Describe a historical period that you are interested in

　　You should say:

　　What the historical period is

　　How you know it

　　What happened during that period

　　why you find it interesting

　　我要说的历史时期是轴心时代。它是德国卡尔·雅斯贝尔思在《历史的起源于目标》中提出的一个概念。指的是从公元前600年到公元300年的一段时间。

　　The historical period I am going to talk about is the core era. It is a concept came up by Karl Jaspers, a German philosopher, in his book, ‘the Origin and Goal of History;. It refers to the period from 600 A.D. to 300 A.D.

　　我第一听说这个词组是在西方哲学史的课上，后来自己又查找了些相关的资料。我发现这300年的历史无比神奇。在几乎相同的时间里，四大互相隔离的文明古国都诞生了某位极其伟大的人物。中国有孔子，印度有释迦牟尼，希腊有苏格拉底，埃及有先知。他们提出的理论彻底改变了人们对世界的认知，影响随后两千年世界哲学的发展，并塑造了各个文明不同的道路。有人说，核心时代之后的哲学不过是在为他们的思想做注解罢了。

　　The first time I heard this phrase was in the history of western philosophy, a course in my senior year. After reading some reference materials, I found this era was amazing. Almost at the same time, great men were born in the four isolated great ancient civilizations. China had Confucius. India had Sakyamuni. Greece had Socrates. And Egypt had prophets. This article is from Laokaoya website. Do not copy or repost it. The theories put forward by these men dramatically changed the way people perceived the world, affected the development of philosophies in the following 2000 years, and laid the foundation of different characteristics of those countries. There is a saying that all the theories and ideas generated after the core era are making annotations for those sages’ thoughts.

　　这一时期最有意思的点在于这些文明之间并没有太多的交流，却几乎同时开始了自己各具特色的文明之路。他们是如何做到的，难道事先有什么约定吗?

　　The fascinating point about the core era is that these countries did not have much communication then, but almost simultaneously produce their national philosophies. How did they achieve that? Did they somehow secretly reach an agreement?