The Ancients: Zarathustra

all right good evening ladies and gentlemen thanks for coming out to the inaugural lecture of this year's series this year we're going to do god tiling the ancient so it's sort of the those figures who have been sort of retrospectively we have attached this huge cultural significance to Confucius Lao Tzu Siddhartha Gautama vaasna Plato a couple of other folks and tonight we're going to start with Zarathustra and the founder of Xero astron ISM now what I really want to explore is the continuing influence that these thinkers their ideas their cultural impact has on the world today why it's come about how what's necessary for that to happen and then how it influences our thinking and our experience of the world many thousands of years later sometimes in quite shocking and surprising ways and so a good place to start with this is our through Stroh who sort of in theory the founder of monotheism which we'll talk about but one thing to understand or a couple things a lot to cover here but one is you know we have history and one great definition of history is it's the remembered past right it's the past that we remember but the problem with history is there's a lot of it and most of it happened a long time ago right and so this this sort of makes it tough to remember it but we also have culture I think one way of thinking about culture is it's the history we don't need to remember it's just influencing us whether we know it or not if the impact is there it's profound but we just don't know it generally but we don't need to know it because it's sort of that the water we swim in it's what we do we live in these historical influences whether we know it or not so we don't remember it but when we encounter it it tends to blow our minds oh this is where this concept comes from and this is where these influences occur for Zoroastrianism and the great Persian culture associated with it I'll just give you two examples from from intellectual history one is from Goethe who his entire life was interested in linguistics and language and flawless studied a little bit of Arabic when he was younger some Semitic languages his father said no no ...