The Axial Age is the term coined by German philosopher Karl Jaspers, and it denotes the period roughly between eighth century BC to 3rd century BC. He observed that... "...in China, in Iran, in Palestine, and in Greece, there emerged almost simultaneously an extraordinary appetite for understanding fundamental reality and for reflecting in incredibly sophisticated ways about reality. So in China, we have the figure of Confucius, emerging—Laozi, Mozi. In India, we have the great quickening of the Vedic tradition from the ritualistic into the philosophical with the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita. In Iran, the birth of Zoroastrianism. Very complex theories about the cosmos and the place of human beings within the cosmos. In Palestine, the great prophetic tradition, from Elijah through to Jeremiah to Isaiah, emerges—especially intensifying in the 6th centuries, 5th centuries BC. And of course, finally in Greece, in Europe, the only European region for all of those civilizations. In Greece, we see the emergence in the 6th and 5th centuries of an extraordinary range of avenues of human inquiry. In this short, brilliant golden age centered around Athens, we see the birth of democracy, albeit not in a form we may be used to today. We see the birth of drama. No one had thought to do theater before—the birth of drama, the birth of tragedy in the 490s, 480s, 470s. And the birth of history, with the figure of Herodotus and Thucydides. The birth of anthropology in Herodotus—Herodotus is obsessively interested, not just in history, but in people, different customs and practices and so on. Thucydides is not just a historian, he's also an economist. We see with the great figure of Aristotle in the 4th century, the birth of psychology. No one had thought to think about "What is the mind, what makes us tick psychologically?". We see the birth of botany, of biology, of physics, of meteorology, all in one place, one tiny city-state, numbering 10-15, maybe 20 thousand citizens at most, supported by an enormous infrastructure of human slavery. And this is what largely permitted these brilliant minds to take "leisure ". The Greek word for leisure is "skhole". To be a scholar is to be somebody who has the leisure to explore these questions. So we have this extraordinary fizz in the development of humanity, this extraordinary ferment, this kind of explosive intellectual phase in the history of humanity in that short period intensifying in Greece." Source: [[James Orr]], *[[PA Plato The Dawn of Thought]],* Lecture 1, [[Peterson Academy]].