Before the Stage Had Seats: Where Acting Really Began
The first actors did not rehearse lines or chase applause. They did not audition. They did not “play a role.” They stood at altars and spoke for gods. Theatre did not begin as entertainment. It began as ritual . Long before there were stages, scripts, or ticket stubs, human societies used performance as a tool to stabilise the world. Words were not merely spoken. They were enacted. Bodies became symbols. Voices carried authority beyond the speaker. What we now call acting was once invocation. Ritual before theatre The earliest forms of performance appear in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt, thousands of years before Greece formalised theatre. In Sumer, priests performed sacred hymns and ritual dialogues as early as 3000 BCE. These were not stories told for leisure. They were ceremonial exchanges believed to sustain the relationship between humans and the divine. The speaker was not pretending. He was functioning as a conduit. In Egypt, temple dramas reenacted the d...
