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Join Wunderry Plus in the Wundery welcome to another episode of Tides of History. I'm Patrick Wyman. Thanks so much for joining me today.

So we're going to do something a little bit different here. A long overdue mailbag episode.

I've gotten so many questions over the past year or so and we haven't

really had time to do one so here we are in the depth of the summer heat. I hope it's

cooler wherever you are than it is in Phoenix where I am right now. It's 114 degrees. It's just awful. Never thought

I would understand the sensation of having my eyeballs burn, but here we are. So yeah, let's

let's dive into some mailbag questions. The first question I'm going to address is not a single question. It's a combination of a bunch.

Basically, since I started doing these episodes on the Iron Age, a number of people have asked about what's called the Axial Age.

So the Axial Age is a way of talking about the 8th through the 3rd centuries BC.

It's a term that was coined by a German philosopher named Carl Jasper's

the better part of a hundred years ago. And the basic idea is that all across

Eurasia at this time between the 8th and the 3rd

centuries BC from Greece all the way to China that there were parallel

developments that the universalizing modes of thought

kind of philosophical modes of thought appeared in all of these places pretty much

simultaneously the great David Graber, sociologist who wrote a book on debt and

collaborated with the archaeologist David Wengro on The Dawn of Everything, which is a book that I really

enjoyed. Graber pointed out that this coincided with the development of coinage and markets across that whole space.

Basically, the idea is that all of these philosophical and religious traditions boil down to the idea that there is a

a single form of matter or being that underlies everything that all of the pluralities we see are an illusion and that underneath that there is a single

substance of some kind and so this is an idea like I said it's I said, it's been around for, it's been around for quite a while.

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