The Axial Age was the first time in human history when familiarity with the written word was no longer limited to priests, administrators, and merchants, but had become necessary to full participation in civic life. In Athens, it was taken for granted that only a country bumpkin would be entirely illiterate. Without mass literacy, neither the emergence of mass intellectual movements nor the spread of Axial Age ideas would have been possible. By the end of the period, these ideas had produced a world where even the leaders of barbarian armies descending on the Roman empire felt obliged to take
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