Great Writing

I've written a few times about stellar writing. Here is a short selection, which I may have already written on my blog, I really love by Thomas Cahill. It's from his book Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus:

The Axial Age was over. It had lasted three hundred years--from the late seventh century B.C. to the late fourth--a very long time. In Confucian China, it had seen the burgeoning of reasonableness and courtly moderation, as well as the mystical depths uncovered by the Tao of Lao-Tsu. In India, the great age had produced the ineffable example of Gautama Buddha, reforming the chaos of more ancient systems and revealing the steps to personal peace. In Iran, the priest Zarathustra had spoken to the Persians, who carried the fire ceremony and the Zoroastrian vision of a cosmic battle between good and evil beyond the borders of Mesopotamia, situated between the legendary Tigris and Euphrates in the fertile delta where civilization had first shown itself. Just west of Mesopotamia, in the tiny, unstable kingdoms of Israel and Judah, the Hebrew prophets rose, giving to the bizarre monotheism of their singular people an ethical foundation so profound that the Jews could never entirely forsake it.

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