One of the first observers of the phenomenon is Lasaulx (1856), who observes,

It cannot possibly be an accident that, six hundred years before Christ, Zarathustra  in Persia, Gautama Buddha in India, Confucius in China, the prophets in Israel, King Numa in Rome and the first philosophers—Ionians, Dorians, Eleatics—in Hellas, all made their appearance pretty well simultaneously as reformers of the national religion.

Victor Von Strauss (1870) notes,

During the centuries when Lao-tse and Confucius were living in China, a strange movement of the spirit passed through all civilized peoples. In Israel Jeremaiah, Habakkuk, Daniel and Ezekiel were prophesying and in a renewed generation (521-516) the second temple was erected in Jerusalem . Among the Greeks Thales was still living, Anaximander, Pythagoras, Heraclitus and Xenophanes appeared and Parmenides was born. In Persia an important reformation of Zarathustra’s ancient teaching seems to have been carried through, and India produced Sakyamuni, the founder of Buddhism.

This trend of observation is collated  by the philosopher Karl Jaspers with his concept of the ‘Axial Age’ for the period –800 to –200, in his The Origin and Goal of History. Here we have Jaspers’ observation:

The most extraordinary events are concentrated in this period. Confucius and Lao-tse were living in China, all the schools of Chinese philosophy came into being, including those of Mo-ti, Chuang-tse, Lieh-tsu and a host of others; India produced the Upanishads and Buddha and, like China, ran the whole gamut of philosophical possibilities down to skepticism, to materialism , sophism and nihilism; in Iran Zarathustra  taught a challenging view of the world as a struggle between good and evil; in Palestine the prophets made their appearance, from Elijah, by way of Isaiah and Jeremiah to Deutero-Isaiah; Greece witnessed the appearance of Homer, of the Philosophers—Promenades, Heraclitus and Plato—of the tragedians, Thucydides and Archimedes. Everything implied by these names developed during these few centuries almost simultaneously in China , India , and the West, without any one of these regions knowing of the others.

Finally Joseph Needham, in Science and Civilization in China, notes:

The close coincidence in date between the appearance of many of the great ethical and religious leaders has often been remarked upon: Confucius, c. –550; Gautama (Buddhism), c. –560; Zoroaster (if a historical personage), c. –600; Mahavira (Jainism), c. –560, and so on. But the Chhun Chhiu period was also contemporary with many important political events, such as the taking of Nineveh by the Medes in –612, the fall of Babylon to Cyrus in –538, and the invasion of the Punjab by Darius in –512, all examples of Iranian expansion. At the beginning of the Warring States period, the Greeks checked Iranian expansion westwards (–480), and the middle of the –5^th century saw the erection of the Athenian Parthenon. The concluding stages of the Warring States time are contemporary with many outstanding events, such as the conquest of Alexander the Great (c. –327), the foundation of the Maurya dynasty in India and the beginning of the reign of Asoka (–300 and –274 respectively), and the Punic Wars in the Mediterranean (–250 to –150) which overlap with the first unification China under Chhin Shih Huang Ti. But the beginning of the Roman Empire (–31) does not take place until well into the Han dynasty.

These and many other observers have stumbled on a first-class enigma, one whose correct solution at first defies ordinary sociological logic. The reason is that synchronous emergence begs for a non-standard causal explanation. We cannot ascribe local causal reasoning to what we perceive as a dispersed, almost global, phenomenon. There must be something operating at a higher level to induce so many changes in separate, unconnected reasons. And this raises troubling questions about what we had thought independently arising historical complexes, e.g. the emergence of two world religions in concert. 

Jaspers' background, a sort of hybrid being between the theologian and the philosopher steeped in German Classical philosophy, equipped him with the detachment to see the connection between separate cultural traditions, even though his initial formulation tended to remain  fixated on the Christian philosophy of history, which the data is asking us to transcend. 

Subsequent interpretations of Jaspers' findings have tended to derail into semi-metaphysical or religious generalizations regurgitating the theme of an 'age of Revelation', but these instant distortions of the original perception do not do justice to the complexity and diversity of the Axial phenomenon, which shows us something much more than the onset of a 'religious age'. The case of Greece in the Axial Age is telling in this regard. 

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