A Systematic Assessment of “Axial Age” Proposals Using Global Comparative Historical Evidence

Abstract

Proponents of the Axial Age contend that parallel cultural developments between 800 and 200 BCE in what is today China, Greece, India, Iran, and Israel-Palestine constitute the global historical turning point toward modernity. The Axial Age concept is well-known and influential, but deficiencies in the historical evidence and sociological analysis available have thwarted efforts to evaluate the concept’s major global contentions. As a result, the Axial Age concept remains controversial. Seshat: Global History Databank provides new tools for examining this topic in social formations across Afro-Eurasia during the first two millennia BCE and first millennium CE, allowing scholars to empirically evaluate the varied and contrasting claims researchers have put forward. Results undercut the notion of a specific “age” of axiality limited to a specific geo-temporal localization. Critical traits offered as evidence of an axial transformation by proponents of the Axial Age concept appeared across Afro-Eurasia hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years prior to the proposed Axial Age. Our analysis raises important questions for future evaluations of this period and points the way toward empirically-led, historical-sociological investigations of the ideological and institutional foundations of complex societies.

Why do great and little traditions coexist in the world’s doctrinal religions?

“…It has been argued that great traditions in the world's doctrinal religions evolved culturally as ways of facilitating cooperation among relative strangers in ever more complex social systems, for example, by promoting beliefs in moralizing supernatural enforcement (e.g., Norenzayan, 2013) or by establishing stable orthodoxies capable of unifying large populations (e.g., Whitehouse, 2004). One version of this idea, supported by evidence from world history, is that the first large scale religious organizations emphasized forms of cooperation based on hawkishness and extreme deference expressed in highly coercive forms of top-down domination (often expressive violently through the arbitrary exercise of power by divinized rulers and cruel practices such as human sacrifice) but that beyond a certain threshold of complexity, more ethical religions associated with the Axial Age evolved, emphasizing fairness and reciprocity and laying foundations for the great traditions of today's world religions (Mullins et al, 2018;Whitehouse et al, 2019). While there is much ongoing debate about whether, how, and when great traditions contributed to the rise of sociopolitical complexity (e.g., Whitehouse et al, 2021), many have tended to assume that religious beliefs proliferating outside organized doctrinal traditions, whether ancient or modern, are mere by-products of our evolved psychology, whose cooperative functions and moral salience are either minimal (Boyer, 2019) or largely unknown (McKay & Whitehouse, 2015).…”

Explaining the Rise of Moralizing Religions: A test of competing hypotheses using the Seshat Databank

“…But these measures do not fully capture the diversity and nuance of the historical data, especially the nature and extent of moralizing monitoring and enforcement and institutionalized measures to promote prosociality. It also excludes from consideration other faiths that were at least as moralizing (or Axial) as those included (Mullins et al 2018, Hoyer andReddish 2019). For example, Baumard et al count Egypt as part of their non-Axial regions.…”

“…The earliest transition is observed in Egypt, which precedes the next earliest shift by nearly 2,000 years. The next two trajectories, Mesopotamia and North India, make the transition to high levels of moralizing religion in mid-first millennium BCE, which corresponds to the Axial Age as it is traditionally dated (Mullins et al 2018, Hoyer andReddish 2019). The majority of transitions, however, happen later-after 1 CE or in the Post-Axial Period.…”

A History of Possible Futures: Multipath Forecasting of Social Breakdown, Recovery, and Resilience

“…To accomplish this phase, our team will leverage the considerable experience and methodology developed through work with Seshat: Global History Databank (Turchin et al 2015), one of the most comprehensive history databases on a societal scale. Although the Seshat project addressed a different set of questions (how large-scale complex societies arose in human history), it pioneered the use of time-resolved (longitudinal) historical data for empirically testing social and historical hypotheses (Mullins et al 2018;Turchin et al 2018;Whitehouse et al 2018). In MPF, we will use Seshat methodology to establish a novel type of historical database, of hitherto unknown scale and comprehensiveness, which will enable us to systematically test hypotheses explaining social resilience and breakdown.…”