How many of you have heard of the Axial Age? a designation given to a part of history by a academic named Karl Jaspers.
I have not heard of the Axial Age although I was vaguely aware of Karl Jaspers.
What are your thoughts about it? Do you deny that it occurred (a hard sell if you do) and if you don't then how do you explain the Axial Age, what do you make of it?
Nevertheless, I am willing to offer some skepticism on the subject.
How can for thousands and thousands of years religion across the globe basically take one of two shapes exclusively (Animism and Polytheism) then all of a sudden across the globe, every religion as we know it today was born? Isn't that just a little mind blowing? If you had a time traveling private jet, you could theoretically go to a single year that's roughly around 500 B.C. and pick up Siddhartha, Confucius, Lao Tsu, the author of the Upanishads, Daniel and Jeremiah, Xenophanes and Anaximander,
- Let's put Confucius, and Xenophanes on that plane, perhaps one of the authors of the Upanishads, maybe Lao Tzu. The rest seem unlikely to make their flight.
- Gautama Buddha was likely not yet born or very young in 500BCE
- 411–400: Dundas (2002), p. 24: "...as is now almost universally accepted by informed Indological scholarship, a re-examination of early Buddhist historical material, [...], necessitates a redating of the Buddha's death to between 411 and 400 BCE..."
- Indologist Michael Witzel provides a "revised" dating of 460–380 BCE for the lifetime of the Buddha
- Confucius [551–479 BCE]
- Lao Tsu [Unknown, 6th to 4th century BCE- so perhaps]
- Upanishads author- Gavin Flood states that "the Upanisads are not a homogeneous group of texts. Even the older texts were composed over a wide expanse of time from about 600 to 300 BCE Stephen Phillips places the early or "principal" Upanishads in the 800 to 300 BCE range-more than one author, big maybe
- Daniel- The consensus of most modern scholars is that Daniel is not an historical figure and that the book is a cryptic allusion to the reign of the 2nd century BCE Hellenistic king Antiochus IV Epiphanes- Not Daniel and 300 years too early
- Jeremiah- [c. 650 – c. 570 BC] 70 years too late
- Xenophanes [c. 570 – c. 478 BC]
- Anaximander [ c. 610 – c. 546 BC] 46 years too late
and bring them all to the same room and hold a religious summit with the founders of every major religion and schools of thought in western and eastern philosophy.
- I don't know why Daniel is given more credit than Isaiah or Ezekiel.
- Paul founded the biggest religion in the world, Christianity, 500 years later
- Mohammed founded the second biggest religion in the world, 1130 years later
- If you'd lump Judaism, Christianity, and Islam into one major religion then your time traveling jet plane should go back another 675 years to pick up Abraham
- Zoroastrianism was huge in 500 BCE and neither animism nor polytheistic but you forgot to pick Zarathustra up and anyway he was likely long dead
- Jainism was huge in 500 BCE and not animism or really polytheistic (believing that humans could become gods isn't quite polytheism) but you forgot to pick up the 24th tirthankara and anyway he was dead some 30 years and anyway he was just the last of 24 founders.
Industrial Revolutions are pretty easy to explain because they just hinge on a breakthrough in some kind of technology and how fast that tech can spread. But a diverse religious renaissance across the globe in relatively isolated cultures? "well it was a turbulent time in history, people needed to turn to new ideas to help them through it. The Waring States Period was going on in China, the Temple had been destroyed in Jerusalem and their people sent into exile, the Persian and Peloponnesian war was going on in greece." Yeah but it's not like war and significant social disrupting events hadn't occurred before in history. The Bronze Age Collapse ended the written word, and sent multiple advanced developed kingdoms back to the stone age and to barbarianism. Yet for the most part, with the exception of Israel (and even they were not much of an exception) the whole world stuck with animism and polytheism like they always had. What was different during the Axial Age? and is "it was just a coincidence" a good enough explanation for you in explaining why it happened everywhere all at once or is their a systemic social and cultural historic explanation for this religious renaissance that satisfies you? I'd love to hear it cause this is interesting stuff.
I think Jaspers (and by extension you) over-estimate the isolation of the cultures you include. Let's note that your time-traveling plane has no need to cross an ocean to get to your selected cultures. If you are going to conclude that some sort of global Vulcan mind meld transpired, wouldn't you want to include at least some of the cultures that had no access to the trade routes? North and South America, Australia, sub-Saharan Africa had significant populations with sophisticated belief systems and yet your jet plane made no stops at places that did not trade with the melting pot of the Middle East.
Jared Diamond's Gun, Germs, and Steel posits that "Eurasia's large landmass and long east–west distance increased [military and agricultural] advantages. Its large area provided more plant and animal species suitable for domestication. Equally important, its east–west orientation has allowed groups of people to wander and empires to conquer from one end of the continent to the other while staying at the same latitude. This was important because similar climate and cycle of seasons let them keep the same "food production system" – they could keep growing the same crops and raising the same animals all the way from Scotland to Siberia. Doing this throughout history, they spread innovations, languages and diseases everywhere."
Whole cloth silk was almost exclusively a product of China in the Spring and Autumn period, yet we read of such silk in the Odyssey and the Book of Ezekiel. By 500 BC postal riders could travel from the Aegean Sea to the Persian Gulf (2000 miles) in 9 days on the Persian Royal Road (rivaling Pony Express speeds 2360 years later) and Scythians were carving belt buckles out of Chinese Jade traded for horses and gold.
Heck, consider that Yamnaya migrations had spread Proto-Indo-European languages from Ireland to Mongolia to India two thousand years before. Is it really so impossible to believe that proto-Monotheistic ideas of an afterlife and a golden rule transmitted along the same routes a couple of millennia later?
Bronze Age collapses were mostly initiated by Iron Age incursions. Iron production was complicated and ritualized. You didn't find iron ore, like copper and tin, you burnt the iron out by slagging, needing large amounts of fuel and charcoal. The size and centralization needed to produce iron very likely consolidated power structures, including priestly power structures that could very likely have expedited monotheistic thinking (my temple before others becomes my temple alone).
Iron made arrows far more deadly and chariots became obsolete. Armored phalanxes became the way to break the enemies' line and moving large numbers of spearmen in synchronicity required a huge amount of training and expensive armor, which necessitated way more power-sharing, giving rise to middle-class armies like the Persian immortals and Spartan hoplites, giving rise to more democratic power structures. The technology was rapidly changing, in no small part due to trade and conquest. Social structures were changing, giving rise to new governments. It seems natural that religions were changing rapidly too.
What do you make of this if you are a christian in terms of your faith? does it challenge your faiths notion that Jesus is the only way if it seems God was inspiring religious thinkers across the world all at once, or do you have a way to view these religious awakenings in a somewhat positive light without giving them the same degree of credit and status you do your own faith? or some other explanation for all this?
I am a lapsed Catholic who does not credit God for these very human-seeming shifts in ideology.
If your an atheist what you make of the Axial Age? do you find it interesting at all?
Very, very interesting but not evidence of magic or God or even Vulcan mind melds.
Thanks for asking!
