BookBrowse Reviews The Great Transformation: Armstrong is a lucid writer with a knack for synthesizing vast quantities of research. History/Religion

From the book jacket: In the ninth century BCE, the peoples of four distinct regions of the civilized world created the religious and philosophical traditions that have continued to nourish humanity to the present day: Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Later generations further developed these initial insights, but we have never grown beyond them. Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, for example, were all secondary flowerings of the original Israelite vision.

Armstrong traces the development of the Axial Age chronologically, examining the...