Did the Buddha, Confucius and the Hebrew prophets share an age?

Maybe. The idea is called the Axial Age, a term coined in 1949 by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers. He argued that between roughly the 8th and 3rd centuries BCE, new universal ways of thinking appeared in parallel in China, India, Persia, Judea and Greece, without obvious contact between them: Confucius and Laozi, the Upanishads and the Buddha, Zarathustra, the Hebrew prophets from Elijah to Jeremiah, and Greek philosophers like Heraclitus and Plato. For Jaspers, this was when "the spiritual foundations of humanity were laid".

He wasn't the first to notice. Writers had remarked on the coincidence since the 18th century, and in 1873 John Stuart Stuart-Glennie had called it "the moral revolution", a theory forgotten by Jaspers' day.

Historians are divided about it, and that is the expert part. Critics say there is no clear common denominator, no sharp break with what came before and after, and that the scheme leaves out figures like Jesus, Muhammad and Akhenaten. Diarmaid MacCulloch called it "a baggy monster". Yet many scholars still accept that profound changes did happen; they disagree about why.

One intriguing explanation came from the anthropologist David Graeber: the core Axial period matches almost exactly the invention of coinage, in the very regions where the sages lived. A 2019 collective history proposed a middle path: not one magic age, but "axiality", a cluster of traits that emerges whenever societies grow large and complex enough.