The Axial Age in world history

BJORN WITTROCK

In the course of the last half-century the interpretation of the first millennium bce has come to occupy a prominent position not only in the fields of history and the history of religion but, increasingly, also in the humanities and social sciences more generally.

This book was one of the first systematic efforts by a leading European intellectual to outline a notion of history that explicitly rejected a Eurocentric or Christocentric account of world history. Jaspers pointed to the relatively simultaneous emergence of distinctly new modes of thought in several high cultures of the Old World in the centuries around the middle of the first millennium bce. These new modes displayed a greater reflexivity that went decisively beyond those that characterized the kind of mythic thinking that in various forms had dominated earlier societies, whether tribal societies or large-scale Archaic societies. Thereby, they opened up new possibilities for humans to think critically not only about crafts and practical matters, but about cosmologies, rituals, and political practices, and also, indeed, about thoughts themselves and their presuppositions. Jaspers characterized the period from about 600 bce to about 350 bce - which he later extended to 800 to 200 bce - as the Achsenzeit, using the German word achse, which means both axis and pivot.

Only with this type of “second-order thinking,” to paraphrase the late historian of science Yehuda Elkana, could humans transcend the limitations of their daily lives and of cosmological assumptions inherent in the rituals of ^[172] their societies.

Axial Age thought extended such ideas by making a sharper distinction between a transcendental and a mundane sphere and thereby enabling a more critical stance to mundane reality but also an examination of modes of thinking about this relationship. Benjamin Schwartz has given the sense of transcending and critically reflecting upon the given world that character­ized the Axial Age a succinct formulation: “Whether one deals with the Upanishads, Buddhism, or Jainism in India, with the emergence of Greek philosophy or with the emergence of Confucianism, Taoism, and Mohism in China - one finds a kind of standing back and looking beyond, of questioning and reflexivity as well as the emergence of new perspectives and visions.”^[174]

Interpreting the Axial Age

When KarlJaspers introduced this thesis he did not do so ex nihilo. The term itself derived from Hegel, so Jaspers believed, erroneously as has later been demonstrated.^[175] Jaspers also referred to earlier works by Victor von Strauss and Ernst von Lassaulx and by his own contemporary and older colleague Alfred Weber. The authors of two conceptual historical essays on the Axial Age, Johann P. Arnason and Hans Joas, have somewhat different assessments of the relevance of these references.^[176] Their main point of divergence con­cerns Lassaulx, who in turn made references to predecessors.

Several authors, including Arnason, Joas, and S. N. Eisenstadt, have also discussed statements by Alfred Weber's older brother Max Weber as of relevance in this context. Thus in his studies of the great world religions, Max Weber points to parallels between classical Greek and Indian thinking. However, this only occurs in a relatively brief passage, and Max Weber cannot be credited with having introduced a clear formulation of the Axial Age hypothesis. It has also been pointed out that in the second volume (1925) of Ernst Cassirer's magnum opus in three volumes, The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms,^[177] there is a discussion in its consideration of mythic thought that not only is compatible with what Jaspers writes later but also, in important respects, comes close to investigating precisely what Jaspers describes as a key element of the Axial Age, namely the transition from Mythos to Logos.^[178]

Strauss, Lassaulx, both Webers, and Cassirer - and others such as Eric Voegelin - worked within broad traditions of scholarship with some com­mon characteristics, including an interest in the historical dimensions of philosophical analysis, in the existential situation of humankind in historical perspective, and in exploring these fields with a combination of analytical and interpretive procedures. They were also interested in exploring linkages between history, philosophy, and religion across regions and across time. However, it still seems reasonable to take the publication of The Origin and Goal of History as the starting point for the engagement with the idea of the Axial Age that has become a vital component of modern historiography, humanistic scholarship, and social science.

In the 1970s, the Harvard sinologist Benjamin Schwartz and a group of prominent scholars, including Peter Brown, Louis Dumont, Eric Weil, and Arnaldo Momigliano, took up the notion of the Axial Age in a pathbreaking special issue of the journal Daedalus, devoted to the theme “Wisdom, Revelation, and Doubt: Perspectives on the First Millennium bc.”^[179] Several of them later published major works that further explored these ideas. However, the two scholars who probably have “done more than anyone to make the Axial Age significant for comparative historical sociology”^[180] are Shmuel N. Eisenstadt and Robert N. Bellah.

Together with the leading Weberian scholar Wolfgang Schluchter, Eisenstadt made it the focus of a sustained research program and, in colla­boration with a large number of historians and linguists, extended the analysis considerably. Bellah and Eisenstadt represent different intellectual styles, but both of them have been crucial in transmitting to the scholarly community at large a strong sense of the intellectual urgency of the debates around the idea of the Axial Age. Through them, humanistic scholars in fields such as Egyptology, Assyriology, Sanskrit studies, history of religion, Sinology, and many others have come to gain respect for and an interest in historical social science. It is also due to Eisenstadt and Bellah that the idea of the Axial Age has more recently come to enter center stage in social science debates and theorizing, and has also emerged in the human and cognitive sciences, with theoretically orientated scholars such as Jurgen Habermas, Hans Joas, Jose Casanova, Merlin Donald, and Charles Taylor, deeply engaged in the dialogue about the Axial Age. This idea has been the subject of an increasingly intense but also increasingly well-informed debate, invol­ving ancient historians, historians of religion and philosophy, and linguists.^[181]

The significance of the Axial Age

The shifts that these and other scholars identified referred to new conceptua­lizations of temporality, agency, and sociality, but also of cosmology.

Firstly, in the wake of the Axial Age, the great world religions emerged. Their religious practices tended to differ not only from those of tribal societies but also from those of large-scale Archaic societies. These early societies involved rule over extensive territories and often a hierarchical order where new rituals emerged and supplanted the rituals of tribal socie­ties. The new rituals of Archaic societies tended to be performed within relatively small elite circles and involved an articulation of the role of the supreme ruler as embodying divine features. Inevitable societal misfortunes and catastrophic events could lead to cracks in the cosmology and practices of these early states as well as to elaborate processes of reinterpretation of myths, what some observers have termed mytho-speculation.

Secondly, these ecumenes were linked to new forms of political order. These forms differed fundamentally from those of tribal societies and Archaic societies, the crises of which served as an important background for the political, religious, and cultural contestations that crystallized in the Axial Age.

Perhaps the most important of the new forms of political order was that which rested on a new conception of empire. In the wake of the Axial Age, empires emerged that were premised on loyalties beyond membership in a circle of kin. Such empires cannot merely be described in terms of bureaucratic-political capacities to formulate autonomous goals and to ^[182] mobilize resources for their implementation. They also have to be examined in terms of cultural programs that underpinned and gave legitimacy to their institutions and their practices in the fields of bureaucracy and violence.

Furthermore, Axial religious imaginations posited commonalities between humans beyond the limits of tribal and Archaic societies. Thus, the Axial Age created new religious ecumenes that encompassed and linked human beings across vast distances. These ecumenes entailed the emergence of trans-local and trans-regional commonalities in terms of conceptions of time, cosmol­ogy, and notions of belonging and allegiance among humans.

Linkages between political orders and religious practices developed differ­ently in different cultures of the Old World. Thus in the Chinese context, with a prevalence of non-Deistic religious-philosophical practices, in particu­lar those designated by terms such as Confucianism, Daoism, and later Buddhism, there were strong linkages between imperial order and religious practices.1² However, at most points such linkages were not seen to entail a need for the political suppression of the exercise of any of these, nor of other religious-philosophical practices either, including those associated with Deistic religions transposed to the Chinese context. In other contexts, however, there were tendencies toward the emergence of a one-to-one relationship between religious practices and political order to the exclusion of alternative practices. In the Iranian world both the Achaemenid and, much later, the Sasanian Empire seem to be cases in point, although both of them also displayed toleration of a number of religious practices other than those most closely associated with and favored by the imperial courts.

The new imperial political orders could be greatly strengthened through an association with Axial religions and their ecumenes. Such an association tended to allow for an extension of empires. It meant that empires could mobilize new sources of legitimacy to support their standing and to reward loyal service.

Axial transformations entailed that imperial rule became premised on a different relationship between the ruler and the divine. Kings and emperors

i2 Three fascinating works on the early imaginations of State and Empire in China are MichaelJ. Puett, The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China (Stanford University Press, 2001); Yuri Pines, Foundations of Confucian Thought: Intellectual Life in the Chunqui Period, 722-433 bce (Honolulu: Hawai'i University Press, 2002); and Yuri Pines, Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era (Honolulu: Hawai'i University Press, 2009). See also Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 bc (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and David W. Pankenier, Astrology and Cosmology in Early China: Conforming Earth to Heaven (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

might rule with a mandate of heaven or the grace of God but, in contrast to the situation in some Archaic societies, rulers in Axial civilizations could not claim to actually be gods. Furthermore, processes of inscription of cosmologies in authorized texts meant that these texts opened up the possibility of different, possibly heterodox, interpretations. Even if efforts were made to standardize rules of interpretation and to reserve them for a circle of authorized mediators, the possibility of heterodoxy and dissent was an inherent property of Axial Age religions. This opened up the possibility for social and political dissent and brought with it the possibility that challenges would be underpinned by convictions of divine or celestial legitimacy.

Thirdly, the new imperial orders helped further regional and trans-regional trade networks. They also directly contributed to the establishment of trade routes. There might, for instance, have been overland contacts between Europe and China as early as the beginning of the second millennium bce. However, it is only with the creation of a centralized Chinese empire in 22i bce, after the long period of turbulence known as the Warring States period, that conditions were established that were conducive to the growth of interregional trade networks. Most famous of these, effectively shaped in the time of the Han Dynasty, is the network of such trade routes that in the nineteenth century was given the name “the Silk Road” denoting a network of interlinked overland routes connecting the Eastern Mediterranean area with central China.

Analogous developments, if on a somewhat more limited scale, occurred within the Roman Empire and beyond its borders. Extensive maritime net­works also emerged linking areas around the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean in commercial but also cultural interaction. Thus, the hypothesis of the Axial Age has served as a focal point for efforts to link some of the most profound transformations that originated in the first millennium bce and that came to have repercussions for much of ensuing history.

We may speak of multiple Axial civilizations, each, however, character­ized, at least initially, by a variety of contending schools of thought, which emerge in the first millennium bce. Profound differences emerged among these various paths of development and the cultural and institutional legacies that became the dominant ones in different areas of the Old World, from that of Greek city-states in the classical period and of Jewish life in the prophetic age in the West to that of China in the East.

In some of these cases, there was a close relationship between religion and imperial rule, most clearly, perhaps, in the different Iranian dynasties already from the Achaemenids, and in China during the Qin and Han dynasties.^[183] Perhaps something similar might be asserted about the Mauryan Empire during the reign of Ashoka. However, for most of historical time there has been no easy correspondence between religious-philosophical practices and political practices within imperial orders.^[184]

Greek philosophical-religious discourse of the classical period must be seen in the context of the specific form of political practice provided by the multiplicity of city-states. Jewish religious and political life in the Hellenistic and later in the Roman era took place against the background of externally imposed rule or of domestic rulers acting on behalf of, or within the constraints of, external powers. Despite this variety, it is still meaningful to take the Axial transformations as an important reference point in the analysis of subsequent developments.

Conditions and causes of the Axial Age

In Jaspers' account the key regions that he identified with the origins of the Axial Age in the centuries around the middle of the first millennium bce were the major civilizations of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Near East, and South and East Asia. This raises the question of whether it is possible to outline a comparative framework that may account for the cultural and societal transformations of the Axial Age across the different civilizations in which it emerged. A first important issue concerns the conditions and causes of the Axial transformations.

First of all it should be noted that some of the terminology employed in discussions of the Axial Age may risk concealing an important question, namely that of continuities. Thus in China, Greece, and the Near East, a key factor behind the dramatic increase in reflexivity and critical discussion may have been precisely the breakdown of the established practices and assump­tions prevailing in earlier civilizations. Whether we look at Egypt, Greece, Mesopotamia, or China during the Shang and Zhou empires, these civiliza­tions clearly do not, to quote an expression used by Jaspers to characterize pre-Axial societies, fall “outside of history.” On the contrary, Axial transfor­mations involved significant continuities relative to these earlier civilizations.

Literati and philosophers in the Axial Age often tried to spell out an imagined legacy of their own societies and civilizations, and their own linguistic strategies and conceptual innovations often involved the general­ization of key characteristics in their interpretations of these traditions. Thus, the Confucian ethic is not a completely new conceptualization, but rather an articulation of a tradition, synthetic in its own ways, and the universalization of some of the most important virtues that had traditionally been seen as limited to aristocratic strata. In this case, as in several others, Axial thought is a reaction to a new type of human condition where neither the structures of kinship and physical proximity, nor those of a self-legitimizing empire suffice any longer to embed the individual in a context of meaning and familiarity.

In this context some observations can be made concerning the background of the Axial Age transformations. Firstly, these transformations had as their background not tribal societies but the early states of Archaic societies, that is, forms of political and cultural order with considerable spatial extension and with highly regulated forms of elite ritual linked to the center of political power.

Secondly, because of the extensiveness and centralization of political power and of cults and rituals linked to the center, there were inevitable and recurring strains and tensions that in themselves tended to engender conditions that were propitious for the kind of deep-seated changes that the Axial transformations involved. Furthermore, some of the most powerful early states came to impinge upon and pose a threat to a range of neighboring societies. The Assyrian and Neo-Babylonian states are obvious examples, as is the Achaemenid (First Persian) Empire founded by Cyrus the Great in the sixth century bce, the largest political entity to that time. In the Chinese case, the threat to life as it was known was related to nomadic incursions, although these were less extensive than they would be later. Nevertheless, Axial thought in China was at least to some extent a reaction to a breakdown of political order, including upheavals and civil wars in the wake of the downfall of the Zhou Dynasty and the threat this posed to orderly, civilized life.

Thirdly, the Axial transformations were initiated and had their intellectual source of inspiration and articulation in sites outside of the direct political center, but where there was awareness of activities in the political center. These sites were peripheral enough to allow for a stratum of interpreters who could elaborate alternative cosmologies or ideas of practices in some degree of autonomy from the center. Eisenstadt, in particular, has empha­sized the crucial role of the interpreters or the carriers, the “Trager,” of a new worldview.

Fourthly, as already mentioned, the Axial Age was related to the emer­gence and diffusion of the great world religions. It seems undeniable that the intellectual and ontological shift, described in terms of a breakthrough, has important links to deep-seated shifts in religious practices. It is also clear, however, that the exact nature of such links is in many cases open to different interpretations. The great world religions had their origins in the Axial Age, and subsequent religious revelations and visions and their textual inscription, codification, and the religious movements they gave rise to had the Axial breakthroughs as a necessary background. It is also true that many previous forms of ritualistic practice were continued in religious practice after the Axial breakthroughs, though in a different guise. Furthermore, in the core epoch of transformation, the fact that the most important proponents of the transformations had a peripheral and heterodox position vis-a-vis mainstream cultural and political order led to an opening of horizons and the emergence of a variety of critical voices. Eventually, however, the Axial ruptures were given a standardized form and became more or less closely tied to new political centers and to new cultural-religious orthodoxies. However, there still remained the potential for the emergence of new heterodox interpreta­tions that could rapidly take the form of a serious threat to central political power, no matter how closely linked the clerical and religious interpreters had become to that center.

There seem to be three key sets of conditions for the emergence of the Axial Age and possibly also for other periods in history of deep-seated change or what may be labeled periods of cultural crystallization. The first are the simultaneously destabilizing and enabling conditions inherent in new economic opportunities and in the introduction of new technologies. In the Axial Age such changes were often related to the introduction of tools and weapons based on iron production that eventually resulted in economic, agricultural, urban, and population growth - but also in warfare of a more violent nature with more pervasive consequences. Changes of these types have historically tended to exert a powerful pressure in the direction of new forms of social organization, including forms of inheritance, ownership, and production.

A second set of conditions involves the existence or at least widespread perceptions of political crisis or even crisis of civilized life itself. This may, to some extent, have to do with civil strife and conflict but also with imminent external threats. However, the conjunction of economic-technological opportunities and of acute political and societal crisis will not by themselves give rise to a profound rethinking that may open up fundamentally new institutional pathways.

This rethinking depends on a third set of conditions, the existence of fora and arenas where interpreters of new ideas may elaborate and articulate these ideas. There must be both a stratum of literati and some degree of autonomy from central political power for a significant segment of this stratum of literati.

Conceptualizing the Axial Age

In his recent magnum opus Religion as Human Evolution, Robert Bellah comes close to arguing that these conditions were indeed fulfilled, if in different ways and to different degrees, in the cases of ancient Greece, ancient Israel, and ancient China, and plausibly also in the case of India. (Bellah refrains from analyzing the fifth “classical” case of an original Axial transformation - Iran - with reference to the paucity and uncertainty of source materials.)

Inspired by the evolutionary and cognitive perspective of Merlin Donald, Bellah also emphasizes that the Axial Age is expressive of the possibilities that opened up to humankind at the time of the emergence of a fourth evolutionary stage in the development of human culture.^[185] In this evolu­tionary scheme, the earliest forms of human interaction are the so-called episodic culture, the second stage is mimetic culture, and the third stage is mythic culture, made possible by the development of language and the possibility of constructing “a unified, collectively held system of explanatory and regulatory metaphors,” a “comprehensive modeling of the entire human universe.”^[186] The Axial Age represents the beginning of the fourth fundamen­tal stage, the so-called theoretic age, that allows for a new type of critically reflexive activities complementing those of bodily reactions and mimetic imitation and gesturing, and those of mythical narratives. Bellah also argues that this four-stage perspective serves as a means of avoiding teleological reasoning because the evolution can happen within one culture and there is no need to privilege any one of the five cases as being the precursor; nor is there a need to construe a genealogy or to establish streams of influence and borrowing. This is a convincing argument as far as the four or five original cases of Axial breakthroughs are concerned, but it seems less clear how an evolutionary perspective can help explain developments once the original Axial qualitative changes have taken place.

As to the substantive core of Axial thought, Jaspers and, even more so, later interpreters such as Bellah and Eisenstadt and their collaborators and colleagues, have recognized the complexity and sophistication of the many narrative accounts in the form of myths, the rituals associated with such myths, and the multiple forms of Axial thought. However, Jaspers also argued that a distinctive feature of the Axial Age was the emergence of forms of thought that involved not only transpositions and variations of mythical narratives, but also new forms of thinking that clearly transcended the limits of existing practices of human society. Thus, Bellah and others emphasize that the Axial Age involved the emergence of a distinction between narrative and analytical accounts. Thereby humans are not only able to give expression to visions and ideas of the world beyond the constraints of existence at a specific time and place, but also to take a critical and analytically orientated stance toward both material and intellectual practices and beliefs. Already for Jaspers, this change marked the transition from mythos to logos, a break­through in critical reflection, and indeed the emergence of history in the sense of the epoch in human existence characterized by a reflexive, historical consciousness.

In earlier tribal societies, the invocation and articulation of mythical beliefs in ritualistic practices would normally serve the social and cultural coherence of a collective. Such rituals would, of course, involve practices outside of the bounds of day-to-day practices of production and reproduction. They might also involve or usher in changes in the collective life of a community. In this way, myths could be reinterpreted and supplanted or even replaced by additional myths, as could notions of the primacy of different forces or divinities associated with the different forms of myths. However, such changes are only a question of continuation or partial adaption, not yet of a critical reflection nor of a rejection of some myths by way of questioning their premises or engaging in a comparative exposition of their merits and shortcomings in a, say, Aristotelian, dialogical form. This questioning started only in some societies in the Old World around the middle of the first millennium bce. This change is profound enough to justify the designation Axial Age and the identification of those civilizations where this first occurred as Axial.

We may perhaps summarize by stating that Jaspers' position rested on the assumption that in the centuries around the middle of the first millennium bce a major intellectual and institutional shift occurred in some of the high cultures in the Eurasian hemisphere. The breakthrough was manifested in different ways in different civilizations. However, in all forms it involved a textual articulation of increasing human reflexivity and reflexive conscious­ness, and the ability to use reason to transcend the immediately given. This reflexivity was manifested in four major dimensions:

• Firstly, an elaboration of more reflective cosmologies, often in terms of positing a more or less fundamental and discursively argued separation between a mundane and a transcendental sphere. This also involved an articulation and interpretation of such cosmologies in terms of their oral mediation as well as their textual inscription, and the emergence of a set of rules for the authoritative interpretation of such texts.

• Secondly, the articulation and inscription of an increasing historical con­sciousness, an awareness of the temporal location and the limitations of human existence and thereby a sense of relative contingency.

• Thirdly, new conceptualizations of social bonds and connectedness, i.e., notions of what might be called sociality.

• Fourthly, an increasing awareness of the malleability of human existence, of the potentials of human action within the bounds of the mundane and temporal.

This change made possible a set of different institutional paths of develop­ment of lasting importance. For all the contestations about historical accounts, such a delimitation of the notion of the Axial Age provides a fruitful starting point for a study of its relevance in world history.

Consequences and pathways of the Axial Age

The Axial Age is a meaningful name for an important epoch in world history. It is not the only epoch that has involved profound shifts in cultural and institutional forms, but it is one of the most consequential cultural crystal­lizations before the Common Era, if not the most consequential one. The transformations in the Axial Age gave rise to at least five distinctly different paths of transformations linking cultural and cosmological shifts to institu­tional transformations, however, none of which should be given preferred empirical or normative status. This does not mean that we should think of these different trajectories as closed cultural systems. On the contrary, they depended on and gave rise to intensified cultural encounters and interactions on a trans-regional scale. All of them were also characterized by a multiplicity of voices and underwent constant and sometimes dramatic contestations and transmutations. Still, it may make sense to outline in schematic form some of the key characteristics of the institutional and cultural patterns that emerged in the Axial Age, as long as we keep in mind that in all five cases there was a multiplicity of contending voices and interpreters and a wide range of philosophical and religious articulations. However, the eventual outcomes in institutional terms were distinctly different.

Firstly, there is the development in the Near East whereby, in a complex process of influence and juxtaposition, the Mosaic distinction (to use Jan Assmann's terminology) between true and false in religion and, as a conse­quence, a distinction between religion and politics was drawn in ancient Israel (but not, despite several preparatory steps, in ancient Egypt). Eventually, this distinction, in the prophetic age and in second temple Judaism, gave rise to a path of development that may be termed transcendental-interpretative.

Significant elements included processes of textual inscription and standar­dization, as well as interpretive contestation and the interplay between carriers of orthodoxy and heterodoxy. The participants in these contestations exhibited remarkable independence from political powers. Sometimes this led to a withdrawal from political power, but more often their activities impinged upon the world of rulership, sometimes explicitly, sometimes inadvertently, sometimes as heterodox dissent or even rebellion, and some­times as support for established power.

Secondly, there is a related path, fundamentally influenced by Near Eastern developments, but in key respects distinctly different. This tradition gradually emerged in the Greek world and may be termed a philosophical- political path of development. It involved contestation and deliberation that exhibited intense concern about human potentials and action and the loca­tion of human beings in history, and constant reflection on the human condition. In this case, a clear distinction between a transcendental and a mundane sphere, absolutely central to the transcendental-interpretive tradi­tion, is relatively insignificant. There is no standardized religious cosmology inscribed in codified texts. Instead, contestation is dialogical, if often textually transmitted, and has a philosophical and largely pragmatic character with regard to the political and moral life of a given community, a polis, as an inevitable reference point. The key protagonists in these contestations act in a context that was characterized by a previously unknown combination of intellectual independence, institutional autonomy, and political engagement.

Thirdly, there is the particular Chinese path that involved, at least from a period a millennium earlier than the Axial Age proper, the gradual merging and synthesis of different regional ritualistic practices and political orders in a broad cultural tradition that may be termed universal-inclusive. Key fea­tures of the cultural and political orders were clearly articulated hundreds of years before the Axial Age. In some respects, Confucius, Mozi, and later Mencius and the legalists - for all their profound differences - wrote against the background of a perceived loss of cohesion in, or indeed the demise of, this earlier order, and they sought a renewed articulation of it. Cultural and scientific developments can and have been described as stepwise shifts, but they exhibit important ruptures and advances in the period of the Axial Age, as do certain aspects of political and social thought that showed a renewed emphasis on tradition, history, and human agency.^[187]

A fundamental feature of this path is its universal-inclusive nature, but it is at the same time characterized by a high degree of contingency even in the political sphere. Thus already in pre-Axial Zhou political thought, the Mandate of Heaven transfers ultimate legitimacy to political order. However, it is a revocable mandate, and improper conduct is incompatible with the maintenance of this mandate. Therefore, heavenly sanctioned imperial rule is nonetheless contingent and open to doubt, critique, and potentially revolt. Similarly, there is a synthetic cultural order composed of highly different original traditions, some of which may perhaps best be understood as forms of moral philosophy, and two of which, Confucianism and Daoism, have only limited concern for a distinction between transcendental and mundane spheres. Precisely for this reason the universal-inclusive path of the Chinese world allows for and involves constant philosophical contestation between different traditions. In a sense, a Mosaic distinction need not be drawn in this Chinese context, where the relationship between political and religious order was always more open-ended than it was in the early polities of Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Fourthly, in India early Buddhism constituted an Axial challenge to Vedic religion. This challenge involved a focus on history and agentiality, through a process of semantic appropriation, transvaluation, and contestation. It thereby brought out the potentials of a critical stance toward what were no longer semi-naturalistic practices but rather conventions that could be transgressed.

It is precisely in reaction to this challenge that an articulation of Vedic religion occurred. The Indic world of Vedic religion may have been distinctly non-Axial, but Vedic religion could not avoid an engagement with the cultural systems that grew out of the early Axial transformations. Whereas the philosophical-political axiality of Greece and the universal-inclusive axiality of the Chinese world had political order as its explicit or implicit centre of attention, the political implications of the Indic path - let us call it pluralistic-semantic - largely remained potential or entirely contingent (with the possible exception of the Mauryan Empire under Ashoka).

Fifthly, the geographical and political space where all of the major tradi­tions of Eurasia actually interacted is the area of the Achaemenid Empire of Persia and its Hellenistic and Iranian successors. In many ways, cultural traditions in the Iranian lands came to serve as direct or indirect sources of inspiration for several of the world religions and imperial orders. However, knowledge of key aspects of religious and even political practices in the Achaemenid Empire is lacking. Nevertheless, the path of development in the Iranian lands may perhaps be termed one of a dualistic-agential tradition, where the relationship between political and religious order is seen as one of mutual dependence and close interaction, where there is a distinction between a transcendental and a mundane sphere, but where the battles within these spheres have implications for all actions in the mundane sphere.

It is a tradition with an articulated cosmology, but in its dualistic con­ceptualization, this cosmology differs fundamentally from the cosmology of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The cosmological distinction between a transcendental and a mundane sphere is consistent with a strong this-worldly orientation of practical engagement and action in the realm of political order. The relationship of the main intellectual-religious carriers of this cosmology to political power is characterized by proximity and reciprocal dependence. As in other forms of axiality, there are also forms of heterodoxy and dissent. However, on the whole, there is a more explicit and direct link to imperial power here than found along the other paths of axiality.

The Achaemenid Empire came to exert a far-reaching influence on later types of imperial orders in the region of the Mediterranean and the Near East, and in the first millennium ce, the Sasanian Empire saw itself as the legitimate heir of the Achaemenid Empire. Indirectly, there was also an influence on the nature of the Byzantine Empire, for half a millennium the main competitor of the Sasanian Empire in the Eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern region. Despite its Hellenistic, urban, and Christian legacy and the fact that is was structurally different from the Sasanian Empire, the Byzantine Empire came from the seventh century onwards increasingly to exhibit features reminiscent of the Iranian imperial model. This was so in terms of changes in military-territorial organization but also in a gradual change in relationships between political and religious orders.

The Achaemenid Empire was the first imperial political order premised on an Axial cosmology and that involved a close reciprocal - but not symmetric - relationship between leading representatives of the political and the cosmological-religious orders. The long-term effects of this on the Sasanian Empire and on the successor of that empire, namely the new Islamic political order as it emerged with the establishment of the Abbasid Caliphate, is a fascinating and still not fully explored field of research.

As was the case with the Roman Empire, the Achaemenid Empire was characterized by tolerance toward minority cultures and languages. In con­trast to the Roman Empire, however, it did not engage in efforts to promote the language of the rulers, that is, Old Persian, relative to the language of other peoples of the empire. However, the Iranian empires, as well as the classical Roman Empire, involved elements of, to use Sheldon Pollock's expression, ethno-transcendence, that is, the assignment of a crucial place in the imperial project to an ethnically defined people linked both to the temporal extension of empire and to its divine protection.^[188]

Both the Roman and Iranian imperial patterns are distinctly different from that of India, but also from the cultural-political order of ancient Israel and ancient Greece during the early Axial transformations - and of course also from that of non-Roman and non-Axial Europe. In both ancient Greece and ancient Israel, the position of the intellectual carriers of interpretive elaborations was characterized by greater independence relative to the holders of political power. This is one reason why it would be erroneous to assume a necessary relationship between Axial thought and imperial order. One may indeed argue that the post-Axial imperial orders, while often embracing a cosmology of Axial origins, often involved severe insti­tutional constraints and a reduction in intellectual autonomy for the car­riers of Axial thought.

We may summarize some of the points above in Table 5.1, which for all its simplifications highlights three conclusions discussed above.

Firstly, a qualitative increase in reflexivity, historical consciousness, soci­ality, and agency is characteristic of the Axial Age. This is the precondition for the distinction between political order and religious-cultural order and hence for the possibility of a challenge to the legitimacy of political order or, to paraphrase Jan Assmann: “Kings can no longer claim to be gods.” Once this possibility has been conceptually permitted, it is a potential that can never be

Table 5.1 Fivepathsofaxiality

“unthought,” that is, the potential of a fundamental challenge to established order can never again be permanently removed.

Secondly, the institutional position of the interpreters of a given cultural- religious cosmology determines whether the potentials of the increased reflexivity may be realized or not. Within each of the five Axial paths, there was always an interplay between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and there were always contending articulations of a given cultural-cosmological order. Often, as in the cases of India and China, there was also contention between deeply different cosmologies.

Thirdly, there is a complex interplay between three broad sets of factors that determine and release the potentials of a cultural crystallization: a deep- seated political and cultural crisis that was an imminent threat to the survival of a culture and its political manifestation; a surge of economic opportunities and potentials of growth; and the creation of arenas of articulation and interpretation with a relative distance and independence from immediate subjugation and subservience to political power.

There are also fundamental differences in terms of the ethno-linguistic force of the different Axial paths. From the perspective of our own age, the study of the wide range of such experiences in the Axial Age cannot but contribute to an enrichment of modern social and political thought.

The idea of the Axial Age has been conducive to high-level scholarship that reaches across time, region, and discipline. It is likely to continue to stimulate such research and to serve as one of the most significant sites for inquiries about the human condition in world history, and also in the contemporary world.^[189]

Further Reading

Arnason, Johann P., Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, and Bjorn Wittrock (eds.), Axial Civilizations and World History, Leiden: Brill, 2005.

Bellah, Robert N., Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, Cambridge, ma : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001.

”What Is Axial about the Axial Age?” European Journal of Sociology 46 (2005): 69-89.

Bellah, Robert N., and HansJoas (eds.), The Axial Age and Its Consequences, Cambridge, ma : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.

Cassirer, Ernst, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen [The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms], New Haven, ct : Yale University Press, 1955.

Donald, Merlin, Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition, Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1991.

Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986.

Eisenstadt, Shmuel N. (ed.), Kulturen der Achsenzeit I: Ihre Ursprunge und ihre Vielfalt, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987, parts 1 and 2.

Kulturen der Achsenzeit II: Ihre institutionelle und kulturelle Dynamik, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1992, part 1.

Jaspers, Karl, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte [The Origin and Goal of History], New Haven, ct: Yale University Press, 1953.

Lewis, Mark Edward, The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han, Cambridge, ma: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

Morris, Ian, Why the West Rules - for Now: The Patterns ofHistory, and What They Reveal about the Future, New York: Picador, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2010.

Pankenier, David, Astrology and Cosmology in Early China: Conforming Earth to Heaven, Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Pines, Yuri, Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era, Honolulu: Hawai'i University Press, 2009.

Foundatians of Confucian Thought: Intellectual Life in the Chunqui Period, 722-453 bce, Honolulu: Hawai'i University Press, 2002.

Puett, MichaelJ., The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China, Stanford University Press, 2001.

Schwartz, Benjamin I., The World of Thought in Ancient China, Cambridge, ma: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1985.

Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age, Cambridge, ma : The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007.

Thapar, Romila, History and Beyond, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005.