Between 1000 and 500 BCE, there was a dramatic revolution in which humans understood their role in the world, their relationship to the supernatural, and their obligation to ethics. It manifested itself as secular ethics and as religious beliefs as well. The western breakthrough in philosophy and ethics has to be seen more as an issue of transmission than as an original contribution. In 1949, German philosopher Karl Jaspers coined the phrase “Axial Age” to refer to the period between 900 and 300 BCE when the intellectual, philosophical, and religious systems that came to shape subsequent human society and culture emerged. A variety of religions and doctrines started developing around this time, some of which are still in practice today. Typically, each belief was rooted in a specific geographical area, and each developed its own value system, but they often shared some elements. Jaspers’ thesis has since been criticized for failing to take into account certain outliers and underlying factors. However, most scholars agree that profound changes in religious and philosophical discourse did indeed take place in a striking parallel development, but they disagree as to the underlying reasons.
At any rate, it was an age of social and political change—often during a period of pause between the fall and rise of empires—during which small states engaged in internal and external struggles and philosophers and traveling scholars across Eurasia contemplated human meaning and the state of the natural world. These scholars would help develop many of today’s extant religious and philosophical traditions—Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Daoism, and Sophism. During the Roman Empire, Christianity would also join the fold. Many of these traditions built on the cultures that preceded them, and they offered ways of achieving salvation or self-transformation and ways of providing order or structure to society.