Prefatory Note: This article was produced in collaboration with ChatGPT.

Rome’s so-called “Period of the Seven Kings” is conventionally dated from roughly 753 BCE to 509 BCE. When placed on the Greek chronological axis, it corresponds to the entire span from the later phase of the Greek Geometric period into the Archaic period—that is, from the moment when the polis was just beginning to take shape to the phase in which institutions, art, and overseas colonization fully unfolded.

The Geometric period is a term used in modern archaeology to describe an early cultural phase of ancient Greece, generally dated to about 900–700 BCE, following the collapse of Mycenaean civilization and preceding the Archaic period. “Geometric” does not refer to mathematics but to a visual language. Pottery, vessels, and grave goods are decorated with straight lines, zigzags, triangles, serrated patterns, and meanders. When human figures appear, they are reduced to highly abstract forms—triangular torsos and linear limbs. Around the twelfth century BCE, the Mycenaean palace system collapsed; writing disappeared, long-distance trade networks broke down, and the Greek world entered what is often called the “Dark Age.”

The Geometric period emerged from this vacuum. There was no state-level bureaucracy, no written law, and no monumental architecture. Society operated through families and small communities. Art no longer served royal power but returned to everyday life, ritual, and burial. The Geometric period functioned as a “preparatory stage” before the emergence of the polis. Land distribution, warrior groups, public rituals, and chieftainly authority already existed, but none had yet been fixed into written law or stable political institutions. The world depicted in the Homeric epics—aristocratic councils, competing chieftains, rule based on prestige rather than office—is essentially a crystallization of the oral memory of Geometric-period society, only later fixed in written form.

On the Roman side, this was likewise a society that had not yet completed the transition “from city to state.” Early Roman kingship was structurally very close to the Greek Geometric world: strong emphasis on ritual, ancestors, and the military community; authority derived from tradition and personal prestige rather than abstract institutions. In the era of the earliest kings (traditionally Romulus and Numa), Rome was little more than a federation of small settlements in a zone of overlap among Latin, Sabine, and Etruscan cultures. Political, religious, and military authority was highly personalized, and institutions were maintained mainly through custom and religious practice. In the later monarchy, especially under Etruscan influence, urban form, public works, priestly offices, and military organization became more clearly defined, but power remained concentrated in the king and his familial network.

Meanwhile, Greece was undergoing a structural leap. In the eighth century BCE, during the later Geometric period, poleis began to stabilize, the Homeric epics took fixed form, and aristocratic martial ethics and collective memory were repeatedly articulated. In the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, the Archaic period brought several decisive developments: the generalization of the polis system; the appearance of written law; large-scale overseas colonization across the Mediterranean and Black Sea; sculpture shifting from geometric abstraction toward proportional and idealized human forms; and, politically, the temporary emergence of tyrannies in many poleis as transitional regimes between aristocratic oligarchy and broader civic participation. Solon’s reforms in Athens and the institutional consolidation of Sparta both occurred during the later phase of Roman kingship.

Seen within the wider Mediterranean and Eurasian context, the Roman Seven Kings period was not isolated. In the eastern Mediterranean, the Phoenicians were at the height of their trading and colonial networks, through which alphabetic writing spread first to Greece and then westward. In the Near East, the Neo-Assyrian Empire expanded rapidly between the ninth and seventh centuries BCE, forming the first truly military-bureaucratic empire. Its logic of rule provided a model for later Persia and, indirectly, for the Mediterranean world. In terms of scale, organization, and capacity for projecting violence, the Neo-Assyrian Empire far surpassed contemporary Greek and Roman city-states. The Phoenician trade-colonial network and the Neo-Assyrian military-bureaucratic expansion thus represent two radically different yet equally mature ways of “organizing the world” within the same era.

The Phoenicians were not a unified state but a chain of port city-states along the eastern Mediterranean coast, with core centers such as Tyre, Sidon, and Byblos. With limited land and poor hinterlands, they could not survive through agricultural expansion. Instead, they perfected navigation, trade, and information circulation. By the ninth to eighth centuries BCE, Phoenician ships systematically covered the entire Mediterranean, from the Levant through Cyprus, the Aegean, North Africa, Sicily, and Iberia, and even into the Atlantic. Alphabetic writing spread through this structure. The Phoenician alphabet was highly simplified, recording only consonants, cheap to learn and fast to write—ideal for merchants, ship captains, warehouse management, and cross-linguistic communication. The Greeks adopted this system through trade and made one decisive modification: the introduction of vowels. The result was a writing system suitable both for accounting and for recording oral poetry and law. Further west, this system was adopted by the Etruscans and the Latins, eventually becoming the Latin alphabet.

The Neo-Assyrian Empire of the ninth to seventh centuries BCE, by contrast, did not sustain its influence through trade but through continuous, institutionalized, large-scale military action that forcibly integrated disparate regions into a single ruling framework. War was no longer episodic; it became the routine output of the state machine. Standing armies, standardized weaponry, siege technology, intelligence systems, road networks, and provincial administration were integrated into a system capable of long-term operation. The end of war was not the goal—war itself was a mode of governance. Terror was used to manufacture certainty. Reliefs, inscriptions, and the public display of brutal punishments were not uncontrolled violence but elements of policy. Cities were besieged, populations forcibly deported on a massive scale, and local elites replaced—not to annihilate opponents, but to break social continuity and prevent renewed resistance. In scale and capability, Neo-Assyria was overwhelming compared with Greece and Rome. Greek armies were seasonal citizen militias; early Rome still relied on tribal and clan-based mobilization. Neo-Assyria, by contrast, could move troops, supplies, and engineers across thousands of kilometers and sustain multi-year campaigns. The Greeks later described this kind of power as “Eastern despotism.”

Further east, the Eastern Zhou period had already begun. After 770 BCE, China entered the Spring and Autumn period, characterized by a multitude of feudal states. Ritual norms remained in place, but political reality increasingly eroded the old order, and intellectual and institutional innovation was beginning to gestate. The Zhou royal house still existed, and concepts such as the Mandate of Heaven, kinship order, and ritual music were not rejected. Feudal lords still “paid court to Zhou” and “honored the king,” major ceremonies still followed Zhou ritual models, and political language remained grounded in bloodline, enfeoffment, rank, and status. Yet reality had changed. The Zhou king lost military and fiscal control and became little more than a symbolic center. Under the nominal shell of vassalage, states waged their own wars, formed alliances, and annexed one another. Ritual persisted, but it no longer automatically constrained action; it was selectively invoked. Even in war, lords insisted on just causes, issued prior announcements, convened alliances, and emphasized ritual restraint on the battlefield. These practices did not halt escalation; they merely packaged warfare in familiar language. Ritual ceased to be a rule and became a political instrument.

At the level of social structure, a major shift was underway. Under the early Zhou system, political and military authority was tightly bound to aristocratic lineage. By the middle and late Spring and Autumn period, this structure began to loosen. As warfare expanded in scale and chariot-and-infantry systems demanded more stable and professional organization, and as territorial governance widened beyond what kin-based enfeoffment could sustain, the power of the great ministers (qing dafu) grew, and the shi class emerged. Shi were no longer defined purely by birth but entered political and military cores through skill, loyalty, and technical competence—foreshadowing the bureaucratization of the Warring States period.

Intellectual change did not precede political change; it was forced into being by political reality. Ritual was still respected, but it was increasingly clear that “acting according to ritual” could no longer explain why the world had fallen into disorder. The question shifted from “how to observe ritual” to “what ritual actually is, why it works, and when it fails.” This was the context in which Confucius emerged. At the same time, another line of thought was taking shape. Confronted with ever-intensifying political competition and human mobilization, some thinkers began to suspect that the world was tense precisely because of excessive human design. This reflection on “artificial order” would crystallize in ideas associated with Laozi.

Confucius was born somewhat later, but the problems he addressed were direct products of this structural disintegration. He is generally believed to have been born in 551 BCE in Zouyi of the state of Lu (near modern Qufu, Shandong). This date, derived from the Records of the Grand Historian and Lu calendrical reckoning, is relatively reliable by ancient standards. His lifetime spanned the most turbulent middle and late phases of the Spring and Autumn period, precisely at the threshold where ritual still existed but had lost effectiveness: the Zhou royal house was hollowed out, feudal states contended for dominance, great ministers overstepped bounds, and the shi class became mobile. His entire life was pressed beneath this structural tension.

Confucius lived from 551 to 479 BCE. In his youth, he was not a recluse or mere scholar but explicitly sought participation in practical politics. He held minor offices in Lu and eventually rose to the position of Minister of Justice, briefly attempting reforms aimed at curbing aristocratic usurpation and restoring ritual boundaries. In reality, however, feudal power could no longer operate according to Zhou ritual norms; kinship, force, and interest-based alliances determined outcomes, not moral status or titles. Confucius was marginalized and ultimately left Lu.

He then traveled among the states with his disciples for more than a decade in what can be described as a form of political exile, attempting to persuade rulers to adopt his principles of governance. He was not writing for posterity but repeatedly confronting real power to test whether his ideas could still function. The result was near total failure. In a competitive environment, advocating benevolence, ritual restraint, and limits on the strong amounted to self-weakening. After recognizing that the political path was blocked, Confucius shifted his focus entirely to the human level.

He detached ritual from bloodline and aristocratic status, redefining it as a set of behavioral norms that could be learned. Ritual was no longer “because of who you are, this is how you act,” but “how you act determines who you become.” He recognized and cultivated the shi as a mobile social stratum, accepting students regardless of birth so long as they were willing to learn and practice self-discipline. This was radical for its time: he was effectively training a personality model in advance for an emerging bureaucratic world. He also redefined the “gentleman” (junzi), no longer as an aristocrat but as an inner standard—restraint, self-reflection, respect for order, a sense of proportion, and the ability not to become deformed by a disordered world. This redefinition explains why Confucianism could later be repeatedly redeployed under different dynasties and institutional forms.

Laozi’s birth date, by contrast, has no reliable determination. Traditional accounts cluster around the sixth century BCE, often placing him earlier than Confucius, perhaps around 570–560 BCE, but these claims are based largely on later textual compilations and legendary accretions, especially in the Records of the Grand Historian, which itself presents multiple contradictory versions. If Laozi existed as a historical individual, his activity likely occurred slightly earlier than or roughly contemporaneous with Confucius. The problem is that the level of thought reflected in the Dao De Jing is difficult to compress into the experience of a single lifetime.

Confucius’s problem consciousness was highly contextual, directly addressing the malfunction of Spring and Autumn politics; his language is concrete, dialogical, and marked by friction with reality. The Dao De Jing, by contrast, addresses a more abstract question: not how to restore order, but why any over-engineered order ultimately turns against itself. Its repeated emphasis on “non-action,” “reversal as the movement of the Way,” and “weakness as the function of the Way” is not passive resignation but a structural critique of high-intensity political mobilization. It presupposes a world in which people are continuously conscripted, society is constantly tightened, and institutions are excessively optimized, resulting in systemic brittleness. Such judgment aligns more closely with the long accumulation of experience from the Spring and Autumn to the early Warring States period than with any single episode of official career.

“Non-action” is among the most misunderstood of concepts. It never means doing nothing; it means not allowing subjective design to forcibly replace a system’s own regulatory capacity. In the Dao De Jing, the problem is not action per se, but a specific kind of action: over-planning, over-intervention, over-correction. The Spring and Autumn–Warring States era was a time when everyone was exerting effort—rulers centralizing, officials governing, scholars advising, armies expanding. The result was not greater stability but greater fragility. “Non-action” is thus a systemic diagnosis: when every layer intensifies control, the whole becomes more prone to collapse. It is not abdication of responsibility, but recognition that complex systems have a threshold beyond which they break, and that near this threshold, reducing force is wiser than adding it.

“Reversal is the movement of the Way” is an unsentimental structural judgment: any state pushed to its extreme triggers a counter-movement. Strength at its limit provokes resistance; fullness at its limit leads to depletion; tightness at its limit snaps. In a society of continuous mobilization, growth, and expansion, collapse is not accidental but embedded in the operating logic itself. Laozi’s thought does not encourage participation in the peak of interest (高潮) but warns that the peak itself is the danger signal.

In “weakness is the function of the Way,” “weakness” refers to structural flexibility and elasticity, not moral virtue or personality softness. The weak are “useful” because they do not confront the system head-on; they survive by yielding, reshaping, delaying, and absorbing shock. Water is Laozi’s favored metaphor because it competes with no form yet passes through all forms. The strong depend on structural stability and collapse once that structure fails; the weak depend on adaptability, turning change itself into space for survival. This insight concerns not personal conduct but civilizational form: systems that endure are often not the strongest, but the least rigid.

From this perspective, the Dao De Jing likely underwent a long process of formation. Early critiques of ritual, naming, and coercion appeared in the late Spring and Autumn period; in the early Warring States period they were repeatedly reformulated, distilled, and compressed into a highly condensed textual form. Its language is stripped down, decontextualized, and impersonal, with few concrete historical references, little narrative, and no engagement with specific state institutions. This makes it ideal for reuse and editing across different eras and political settings—and ill-suited to reconstruction as an autobiographical work.

Accordingly, “Laozi” occupies a position in intellectual history closer to that of a conceptual label or author-function. The name gathers a whole category of skepticism toward civilizational overexertion, enabling it to be transmitted, debated, positioned against Confucianism, and repeatedly reactivated by later generations. Whether a single historical individual ever existed becomes a secondary issue.

At the same time, elsewhere in Asia, the Indian subcontinent was entering the Late Vedic period. Urbanization and proto-state formations emerged, providing the social soil for the later rise of Buddhism and Jainism.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in Asia, the Indian subcontinent entered the Late Vedic period. Urbanization and proto-state formations began to emerge, providing the social conditions that would later give rise to Buddhism and Jainism.

The term “Vedic period” comes directly from the Sanskrit word Veda. Its root is √vid, meaning “to know,” “to recognize,” or “to have insight”—not ordinary, everyday knowing, but an authoritative, religious, and revelatory form of true knowledge. In its original sense, Veda does not mean a “book,” but rather “sacred knowledge that has been correctly known and transmitted.” The period is called the “Vedic period” not because people at the time identified themselves as living in a particular “age,” but because later scholars used the term to summarize a historical phase in which the Vedas functioned as the central source of authority.

This period is not named after a dynasty, a city, or a technology, but after which body of knowledge was regarded as the highest source of legitimacy. The Vedic period therefore refers to a time when religious ritual, social order, linguistic norms, and cosmology were primarily organized around the Vedic tradition. The Vedas are not a single text, but a corpus of classics formed through a long oral tradition and continuously refined over time. Later generations organized them into four core Vedas, often collectively referred to as the “Vedic corpus”: the Rigveda, Yajurveda, Samaveda, and Atharvaveda.

The world of the early Vedic period was small in scale. Society revolved around nomadic or semi-agricultural tribes, with authority concentrated in priests and tribal leaders. Central activities included fire sacrifices, animal offerings, and ritual recitation. This structure is precisely what the Rigveda reflects: the relationship between humans and gods is transactional, with correct ritual performed in exchange for rain, livestock, and victory. The transformation in the later Vedic period began with material conditions. The expanded use of iron tools, systematic cultivation of the Ganges basin, stabilization of agriculture, rising population density, and the emergence of permanent villages and towns all reshaped society. Land was no longer merely pasture, but became an inheritable, contestable, and taxable resource.

As a result, the previously loose tribal structure came under pressure. Kingship emerged and strengthened, and the status of the Kshatriyas (warrior-rulers) rose. The Brahmins (priests) remained important but were no longer the sole authority. Society became systematically stratified, and the varna (caste) structure began to solidify. Rituals grew increasingly complex, costly, and centralized in terms of interpretive control.

It is in this context that the Upanishads began to take shape. The term Upaniṣad comes from Sanskrit, composed of upa (“near”), ni (“down”), and sad (“to sit”), literally meaning “to sit near” or “to sit at the feet.” It refers not to a literary genre, but to a setting: a disciple sitting close to a teacher, receiving core teachings transmitted orally only to those deemed qualified. The name itself thus reveals the nature of the Upanishads—secret, inward, and non-public knowledge.

The Upanishads appear at the end of the Vedic corpus and are often called the “end of the Vedas” (Vedānta). They mark a shift from questions of how to perform rituals correctly and how to please the gods, toward deeper inquiries such as whether ritual has an underlying meaning and whether there exists a unified reality behind ritual practice. For this reason, the Upanishads are usually linked with the Brahmanas and the Aranyakas as part of a continuous lineage, and are seen as an internal reflection on early ritual religion rather than a rejection of it.

It is important to be clear that the Upanishads are not a single book, but a collection of texts formed in different regions and at different times. They were later grouped together under the collective name Upanishads through retrospective classification and organization, not as a unified project of their own era. Because their origins are dispersed and their contexts diverse, their ideas are not entirely consistent. Yet they share a fundamental stance: what truly matters is not external ritual, but direct insight into “the self,” “ultimate reality,” and “existence.”

The self spoken of in the Upanishads—Ātman—is not a personality, an ego, or a collection of subjective experiences in the psychological sense. On the contrary, it is defined precisely through the negation of such things. In many texts, the self is stripped away layer by layer: the body is not the self, because it ages and dies; breath is not the self, because it comes and goes; sensations, intentions, and thoughts are not the self, because they change, are unstable, and can be observed. What remains is not a “thing,” but the standpoint of awareness itself—always present, yet never appearing as an object. It is not “I have an experience,” but “that unmoving point by which experience is possible.” This may sound abstract, but on reflection it becomes intelligible. Our experiences do not define us; rather, the coherent ground that observes experience is the self—at least, this is the Upanishadic position.

As for “ultimate reality,” or Brahman, it is not a personal god nor an anthropomorphic creator figure in the Upanishads. It is the final reality by which everything is what it is. It is not something hidden behind the world, but the fundamental condition that allows the world to appear, change, and disappear. This may seem abstruse, but it resembles an attempt to trace the origin of all things, perhaps analogous to what other religious systems call “God.” Crucially, however, the Upanishads do not treat Brahman as an object of discussion. Instead, they advance a radically disruptive equation: Ātman = Brahman. When one truly sees the self, one discovers that it is not something partial or personal, but structurally identical with existence itself. This reminds me of Calvinist thought, where God is said to be present with us.

The insight into “existence” goes even deeper, and I cannot help but admire the ancient thinkers for it. Amid all change, becoming, and destruction, what has never changed? The answer is not a particular entity, but “existence as such.” Existence, then, is not “something being there,” but “the fact that manifestation manifests.” Everything is an externalization of something, much as the “self” is also an externalization and expression of “ultimate reality.” In some texts, this is described as “pure being,” “pure knowing,” or “pure bliss”—not bliss as an emotion, but as a state of completeness without lack or division. At this level, distinctions between life and death, self and other, subject and object are regarded as constructions of experience rather than ultimate reality.

The emphasis on “direct” insight arises from the Upanishads’ deep distrust of intermediaries. Language creates concepts, concepts create objects, and objects create a sense of separation. For this reason, the texts make extensive use of negation, paradox, and metaphor—not to be obscure, but to prevent readers from treating truth as something that can be grasped and possessed. The famous strategy of “not this, not that” (neti neti) continuously dismantles false identifications rather than offering a positive definition. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad and the Chandogya Upanishad, this method is especially thorough: truth is not something taught to you, but something you realize has never left once all errors have been exhausted. I am particularly interested in this explanation and plan to write a separate study on it someday. The insight of the Upanishads is not to tell you “what you are,” but to show you that when everything you think you are has been seen through, what remains is not the personal self, but existence itself manifesting here. It is not acquired, but recognized; not experienced, but always already the case.

Taken together, when we observe the cultures of different regions during the same period, a shared trend emerges: people move from passively accepting prescribed arrangements to questioning authoritative structures and indoctrination, developing their own understanding and insight, and challenging traditional narratives. While this cannot quite be called a Renaissance, I would describe it as a strong rise in humanity’s self-driven impulse to understand the world. The various schools of thought that emerged from this process—diverse and competing—are akin to a “hundred schools contending,” and are deeply fascinating.

Footnotes:

1. The traditional dating of Rome’s “Seven Kings” (c. 753–509 BCE) derives from later Roman historiography rather than contemporary records; archaeology supports urbanization in the 8th–6th centuries BCE, but the seven-king schema is a retrospective narrative compression.

2. Greek “Geometric” and “Archaic” periods are modern archaeological classifications based on material culture (especially pottery), not ancient self-periodization; their alignment with Roman political phases is analytical, not institutional.

3. The Geometric period (c. 900–700 BCE) includes internal phases; the late 8th century BCE shows gradual increases in settlement size, exchange, and social complexity rather than an abrupt transition.

4. The post-Mycenaean “Dark Age” reflects the collapse of palace administration and Linear B usage, not civilizational disappearance; recent archaeology indicates continuity and regional recovery.

5. Geometric Greek society lacked centralized bureaucracy and codified law, relying instead on kinship, ritual, and personal authority rather than formal institutions.

6. Polis denotes both urban form and political community; the Geometric period is considered “preparatory” insofar as key elements existed without institutional stabilization.

7. The Homeric epics took shape around the 8th century BCE, reflecting late Geometric aristocratic society rather than Mycenaean palace culture, following a long oral tradition.

8. The comparison between early Rome and Geometric Greece concerns structural features (personal authority, ritual–military community), not economic scale or imperial capacity.

9. Early Rome functioned as a multi-settlement cultural overlap zone (Latin, Sabine, Etruscan), not a formal political federation.

10. Urban development traditionally attributed to Rome’s late monarchy aligns broadly with archaeological evidence, though attribution to specific kings remains uncertain.

11. Greek colonization (apoikia) involved independent city foundations linked by ritual and kinship, not direct political control by a metropolis.

12. Solon’s reforms (594/3 BCE) and Sparta’s institutional consolidation (7th–6th c. BCE) are juxtaposed with late Roman monarchy for comparative, not exact chronological, purposes.

13. Alphabetic writing spread broadly from Phoenician to Greek, then to Etruscan and Latin contexts through multiple contacts and adaptations, not a single linear transmission.

14. The Neo-Assyrian Empire represents one of the most developed ancient military-bureaucratic states, exceeding Greek and early Roman polities in scale and logistical capacity.

15. Neo-Assyrian use of terror was a deliberate policy embedded in governance, alongside infrastructure, taxation, and administrative control.

16. “Eastern despotism” is a later Greek conceptual contrast, crystallized especially after the Persian Wars, rather than a contemporaneous analytical category.

17. In Eastern Zhou China, ritual (li) comprised concrete political and social procedures; during the Spring and Autumn period it persisted but became increasingly instrumentalized.

18. The shi class gradually shifted toward greater mobility and skill-based recruitment, though birth status remained relevant.

19. The claim that political change preceded intellectual transformation reflects an analytical emphasis on structural pressure rather than denial of intellectual autonomy.

20. Confucius’s office as Sikou (“judicial official”) is variably described in sources; the account follows conventional narrative usage.

21. Treating “Laozi” as an author-function highlights the composite formation of the Dao De Jing rather than denying its historical depth.

22. Cross-civilizational comparison here identifies parallel structural pressures and reflective responses, not a synchronized or causal global progression.