The Axial Age (roughly 800 BCE to 200 BCE.)
is the period when, roughly at the same time around most of the inhabited world,
the great intellectual, philosophical, and religious systems
that came to shape subsequent human society and culture emerged.

There were the ancient Greek philosophers.
Indian metaphysicians and logicians, who articulated Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism,
Persian Zoroastrianism, the Hebrew Prophets, Confucianism and Daoism of ancient China, and so on.

During this period there was a shift, as if on an axis, away from localized concerns towards transcendence.
Human thought went beyond its previous boundaries. Kings became "kings of kings" and empires formed.
Gods became global rather than tribal and took on a global role.
People came to wonder how the world worked, rather than taking for granted that it did so.

Axial Age thinkers displayed great originality and yet exhibited surprising similarity with respect to their ultimate concerns.
Indian thinkers came to think of karma, the residual effects of past actions, as having direct impact upon human life,
and they proposed solutions for how human beings could attain liberation (moksha) from karma's effects.
In ancient Greece, Socrates was the exemplar of thinkers who emphasized the use of reason in the investigation of truth,
and his student Plato (arguably the father of Western philosophy) adapted his teacher’s insight in theorizing
how the world of everyday existence and the eternal world of the ideas interrelate.
Chinese thinkers disputed and debated the appropriate way (dao) for human society;
the disciples of Confucius, for example, argued that the dao consisted in promoting a humane civilization,
while the disciples of such thinkers as Zhuangzi took the Cosmic Dao as a guide for life.
The Hebrew Prophets came to view the god of their nation, Israel, as the God who created heaven and earth,
so shaping the destiny of all people.
The tradition of Zoroastrianism conceived of human history as a microcosm of the cosmic struggle between good and evil.
Each human life as a constant living out of the struggle to choose good over evil.

Yet, in all cases, the representative thinkers saw themselves as postulating solutions to life's questions and problems
not only for themselves or even for their cultures but for humankind as a whole.
Despite beginning their investigations as local and traditional,
their concerns became global, even universal.