Is There a Sustained Kind of Self Consciousness?

I think a sophisticated kind of self consciousness is new. It's not that it never happened in 1000 BC, but it was probably kind of rare and only happened under certain circumstances. That became increasingly common first among rich people, like Athenian slaveholders or people like the Buddha. And then eventually kind of comes to affect larger and larger percentage of the population. I know it's a big claim and it's one that's very hard to defend in a short period of time. But yeah, I think that's my working hypothesis is what I would say is that something changed with regard to an understanding of what the self is over time. The same shift may even have been happening in the 20