Axial Age Essay

Characteristics of the Axial Age
Karl Jasper defines Axial Age as, in his book “The Origin and Goal of History”, intellectual revolution that swept Eurasia from around 600 to 200 B.C.E. (Getz et al., 2008, p.136).In fact we can see a connection between this definition and the wordAxial’s origin. The word axial derives from axis and pivot, in which axis means a straight line or a center point, and pivot means turning on a defined point. I believe the straight line stands for ongoing traditions and turning point is when these traditions were questioned and started to outdate. So as people started to radically questioning old religious rituals and their universe and their own limits, it eventually led to the birth of historyand science disciplines,
Because the etchical side of the religion gained more importance after radical questioning of customs, Greeks, Indians, Chinese and Persians abandoned these mythical and polytheistic religions of their time.If we state this in Jasper’s words: “The philosophers and prophets, both of whom emerged at this time, stressed a new kind of spritituality and emphasized justice over religious form and ritual” (Getz et al., 2008, p.136).For example, in Persia, a philosopher called Zoroaster introduced monotheism to the polytheistic society when he started preaching his religion; Zoroastrianism.Here the basic belief was that there is a battle between two divine forces; good and evil. Salvation could only be earned if a person chose God over evil spirits and to choose either God or evil depended on the person’s choice. Thus Zoroastrianism emphasized the importance of personal moral choice in picking one side or the other, with a last judgment ultimately deciding the eternal fate of each person(Stearns et al., 2011, p.105).We can see that myths were no longer elucidative as they were being replaced by new religions. So people couldn’t rely on them to explain what happens in universe