The Axial Age is the term, coined by Karl Jaspers, for a period roughly between 800 and 200 BCE in which foundational ethical and philosophical traditions emerged almost simultaneously in several separate civilisations. In China it produced Confucius and the Daoists; in India the Buddha and the Upanishadic thinkers; in Persia Zoroastrian reform; in the Levant the Hebrew prophets; and in Greece the rationalist philosophers from the Presocratics to Socrates. These thinkers turned from ritual and myth towards questions of justice, the self, transcendence and reasoned argument. The parallels remain historically striking and debated.
The traditions of this era established enduring frameworks of ethics, law and metaphysics that still underpin how major societies — and the institutions and public life of their cities — order collective existence.