The Axial Age
Across Eurasia, independently, people start asking the same new questions.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 300 years
- Known to
- ± 100 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
Karl Jaspers named the observation: between roughly 800 and 200 BCE, in Greece, Israel, India, Iran and China — regions with limited contact — thinkers turn from ritual and myth toward reflection, ethics, the individual conscience and a universal moral order. The Upanishads, the Hebrew prophets, Confucius and Laozi, the Buddha, and the Greek philosophers all fall inside it. Whether it is a real single phenomenon or a pattern imposed after the fact is genuinely contested, but the near-simultaneity is striking.