> we tend to believe that ideas spread via diffusion, maybe that is not so at all. That was also what Karl Jaspers claimed in The Origin and Goal of History wi

> we tend to believe that ideas spread via diffusion, maybe that is not so at all. That was also what Karl Jaspers claimed in The Origin and Goal of History with regard to earlier intellectual breakthroughs in the first millennium BCE that mark the beginning of most of the world's major religions. He thought the parallel developments in Greece, Palestine, India and China (as well as Persia, though that is now disputed) could not be explained by diffusion, but rather as a single spiritual event that played out independently in multiple locations. He called this event the Achsenzeit (originally translated as "axial period", now more commonly rendered as "axial age").