Almost sounds like Mithras is a early version of Muslims before becoming a murderous cult .
different animal.
mithrus had to do with the recession of the equinox.
When I first read the article I saw Mithril not Mithras. So I was thinking of Frodo from LOTR. Grin.
Not really.
the surprising thing about Islam is that it started only in the 700s.
in the 500s and 600s you have a heretical sect half-way between Rabbinical Judaism and Christianity who consider Jesus a prophet whom they called the praiseworthy one - the Muhammad. This is the core of what later became Islam - in the earliest parts of the Quran.
then, in the years around 600 to 640 the Roman and Persian empires entered into a decade long war with each other that was utterly devastating - think WwI+II combined but for decades. They were utterly exhausted.
they both used Arab tributaries to fight, but couldn’t pay them. So the Arabs took over.
The Arabs were in amazement that this just fell into their laps so basically thought ‘we must be great, let’s take this half-baked heresy of ours and make it a religion’
That only got realy going after the first Arab rulers - the Ummayyyads were chucked out by the Abbassids who fused together Zoroastrianism with the Gnostic-Christian-Jewish mix and together this mix created Islam in the 750s AD