The Lost Prophets: An Exploration

The belief in prophets — human beings chosen to receive and convey divine guidance — stretches back to the earliest days of humanity. When so little was truly understood about the world, Prophets acted as mediators between the seen and unseen, guiding early communities with meaning and purpose towards a greater moral order.

The first prophets I encountered were the Abrahamic ones. The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was central in my Islamic household — the figure my father modeled himself after — and whose sayings and teachings (hadith) shaped my upbringing and continue to center me today. Alongside him stood Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jesus, among others. Yes, they were all men, and we will explore that later.

But with their connection to the divine, they did extraordinary things. They survived raging infernos, unleashed plagues upon tyrants, called down fire from heaven, commanded creatures from another realm, built vast vessels to weather the worst of storms, and ascended through the heavens atop a mount made of lightning.

I grew up on these stories not as legend, but as religion. To me, these were real people doing supernatural things — regardless of what the historical record could prove — because that was the belief system I inherited and still follow as a devout Muslim.

But being the curious fellow I am — with a more expansive view of Islam than many of my peers — I was drawn early to the study of other faiths as well. I read voraciously about ancient traditions we now label as myth, alongside newer ones we call religion.

And as I read across centuries of belief from around the world, I began encountering figures who bore striking similarities to the prophets I was raised on, but they lived under very different names: shaman, seer, lawgiver, sage, priestess, culture hero, or holy person.

Zoroaster in ancient Persia, Apollonius in Greece, Enheduanna in Mesopotamia, the Buddha in India, Asiya in Egypt, Laozi in China, and many others. These figures spoke on behalf of the transcendent, warned against moral decay, corrected social imbalance, and guided their people toward a higher self. Whether described as revelation, enlightenment, vision, or divine wisdom, the function felt familiar.

Were they prophets too?

They surely didn’t claim that title, and neither did their traditions — the term itself is largely Abrahamic. But key threads jumped out at me and demanded some exploration.

One of them came from my immersion in mythology, particularly the work of Joseph Campbell, who argued that myth across cultures arises from a shared human source. “The different mythologies are like different dialects of the same language,” he wrote in Myths to Live By.

Islam teaches something remarkably similar: that God sent guidance to every nation on Earth — 124,000 prophets throughout history, each delivering divine wisdom shaped to their community, all preaching the same truth. “For every community there is a messenger.” (Qur’an 10:47)

These readings sparked a fascinating thought in my mind: were some of the spiritual leaders from other faiths the very prophets Islam speaks of?

And if so, how many of the figures we now call “mythic” were once real individuals whose lives, teachings, and struggles were preserved through story — and later transformed into legend, archetype, or even…gods?

Yes, gods!

Now before you label me as a little *too* expansive in my thinking, it’s worth remembering that the ancient Egyptians and Romans famously deified their pharaohs and emperors. But the most striking example of this transformation comes from the world’s largest faith, Christianity, where Jesus — understood in earlier tradition as a holy man and prophet —came to be seen as divine over the centuries, a belief formally codified by the Council of Nicaea in 325 CE.

Islam pushes back firmly against this elevation. But in doing so, it raises an even more tantalizing question: if Jesus, a holy person, was transformed into a god, then which “gods” of the ancient world were once people — or even prophets — just like him?

Did Osiris live as a civilizing king before being deified for his deeds, as the Greek historian Plutarch suggests? Was Pachamama, the earth mother of the Andes, once a venerated matriarch preserved as a goddess? Was Odin just a great chieftain and lawgiver who was later worshipped as a god, as Snorri Sturluson — keeper of Norse myth — explicitly claims?

As fantastical as this sounds, it becomes even more difficult to meaningfully evaluate any of this when 95% of human history predates writing.

Thus, we must work with the tools available to us — archaeology, comparative mythology, oral tradition, and a bit of cautious extrapolation — to explore what I call The Lost Prophets.

This endeavor cannot claim historical certainty, but little about ancient faiths is certain beyond the fact that people believed in them. Instead, I offer a framework for thinking about the deep and often uneasy relationship between prophecy, myth, and memory.

Stories of ancient prophets — or prophet-like figures — were passed down orally, not merely as entertainment, but as instruction. They carried ethics, cosmology, survival knowledge, and social order.

But stories change as they pass through time. Events become symbolic. Teachings become narrative. History becomes myth. And myth becomes memory.

But memory preserves meaning!

Consider the Homeric epics. Long before they were written down, they were transmitted orally for centuries. Each retelling adapted to its audience, while still preserving a shared moral and cosmological framework. The stories survived not because every detail was fixed, but because their meaning mattered. We see this across the world in other tales.

So, if we consider some of the figures identified, the mythologized humans or gods, as potential prophets, their stories and teachings may have endured in this way, through myth — shaped by time, culture, and retelling.

And they would likely be remembered by the most impactful meaning of their myths.

A prophet who taught divine law may have become a legendary lawgiver. A prophet who explained cosmology may have become a creator deity. A prophet remembered for wisdom may have become a sage, or a trickster.

Some figures we will explore may have been prophets. Others may not have been. What matters is not certainty, but attentiveness — listening for echoes of moral truth, monotheistic intuition, and cosmic order embedded in humanity’s oldest stories.

In an age when ancient faiths often feel rigid or distant, the idea of lost prophets offers something radical: continuity and commonality across cultures. It explores the belief I hold dearly that God has always been speaking to us, through many voices, in many languages, across many nations.

In the essays that follow, we will examine specific people and civilizations, beginning with humanity’s earliest memories, and ask whether some of their gods, sages, and culture heroes — men and women — may once have been prophets whose names were lost, but whose messages endured.

These are the lost prophets. And their stories are still speaking to us.