Around 10,000 years ago, domestication of plants and animals transformed the patterns of human life from small, migratory hunting and gathering bands to large populations of settled citizens living on the labor of farmers and herders, and eventually organized in cities. As the food supply became more reliable, more people could be fed by fewer producers and some people could spend their time on other things like building buildings, weaving fabrics, making all sorts of useful items, trading those items with people over yonder, studying things, and teaching the young about all of the above. We have no idea who the leaders of this transformation were because nobody signed their names to any of it. After several thousand years of settled agricultural life and expanding populations, however, the process of cultural evolution took another big leap forward with the development of writing.
Now all the new information people were developing could be stored for later use in a continuous accumulation of knowledge and a virtuous cycle of progress. You can also look up all the names of all the leaders who were significant enough to have their names and their stories written down by their followers. Alphabetic writing proved to be especially useful, since it could represent the sounds of words that people had been speaking for many generations rather than forcing people to memorize thousands of hieroglyphic symbols, each one standing for a specific word or concept.
Meanwhile, full-fledged cities arose full of so many people that nobody could keep track of all their neighbors. In the old hunting and gathering bands, everyone knew everyone else rather well, and everyone was rather closely related to everyone else. A lot of the work was accomplished in collaborative ways and tasks were not very sharply specialized. In large cities, however, people seldom knew other people outside their own small neighborhood and work tended to be organized within special groupings. Low-status low-power families often wound up doing most of the physical dirty work while high-status high-power families got to give orders and reap most of the rewards of other people’s work. Low-status families and high-status families tended to live in their own separate neighborhoods and quickly lost touch with each other physically, psychologically, and emotionally. Over generations, small villages run by hereditary chiefs gave way to larger city-states run by hereditary kings, and eventually to large empires or clusters of city-states run by hereditary emperors. The importance of heredity itself, however, was seldom questioned.
The Axial Age. During the first millennium B.C., based largely on information, stories, and poetry transmitted through written documents, including sacred documents, attention turned to questions of meaning and purpose in human life. By this time the scope of human settlements had grown immensely and the scope of leaders’ power had grown apace. The world’s mainstream religions — Hinduism, Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam — all arose shortly before, during, or shortly after what has been called the Axial Age, which vaguely signifies the rise of concern for meaning and purpose. This period also starred historical figures (mostly men) whose names and stories were written down by followers and disciples (also mostly men).
Most of the stars of this era were associated with divine power and spiritual insight–men like Abraham, Moses, Confucius, Siddhartha Gautama (aka the Buddha), Ashoka, Lao Tse, Jesus, and Mohamed. The Axial Age also spawned schools of secular philosophy which addressed questions of ultimate meaning, such as the Academy of Plato, who was a student of Socrates and a teacher of Aristotle. (In turn, Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great, who built an empire stretching from Greece to what is now Afghanistan.) At Plato’s Academy, rulers and would-be rulers from all over the Mediterranean world convened to discuss meaning, purpose, and the use of power in human life. The classical Greek thinkers of the Axial Age also developed coherent notions of democratic governance, though they were overlaid on an entrenched system of social categories and slavery.
Since the vast majority of people in the heyday of the Axial Age were still illiterate, priests and scholars who were literate gained power over most other people, but rulers with political, economic, and military power over the priests and scholars gained power over just about everybody. The Axial Age got the ball rolling for the meaningful, purposeful study of meaning and purpose in human affairs. But the central insights of the Axial Age were still riddled with superstition, inherited ideology, and ignorance, tempered only mildly by wild guesses about the nature of reality. Perhaps the most significant challenge posed by the Axial Age was to search for universal principles of truth and virtue. It would take many more centuries to figure out how to expand and verify that search through formal methods of re-search.
