>>22337700Between the eighth and sixth century B.C., a kind of crisis or decline occurred almost simultaneously in all of the greatest ancient civilizations, along with an insurrection of those inferior racial elements. One could say that in the East — from China to India and Iran — this crisis was overcome by a series of reactions or adequate reforms (Lao Tzu, Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster). In the West, the dam appears to have broken and the insurrection seems to have encountered no major obstacle. In Egypt, it took the form of an outbreak of the popular worship of Isis and similar divinities, with its chaotic plebeian mysticism, in opposition to the ancient virile and solar royal cult of the first dynasties. In Greece, it was the decline of Doric-Achaean civilization with its heroic and Olympian ideals, the advent of secular, anti-traditional and naturalistic thinking on the one hand, and Orphic and Orphic-Pythagorean mysticism on the other.
But the center from which the ferment of decay mainly spread seems to have been precisely the group of Semitic-Eastern Mediterranean peoples and, ultimately, the jewish people.
