Pashupata, perhaps the earliest Hindu sect to worship the god Shiva as the supreme deity.
They were, in essence, the first faith-based apocalyptic sect to take charge of a country.
The Alawites, the sect to which President Bashar al-Assad and much of his army officer elite belong, are Shia.
Repeated heresy trials of his followers caused the sect to die out by the end of the century.
The north-west of Syria is the ancestral home of the small Alawite sect, to which the Assads belong.
The opposition blames the regime for arming gangs of Alawites, the Muslim sect to which the Assad family belongs.
This led the adherents of the sect to revolt against the Umayyads, whom they regarded as corrupt and unlawful rulers.
Tripoli has previously seen clashes between Sunnis and Alawites, a Shiite offshoot sect to which Mr Assad belongs.
In fact, Christianity advanced from an obscure sect to the official religion of the Roman empire by focusing on women.
He is the second former member of the Aumshinri Kyo sect to be sentenced to death for those killings.
They were all Allawites, he said – members of the prominent Syrian Shia sect to which the president belongs.
