Axial Age civilizations were defined by transcendent myths voiced by a distinct intellectual class

Evidence

For more than three thousand years after civilizations first emerged, the contacts among them were, with some exceptions, either nonexistent or limited or intermittent and intense. The nature of these contacts is well expressed in the word historians use to describe them: “encounters.” Civilizations were separated by time and space. Only a small number existed at anyone time, and a significant difference exists, as Benjamin Schwartz and Shmuel Eisenstadt argued, between Axial Age and pre-Axial Age civilizations in terms of whether or not they recognized a distinction between the “transcendental and mundane orders.” The Axial Age civilizations, unlike their predecessors, had transcendental myths propagated by a distinct intellectual class: “the Jewish prophets and priests, the Greek philosophers and sophists, the Chinese Literati, the Hindu Brahmins, the Buddhist Sangha and the Islamic Ulema.” — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 132

Categorization

• XREF: Recalls Jaspers’ Axial Age and connects to Weber’s priesthood/carrier-class sociology of religion.