Armstrong’s first sentence in her book is completely wrongheaded, and shows the first of a series of fallacies that completely wreck her whole treatment of the Axial Age.
It is simply nonsense to speak of some kind of ‘Axial Age spirituality’, let alone in relation to some putative ‘Axial peoples’, the Indo-Europeans. Quite apart from presumably unintentional racism the statement seems to suggest that this ’spirituality’ was present in Indo-Europeans prior to the Axial Age.
This type of confusion is at least a reminder that people are having a hard time with the Axial Age and the history behind it.

The first mistake is to confuse the Axial Age with religion. The next one is to think that some doctrine is assoicated with this religion, and then finally that this religion belonged to particular people later seen in the Axial Age spectrum.

The only safe way to approach the Axial Age is from a viewpoint far larger than that of religion. Look at it in terms of the cultural transformations in five separate regions across Eurasia, to note the way in which it is the general evolution of civilization that is going on here, not religion as such. In any case the Axial Age exploits diversity and produces different results in different areas.
It is a time-slice in particular regions, and acts on those who in a given time and place are in the direct path of what we call in the study of the eonic effect the ‘eonic sequence’.
It is important to see that this has nothing to do with the archaic Indo-Europeans in the steppes of southern Russia. There are no ‘Axial peoples’.

We are ready to move backwards again toward antiquity in search of the right perspective on the rise of the modern world. We have asked ‘middle of what?’ There can be only one answer, and we can move on, to examine the onset of our middle period. As we explore the world of the Classical Greeks we know that we are in the presence of another or our seminal eras, further, that as we zoom in on the phenomenon, it shows a strong resemblance with the rise of the modern world.

3.3 The Axial Age

Our riddle is solved at once, then, by slightly extending the range of examination, to see that while there may be a local explanation for decline, there must be a global explanation for the rise. Our model won’t tell us why Rome declined, only that its (relative) genesis is in the great seminal era of cyclical upturn. We are at the point of seeing the one great clue to the emergence, as evolution, of civilization itself, in this strange phenomenon of synchronous acceleration. All across Eurasia, from Rome, to Greece, to the Near East, to India, and China, we see a sudden burst of cultural acceleration, with a center of gravity around –600, the time of the Exile in the case of Israel. We are back at our starting point, the mysterious drumbeat sounding across Eurasia in the period from ca. –900, and over by –400.
Beginning in the nineteenth century this perception of synchronous emergence in classical antiquity began to crystallize. These are ‘eonic observations’, and the redactors of the Judaic tradition were the first to observe the compression of their history and immediately cast this into the classic form that we have received from them. A similar sense appears in the history of Buddhism. The Judaic tradition is exceptional here, for the Greeks tended not to realize the phenomenon of their almost more remarkable and isomorphic history of this period. Let us note in passing, lest we get confused over ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’, that we see the birth of monotheism, but also the Greek proto-secular Enlightenment (matched with the last spectacular flowering of Greek polytheism). The birth of monotheism and science are synchronous, therefore. Our data is a superset of such eonic observations passing so quickly into a great myth. The distinction of sacred history has no meaning. Clearly we are seeing a spectrum of outcomes that blend into each other. But we must be wary of reducing them to a common denominator. Our system is exploring diversity.
The number of cultural processes that undergo rapid transformation in this period is remarkable, and it is not until modern times that we see anything comparable. One problem is that the scale of the process is tremendous, the study of five time slices in parallel. The logistics defeats observation, like a blind man reading a Braille text of a movie script. We don’t quite see the spectacular effect. Normal historiography specializes in the part, but this requires a greater whole. Thus specialized study tends to lose perspective on the echoing parallels reverberating across Eurasia as this drumbeat clocks multiple innovations appearing in the ongoing momentum of the target areas. The Old Testament unwittingly suggests the time frame for this interval, from after around –900 to the proximate period around –600, if we distinguish carefully a kind seminal period from its first spectacular fruits in the rough two centuries after –600.
Thus, in the clearest case we see the world of the Greeks emerge from its so-called Dark Age, suddenly begin a quiet transformation in the Archaic, then flower in spectacular fashion after –600, significantly the period of Solon. The change in character of the phenomenon shows how it is quite suddenly on the wane after around –400, and within a few centuries men are looking backwards to this era as an historical enigma. The remarkable thing is that we see this synchronous phenomenon in a fashion that transcends the possibilities of cross diffusion, which are nonetheless considerable. The Israelites had heard of the Iliad, there is an influence, but we cannot explain the one from the other. We might thus include the emergence of Rome as an additional independently emergent center, yet we see it more clearly as a variant of the Greek city state expansion characteristic of the Greek Archaic, that is, in part a case of diffusion. But with Greece, Israel, India and China we have no basis to claim that one triggers the other. We get the suggestion of something occurring ‘on schedule’.
All we can really do is to try and observe this phenomenon by setting out rough periodization boundaries. Later, on the analog of the modern we can partition our Axial phase as transition and divide, which is easy to spot. We will examine this ‘differential boundary’ below as being about –900 to –600. This puts a ‘divide’ near –600, after which we find a brief flowering followed by a rapid fall-off. It is almost eerie. Within a generation or two the character of the Greek era changes gears and a great flowering is over (this falloff and the divide are not the same). We had thought that coincidental, but it falls like ripe fruit into our periodization scheme. The factor of eonic determination is waning, and the high-octane fuel starts to be exhausted. The ‘punctuation’ is over and the eonic emergents head out under their own steam, if they survive at all. Greek democracy and tragedy don’t survive.
A birth of democracy Let us continue to track the history of democratic emergence in our system, to note once again: twice in a row, democracy shows correlated jump-start emergence in the eonic sequence, more, just at the point of the divide. Twenty-four hundred years to the decade separate Solon and the modern divide! We see the sudden appearance of a string of democratic revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, just as our modern transition is concluding. In the Axial period, we see the fragile Athenian experiment emerge from ‘raw republicanism’ in the sixth century. To repeat, we can see that this is no coincidence. Clearly democracy as micro-action is at risk as it sets sail into the uncharted waters of its mideonic period!
We can probably extend this backwards to our first transition, the system of Sumerian city-states, but the data is blurred, and it is probable that emergent civilization is too primitive for democracy to appear.

The prime objective is to describe a beautiful discovery: a non-random pattern in world history. This is called the ‘eonic effect’. The term ‘eonic’ is a pun on ‘eon’ and ‘eonic’ (as in digital sampling electronics, type ‘eonic in google’ and see all the DSP companies listed).
Even superficial inspection of world history has often suggested a ‘macrohistorical’ dynamic at work, witness the rising literature on the Axial Age, smoking gun evidence of something going on in terms of a dynamic. But the literature on the Axial Age has ended in confusion, because of distraction of the emergence of two world religions in the Axial Age. But this period shows that this aspect of the Axial interval is not the real issue: many other things occur in sync, among them the Axial interval of the Greek Archaic. Still more confusion has arisen from Karen Armstrong’s book The Great Transformation.

A careful method is required to sort out this confusion….(continued)

Karen Armstrong’s The Great Transformation, an historical depiction of the Axial Age, is in many ways a poor addition to the literature, although one destined to remain popular, no doubt. Perhaps, however, her account will draw attention to a question that has been neglected for too long. This question of the Axial Age, almost a taboo amongst conventional scholars, has seen very few analytical studies since the original publication of Karl Jaspers’ classic Origin and Goal of History. Despite the flaws in Jaspers’ account, his work cogently summarized a century of accumulating observations noticing the striking pattern of synchronous emergence in classical antiquity in the period indicated by Jaspers as stretching from -800 to -200. The publication of World History and The Eonic Effect in 1999, with a second edition in 2005, changed the context of discussion by seeing the Axial Age, as a phenomenon in a larger context of world history. This book then considered the question in the light of Darwinian evolution. It is not clear if Armstrong was aware of this work, and it is unfortunate that she proceeds to make a series of mistaken judgments about the Axial Age data which acquaintance with this book might have prevented. Armstrong’s basic mistake is to downplay the element of synchronous emergence, the remarkable effect of simultaneity in separate regions stretched across Eurasia. This is the result noone wants to see, but which is staring us in the face, for it implies something of global scale is at work, something stupendous, mysterious. 
The result of Armstrong’s tactic is a bland flattening out of the depiction, and the motive behind this is no doubt a sense that her secular audience will not accept the provocative facts of the case. Readers of her earlier books might have thought Armstrong was religiously motivated, but apparently this is not the case. She appears to have shifted here views toward a kind of generalized Buddhistic perspective and this is a tempting way to approach the data, but unfortunately this does not do justice to the phenomenon in question. It is ironic that she enters the one-dimensional history that the universal history of the ancient Israelites attempted to propose as a challenge to mundane world views.
This, of course, throws down the gauntlet. I should say that I would also propose a secular account of history. And would demand that we embrace the new research findings of Biblical Criticism that have exposed the mythology of the Old Testament. We must withdraw the claim that we have any knowledge of ‘god acting in history’. But once we have completed this confrontation with science, a strange thing happens. We discover that the bare historical facticity of the ‘real’ history behind the Old Testament is as remarkable, more so, than the mythical religious version! For this bare facticity of Axial phenomenology demands that we ‘deconstruct’ the ‘flat histories’ of causal mechanics with a renewed consideration of universal history, this time one that encompasses the whole effect of the Axial Age. We should note at once that this effect is almost more visible in the case of the Greek Axial Age than the Judaic. Put the history of the Greek Archaic/Classical era on a timeline against the backdrop of world history, and a remarkable mystery arises. 
This Buddhist trend, if that it was it is, of Armstrong’s account thus loses a major thematic staring us in the face, one that confronted its first discoverers in the nineteenth century and which disconcerted Karl Jaspers, who nonetheless brought himself to see that what he was dealing with transcended his own religious perspective. This perspective lingers in his work, with its confusion over the Axis of history (the Christ moment, but which is not in the Axial Age) and the actual era of the ‘Axial’ effects. 
It is appropriate to bring Buddhism into conjunction with monotheism, but we cannot reduce the one to the other. Nor can we easily explain how this process produces two religions, one theistic, the other non-theistic. Armstrong’s tendency to assume that the Axial concordance implies an ‘Axial ethos’ gets her in trouble with her thesis. 
Armstrong’s views are more transparent from another book she has written this year: a book on mythology, The History of Myth. Here she looks at the whole of world history since the Paleolithic and produces a periodization in which there is also a ‘modern transformation’. But here Armstrong seems to wish to downplay the question of modernity with a critique based on her flawed mythos/logos distinction. There is a distinct bias against the supposed ‘rationality’ of the modern age. Thus in here account of the Axial Age there is a pronounced confusion over the place of Greece in the Axial period. A myth has appeared that the Axial Age represents some kind of primordial religious age. But this fails to deal with the fact that the first scientific revolution in Greece, along with Greek democracy, are prime Axial phenomena. And this can’t be pressed into the sausage grinder generalizations Armstrong wishes to use on her data.
The Axial Age is a mystery until we see it in a larger context, that of the whole history of civilization. Then we notice what I call the ‘eonic effect’, which is a long-range pattern of which the so-called Axial Age is a subset. We discover that the key to the Axial Age is in many ways to be found by studying the modern world. Once we drop the assumption that the Axial Age is some kind of religious era, then the deeper meaning of the whole sequence of ‘Axial Ages’ stands out. 
Finally, Armstrong is on record trying to propose/promote various notions of a Second Axial Age. But this conflicts with her own statements about the modern transformation. What is the relationship of these things? We cannot eclectically invent new ‘Axial Ages’ and aspire to them in the future. Some kind of postmodern neo-spiritual age is simply not in the predictable future that is emerging from modernity. The many New Age movements predicting such events could be self-fulfilling prophecies, but they would not be a ’second Axial Age’. The only second Axial Age is the rise of modernity itself, a statement that requires careful study of the whole of world history in light of the eonic effect.