Once we examine the Axial phenomenon in its entirety we notice two things, first that it is something more than the appearance of sages and prophets, its effects extend to a broader cultural transformation, and further that its full range of effects must include phenomena not connected with religion at all. If we take seriously the property of synchrony, then the spectacular appearance of the classical Greek world shows us that the keynote of sudden 'Axial' change must be extended to include the birth of science, philosophy, democracy, and much else. Consider this point, and its implications. The secular and sacred emerge in synchronous concert, and thus the distinction is open to question. Whether the birth of science and democracy is sacred or not, they have the same Axial signature as that of the Axial religions (which are much later outcomes, in any case). In fact, the testaments of the Old Testament period are so full of distortions and so poorly documented that by comparison the Greek Axial gives us at something to work with.  

In fact, our histories of the emergence of religion are so distorted, almost mythological, that we can barely trust their standard chronicles to give us any accurate information at all about what is really occurring in the Axial interval. Thus the account of Israel in the Old Testament, while it takes its place as a document and tradition as 'Axial data' it does not follow that the so-called history it describes has objective status in a proper account.

Ironically, the unwitting portraits of Greek history in the Archaic/Classical period give us what is probably the only good documentation of how we might come to understand the Axial Age. The extraordinary hiding behind the ordinary is actually something far more spectacular. And a further irony is that in many ways we see in Greece the birth of modern secularism (a dangerous term we may end up having to jettison) and its keynote of rationalism (among a host of other Axial effects). Thus the birth of science, secularism, and democracy need to be taken as appearing in parallel to the emergence of the great religions. That confounds the standard narrative and shows us that we must reckon with the phenomenon of synchronous emergence with a new perspective on the realization of different potentials in tandem. 

In any case, the period of Archaic/Classical Greece is the best documented of the Axial progeny cultures that reflect the extraordinary period of renewal and creative advance that took place in the centuries clustered before and after ca. -600. Simple periodization alone shows the stunning clustering of effects, one that demands some kind of explanation. 

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