 Mae'n bwysig iawn i gweithio'r awtfyrdd yn ddwy i ni'n gweithio'n gweithio'r Ffelly Philip Crenbroeck. Ffelly Crenbroeck wedyn o'i bwysig gennych 1988 a 1996, ac wedi gweithio'n gwneud i ffnodd i'n gwneud i'r ffordd, ac yn gweithio'n gweithio'r amser wedi'i gwneud i'r gweithio'r gweithio'r beithio'r gweithio'r amser. Mrs Shanaz Munshi, ond y bwysig, Llyfrgell, Arastrionism, Parsee yn ymdodd yn ymdodd. Rydyn ni'n ymdodd y ffost, y ffost ymdodd yw'r ysgrifennu cyfnodd yn ymdodd, yn ymdodd, yn ymdodd, yn ymdodd, yn ymdodd, yn ymdodd. I think of Professor Crenbroke as a sort of pioneer of that particular methodology which many of us have continued afterwards and indeed he's published widely on minority Iranian religions, particularly the al-Ahak and the Yazidis. So I think I'm just going to turn over to him now and please join me in welcoming him again. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed, Dr Stewart. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to start by congratulating the organisers of this exhibition, especially of course Dr Stewart, which also Professor Williams and Professor Hinzer, for this exhibition and this conference and congratulate them on the success in carrying out the heroic task of realizing an enterprise like that. Drawing attention to a religion to which, in my view, we may well owe the very concept of religion as we understand it in the West today. Zoroastrianism it seems may have been the first social movement in history to claim identity on the basis of adherence to beliefs rather than tribal or traditional adherence and practices. The individual is invited to join a community of men and women whose worldview Dinah, as Professor Hinzer already mentioned, whose worldview differentiates them from those around them. That is new, that is not known before that in the Indo-Iranian tradition and I can't think of any tradition outside the Indo-Iranian area where such a community of believers would have existed. If one joined that group and pronounced a formal profession of faith, one belonged to what must originally have been a novel social category which later came to be called a Dean, a religion in our modern western sense of the world word. That refers to ancient practice, to ancient ideas, it's nothing to do with modern ideas about conversion and so on. That is a matter for the Zoroastrians themselves to decide. But in the early days we see Zoroastrianism maybe being the first religion in our sense. But that's as we shall see is not all. This new worldview encompassed several other postionates that followers of the Abrahamic religions have come to take for granted but without which their beliefs might not have developed as they did. And several of those key beliefs have to do with looking back and that's what we're talking about. I call this return to the past but I mean of course looking back. Then Zoroastrianism then as the late lamented Professor Mary Boyce often said is worth studying. But then what we mean when we speak of Zoroastrianism, once upon a time the concept conjured up an image of a static, undifferentiated and essentially unchanging system of beliefs and observances which started with the prophet Zaratustra and essentially continues down to our day. Now one can certainly think of Zoroastrianism in this way. It makes sense but it does mean that one loses another perspective namely that of development and change which was probably at least as significant for the history of Zaratustra. One of the great questions facing the modern student of Zoroastrianism is precisely that of the balance between continuity and change of the long history of the diner which came into being because of the message of Zaratustra's pitama. This question is all the more intriguing because for approximately the first 2000 years of its existence that religion was transmitted by word of mouth in a context of laymen consulting priests who had undergone a rigorous training but could not fall back on a solid body of written exegesis. They couldn't consult books. They had to trust to their combination of religious knowledge and their common sense of members of their own period in history. Both elements of continuity and development, ladies and gentlemen, can be aptly illustrated by examining the question of looking back. While the traditional orientalist informed by Christian or Islamic culture may have expected Zoroastrians of all ages to have looked back first and foremost to the period of the founder of their faith, I hope to show this afternoon that the reality was in fact more complex and more interesting. Of course when one thinks about looking back in the context of religion the question arises to what extent looking back is common to all religions. Religious teachings generally originated in the past and most religions tend to look back in some ways. Still a closer look shows that looking back can serve a range of different purposes and each case needs to be examined individually. Some religions look forward to an ideal future which represents the return to an ideal primeval time whose perfection was disrupted by a fall from grace which humanity must now strive to restore. You may recognise many forms of Christianity here, Paradise and the end of time, as well as Shiite Islam. This, looking back to the past as a blueprint for the future, is also found in several periods of the history of Zoroastrianism, but as we shall see it's not the only reason the Zoroastrians had for looking back to the past. The past could also be seen as a time when religious knowledge was still intact and which therefore needs to be studied so as to help one define one's religion of the present. There again different questions may be asked. One may wish to know about rules and rules and the workings of the church so to speak when the religion was still in its prime. One may have questions regarding the original teachings and the validity of religious leadership wondering to what extent it's representative of the original teachings which brings the whole question of religious authority into the equation. Alternatively, one may look for religious inspiration in the early teachings of the faith which can be done either with a view to renewing one's current religion and modernising it or in order to prove the orthodoxy or one's traditional beliefs. All those reasons for looking back can be found in the history of Zoroastrianism. Many, many groups have looked back but their ideas of the past were as different as their motives for studying it. Now, ladies and gentlemen, in my view, the greatest looker backer of all was probably the prophet Zaratustra himself. Zaratustra, who started out as a priest of perhaps somewhat conservative, cattle-reading community sometime around or before 1000 BCE, was forced by circumstances to look back. His community, it seems, had settled in a territory whose culture was dominated by cognate people, whose language and practices were comprehensible to Zaratustra and his followers, but seemed to them utterly misguided. Zaratustra's songs or garthas have long been thought of as being largely incomprehensible or at least very mysterious, but a number of recent publications, including the work of Professor Hintzer, shows that if we focus on what can be known rather than on an unknowable, we can in fact infer a great deal of information from them. Zaratustra's community, when I realised, was involved in a very real conflict with members of a related culture who were more powerful than they, but whom they regarded first of all as deceitful, not righteous, and amongst whom there was, I quote, no decent life for the cattle breeder, end of quote, Ysler 29.5. Zaratustra, who was a highly trained priest, sought to understand this conflict in religious terms and arrived at a number of very stapling insights. Now, in order to understand Zaratustra's teaching, we do need to take into account that he lived not in 2013, but in a very different culture from ours. As has been very clearly shown by Keanu Shrezzanya, early Zoroastrianism clearly distinguishes between two times, as they call it, which I would call two concurrent modes of reality. One, called limited time, refers to our everyday reality with good, alternating with bad, heat with cold, etc. That is to the dynamic, ever-changing, time-bound reality we all experience. But underlying that mundane perception of the world was unlimited time, or timeless time, as Rezzanya calls it, which represents a parallel, unchanging, absolute reality that's distinct from, but nevertheless plays a role in our everyday affairs. One might compare the two to our actual daily personality, our daily life, on the one hand, and our soul to the other. The former being dynamic, changing all the time, and the latter, the soul, I expect being more or less unchanging. I don't know very much about the soul, but I think that's the idea. Absolute reality, remote, though it is, could be accessed by an able priest such as Zaratustra, who was thus capable of being in touch with absolute truth or the divine, if you prefer. Now my own recent work on the garther suggests that this distinction between an unchanging archetypal mode of being and a mundane one was vital to Zaratustra's thinking and is a key to his interpretation of the reality of his day. By looking back to the traditions of his own people, he sought to understand how it was possible for a far-from-righteous group to dominate his own righteous followers and make life impossible for them. Now Zaratustra, as you all know, connects this antagonistic state of affairs with the distinction between two groups of supernatural beings, the divers who appear to have been as anthropomorphic, unpredictable and self-willed as their Greek and Roman counterparts, theoi and dei. These were gods whose attitudes inspired the morals and behaviour of Zaratustra's opponent. But Zaratustra's group, on the other hand, predominantly worshipped the so-called Ahuras, who, as I've argued elsewhere, were originally personifications of what we would call abstract concepts, as well as natural phenomena such as the sun. All of these personifications were bound to the laws of truth or righteousness, Asha. And just as truth underlies all manifestations of what's good, absolute reality or timeless time has been present from pre-eternity, is present now in our time of trials and tribulations and will still exist when the problems of life have been overcome and limited time will no longer play a role. Now, Zaratustra, stressing the superiority of what one might call the moral Ahuras over the self-willed divers, regarded all abstract qualities that could help the righteous as being embodied by good Ahuric divine beings, until then some beings like contract had been personified, Mithra. But Zaratustra seems to call on all the qualities that he needs in his struggle against evil. These good Ahura, Ahura divine beings, owed their origin to the greatest Ahura of all, Lord Wisdom, or Ahura Mazda. Furthermore, and that's very important, in order to play a role in this physical world, the qualities of those spiritual divinities had to be embodied, that is to say internalised, by human beings who opened themselves up to them. Only humans, it seems, could act freely in our physical world, and in the battle against evil the divinities needed them as much as they needed divine inspiration and guidance. Now, ladies and gentlemen, in later Zaratustra sources, there's absolutely no doubt that Ahura Mazda is a creator. But, as some of you know, Jean Kellence has argued with some justification that this does not appear to be the case in the Gathos. Ahura Mazda nid pas ond diw Creador, which has provoked strong reactions among many students of Zoroastrianism, including some of those present here. But my own work suggests that whenever the verb da to create titami is used for Ahura Mazda's creative activity, the word consistently refers to laying down the fundamental laws of existence called data. Later the word data came to be used for a law, but it could also be called a mantra, a sacred word to bring something into being. It could also refer the data to the creation of prototypes such as the soul of the cow and the Amishaspanthas, or, if you like, archangels, although that is always difficult. In other words, Ahura Mazda created beings that essentially belong to timeless time. And Ahura Mazda himself, moreover, as far as I can see, is not normally represented in the Gathos as intervening directly in the affairs of our time or reality. He belongs even more strictly to the sphere of timeless time than the other divine beings which he created. Still his laws or concepts may be actualised through these other divine beings who were capable of acting, in a sense, in our world, and who represent Ahura Mazda. Zarathustra's teaching clearly implies that before our time began, that is, in the beginning, pa o ru ye, which I take to mean just that and nothing esoteric, in the beginning, the fundamental laws of existence were laid down by Ahura Mazda and all was ideal for a brief time. Think of the big bang and the fact that the laws of nature were established during the first second, nothing to do with each other but similar maybe. At first everything was all-deal but Ahura Mazda's laws were just that, laws that can either be obeyed or ignored. Although the eternal structure is sound, in other words, it's up to human beings to realise its perfection or not as the cash may be. Humans, of course, must understand these laws in order to be righteous and be part of the world of righteousness and go to heaven. And choose to follow them. The divers and their followers did neither and Zarathustra's claim is that after the beginning the world was damaged by the divers and their followers. Moreover, Zarathustra fears that these powers of evil may damage the world a second time in his day and exalts his own Ahura worshipping group to resist this, knowing that the ultimate reality to which the world must one day return is the one established by Ahura Mazda. Ahura Mazda, in 2018-11, prays that Ahura Mazda may teach him the mantras, the sacred words, teachings or commands through which, quote, the world will be as it was at the beginning. End of quote. Now, what is so important in my view, ladies and gentlemen, is that this may well be the first time in the history of religion that a consistent world view was proposed implying that the world we live in is not as God or the source of existence wishes it to be. And that it's up to humans to embody the virtues represented by the holy beings who emanated from this source of existence and thereby to bring the world back into harmony with its fundamental laws of existence. Of course, we have Adam and Eve in Christianity Judaism, but it's not quite as consistent and clear as in the Gathas if one reads them simply without interpreting too much. So, in other words, Zaratustra claimed that everything had been ideal in the beginning, but it was because of misguided divinities and the followers that it elapsed into a state that was very different from the one intended by Ahura Mazda. Mazda himself was too holy to interfere directly, and the Gathas indicate that the divine beings who can help can only do so if their qualities are embodied by human followers. So, Zaratustra, if I'm right, was the first religious leader who came to the conclusion that we now take for granted, but without which, if you think about it, neither Christianity nor Islamic theology would make much sense. Instead of believing as older religions often did, the world was, as the gods had decreed, Zaratustra came to the conclusion it was not, and that the current conditions of our world are the result of wicked misinterpretations of the truth and needed to be made whole again, which could only be achieved if humans lent the Ahuric beings their physical power. Men and women, in other words, needed to choose to embrace the diner proposed by Zaratustra. Zaratustra expected that an ideal existence would come into being when the forces of evil in the form of the worshipers of the deceitful divers had been overcome. That ideal state would mirror Zaratustra's idea of an ideal world in the beginning. As we shall see, the pattern of looking back, so as to elucidate the future, repeatedly played a role in the history of Zoroastrianism as it does in many other religions. Now, Zaratustra's age must logically have been followed by a long period, if you lived around 1000 BCE, during which the founder's teachings gave rise to the formation of a religious community that, uniquely for early Indian and Iranian cultures, was able to spread. It could travel beyond the confines of a single people or tribe. Since, as we find in Ysrana 39.2, it would accept believers wherever they came from provided their sherds Zaratustra's diner. We have no accurate information as to what happened exactly during those dark centuries, but it's clear that many of the developments that characterised this period are reflected to some extent in what we call the young of Esther. That is in the text that continued to evolve as to language and contents, probably in my view until Achaemenid times in 500 BCE. So, what happened to the question of looking back? It's important to stress that Zaratustra's revelation appears to have been regarded by the Zoroastrian community as the only source of religious knowledge. He talked, Zaratustra talked to Ahura Mazda, and this is how the world can know anything. That in turn gave rise to the belief that all knowledge had been revealed to Zaratustra. So, the members of this newly developing religion expressed their joint veneration for Ahura Mazda and his prophet by looking back on the one hand to the time of creation, but also, and more particularly, to a time when Ahura Mazda tut Zaratustra the truth. The confession of faith says, as Ahura Mazda tut Zaratustra, at all discussions, at all meetings at which Mazda and Zaratustra are conversed, even as Zaratustra rejected the authorities of the divas, so I also reject as a Mazda worshipper and support of Zaratustra the authority of the divas, even as he, Roger Zaratustra rejected it. So, the community started looking back perhaps more to Zaratustra than to the beginning, whereas Zaratustra looked back to the period of creation. This goes on because as the period when Zaratustra was in contact with God preceded into the remote past, one has the impression that expectations about the end of time came to be predicted further into the future. Legends developed about the events leading up to the end of time, which depict a sequence of events that was a mirror image of that of creation. Now, since Zaratustra played such a key road in communicating the truth to the world, it was apparently felt that he should also be prominently represented at the end of time. But the problem was that Zaratustranism does not teach reincarnation and the resurrection of all the dead, which does occur, will occur according to Zaratustran mythology, but it was expected to take place when the process leading to the end of time was already well advanced, so Zaratustra could not play as a role as an initiator of those events. The solution that was found was to have implications for Christianity as well as Arustranism. A legend developed claiming that Zaratustra's seed was preserved in a lake and in the fullness of time a virgin would bathe there and give birth to a saviour who miraculously is Zaratustra's son. Native speculation came to believe that three such saviours would appear before the end of time, each at the end of a long period of decline. When the authors or transmitted of the Young of Eastern Text looked back, they still saw Zaratustra as a pivotal figure in the history of their religion. But curiously, this appears not to be the case in the Iranian sources that reflect the next stage in the history of Zaratustranism, that is the Achaemenid inscriptions which begin under the reign of Darius I, 521-484 BCE. Now, when Darius and his successors, the sovereigns of a new empire, took back, it was to the recent past and not least to their own great exploits. I mean, just imagine, you're a king and you're not going to look at an ancient prophet, you look at your own deeds. Now, there are good grounds for the assumption that the Achaemenids were at least profoundly influenced by Zaratustranism from the time of Darius I onwards. We don't find a single mention of the prophet in the inscriptions. Pierre Briand has drawn attention to a single seal which Professor Canterra has just shown this morning, that is inscriptions in Aramaic script with a name which Briand reads as Zaratustres and he may well be right. But one seal, one swallow doesn't make a summer, one seal can hardly be taken as evidence of a strong tendency to look back to the time of the prophet. But although the fact that there is no mention of the Zaratustre has led to many speculations that the early Achaemenids were not Zaratustrans at all, which for reasons given elsewhere are regarded as intenable, but the true explanation may be that all those Zaratustranism became the religious of choice for the Achaemenid elite and gradually for the people generally. The nobility was not overly preoccupied with the founder of that faith or with its early history. So if we accept the early Achaemenids were indeed Zaratustrans or on the way to becoming that, does that mean that the founder of the religion was no longer felt to be relevant or was he just not very relevant to the majesty of the Achaemenid kings? Interestingly, when we look at the Greek sources, we find that Zaratustres' name in its Greek versions, Zorasta, crops up for the first time in the works of two Greek authors of the 5th century BCE, that is precisely at the time when one would expect Zorastranism to have been in the process of becoming dominant in western Iran, namely in the work of Xanthus of Lidia, in the Lidiaka, and of Plato in the first Assybiades. Plato has the following to say about him. At 14 years of age he, that is the king's son, is handed over to the royal school masters as they are termed. These are four chosen men reputed to be the best among the Persians of a certain age and one of them is the wisest, another justest, a third the most temperate and a fourth the most valiant. The first instructs him in the majornism of Zorasta, the son of Oromasus, which is the worship of the gods and teaches him also the duties of his royal office. Clearly, the Greeks can only have learned about this figure, Zorasta, the son of Oromasus from Iranians. They weren't clairvoyant, they can't have made it up. The fact that Zorasta's name is mentioned in the works of two Greek authors of the 5th century BCE, or strongly suggest, I would think, that the Persians' new preference for the Zorastian tradition had generated a great deal of discourse about religion and that Zaratustra did indeed play a key role there, which in turn suggests that many ordinary believers were more interested in looking back to the early days of their religion than their royal masters. No, Zaratustra stressed, as you all know, that a righteous person does not necessarily meet with success and happiness in this world. But that part of his teaching does not appear to have been taken on board by the Achaemenids, whose inscriptions state that they owe their position to Ahura Mazda because they were so righteous. That comfortable view of the world came to an abrupt end when Alexander the accursed, perhaps known better to you as Alexander the Great, defeated the Achaemenid Empire. When the Zorastians looked back after the second half of the 4th century BCE, they saw that a good period had given way to a bad one. Given that they'd always been taught that God had supported the Achaemenids because they, and obviously their religion was so righteous, this new state of affairs needed an explanation. Zorastians who believed that God rewarded the righteous could hardly accept that God had switched the legions from Zorastianism to Greek cults. An answer was found that involved a novel way of understanding the past of looking back, if you like, which was to influence a range of other religions, notably Judaism, but others as well. This new view of history implies that history follows a preordained course and that good periods will inevitably be followed by a time of decline until things have become so bad that a saviour is needed to restore the world to a more or less ideal condition after which another period of decline can be expected to follow. Those preordained periods came to be thought of as lasting 1,000 years, and these speculations gave rise to a view of history now known as millennialism, thinking in periods of 1,000 years, which plays a role in several religions as well as Zorastianism. Such myths may have already existed in later Achaemenid times, but they appear to have acquired a particular significance after Alexander. According to Plutarch, 45-125 CE, who cites the opompous 4th century BCE, the magens believed that a series of periods of 1,000 years would succeed each other in which the good and the evil gods would dominate alternately. In other words, here again current religious problems were solved by proposing a different view of the past. At this stage, in the history of Zorastianism, ladies and gentlemen, I unfortunately have to skip two important periods, those of Alexander's successors, the seducers, and of the Parthians, because in spite of the very valuable efforts of Dr Curtis, among others, we still don't know enough about the Parthians to make any pronouncements. It seems likely that the Parthian successors, the Sasanians, did their best to make sure that nobody would look back to their immediate predecessors of Parthians, but that's another matter. We're on firmer ground with the Sasanians who ruled Iran from, I hope I'm right, to 124 until around 650 CE. To understand the development in their view of history, we need to consider a few points. Firstly, in a culture where the legitimacy of the king was regarded as a key consideration, the Sasanians had succeeded to the throne through a military victory, which in itself was not sufficient to warrant acceptance by the Iranian people. The Sasanians and their councillors successfully solved this problem by means of a propaganda campaign based on two main points, both of which involved the construction of an appropriate view of the past. The Sasanians claimed to be the legitimate successors to the Achaemenids including an improbable genealogy, which Professor Darioi also referred to, but it was apparently enough to satisfy the people, not least because, after all, the Sasanians held the power. Secondly, they presented themselves as the champions of true Zoroastrianism, and that's a new concept, arguing that owing to the incursion of Alexander, the original true form of the religion had been lost, and only the Sasanians had the qualifications to restore the religion to its true form. That is, whereas in fact everything points to the idea that a range of local Zoroastrian cults and of Zoroastrian beliefs must have existed at this time, the Sasanian political and religious leadership looked back to a hypothetical ideal period when a true form, the one true form of the religion existed, thereby introducing a new concept. A striking case, in other words, of interpreting the past according to the requirements of the present, and one that was to have far-reaching consequences because it led to the assumption that a true form of Zoroastrianism could indeed be re-established and some form of centralized authority was needed to achieve this. The Sasanians were good politicians after all. The ideas and questions can be found in the works of the first two great religious leaders of the time, Tansar and Kertair. The first of these, Tansar simply claims that the Sasanians have absolute religious authority because they're so good. In combination with the physical fact that they were also so powerful, apparently that was enough for his time, but a successor, Kertair, who was a dominant force in Iran in the third century CE, the question of religious authority was much more of a challenge, perhaps because two rival religions, Manichaeism and Christianity raised their heads, claiming to be based upon direct divine revelations that had taken place recently enough for them to be able to look back to it. Kertair could not count this with a similar claim for Zoroastrianism. He couldn't just say, oh well, in Zarathustra's revelation, it said so and so. In Sasanian times it seems Zarathustra had become a figure shrouded in legend and mystery, but the ultimate source of religious authority referred to in the Pahrewe book tends to be the ancient teachers, generally Poryot Kishon, rather than Zarathustra. Definitely neither Kertair nor Tansar explicitly refers to Zarathustra as a source of authority. The essential conditions for being a good Zoroastrianism were that one should be, according to the Pahrewe Vendidad, eri o'r Poryot Kishi, which I would loosely translate as belong to Iranian culture and be a follower of the first teachers. However this may be, Kertair's own inscription implied that Kertair really thought that the ultimate authority and all practical questions of religion was his alone. He didn't suffer from an inferiority complex. As Professor Darioe also said, I thought I'd been the only one to think of this, but he did too, in order to prove that like the Christian and Manichaean authorities, he too had some form of direct access to the divine, Kertair claimed that his alter ego had visited heaven and hell. This does not automatically make him a shaman, but the claim I think was in fact intended to underpin his religious authority by claiming direct knowledge of the divine. This question of the authority of the Zoroastrian leadership came up again during the reign of Sharper II, whom we've just seen in Professor Russell's presentation and others. That is a little after the time of Kertair, with the appearance of Adorbar-e-Mahras Pandan, who, according to the tradition, underwent an ordeal by Milton Metal in order to prove his claims to religious authority. In other words, he needed to prove it. In late, as a Sasanian Zoroastrianism, of course, Adorbar came to be regarded as one of the great authoritative figures next to the teachers of old, meaning that the counter was no longer satisfied with the idea that once upon a time there was Aratostra, and that's enough for all of us, they wanted some proof that what people were saying was based on actual experience of something divine. Later, again, a number of priestly lineages of schools, Charles Stagg, emerged, each member of which claimed authority from the founder of his school. All this, as I said, suggests that, in view of the strength and immediacy of rival claims to divine knowledge in Sasanian times, claims of looking back to Zoroastra were no longer felt to be adequate. The unspecific Poryod Keshon carried greater weight, and later there was a tendency to demand that religious leaders have some direct or indirect connection with the divine. The Ordeen of Adorbar di Maras Pandong, and possibly Kere's visit to heaven and hell, became points of reference to which Zoroastrianism could look back in questions of religious authority. Of course, Zoroastra remained a legendary figure, the founder of the faith, for his direct contact with Hora Mazda. Myth developed about his life, which shows that Zoroastrians did indeed look back to the period of Zaratusta, and he was the more or less mythical source of all religious authority and knowledge, but apparently no longer the primary figure to look back to when it came to deciding actual questions in the field of religion. The problem of authority continued to haunt the Sasanian Zoroastrians, and the next problem to crop up was the appearance of Mazda, who died around 524, who challenged the status quo, apparently on the basis of his understanding of the true Zoroastrian teaching as reflected in the Middle Persian translation and exegesis of the Avesta, the Zand. His revolt, which at first enjoyed great popularity, was quashed, and as a result, Khorthrow I banned the laity from studying the Zand. That blocked the road to a sense of empowerment in religious affairs among wide sections of the people and left the priesthood as the only body capable of looking back in search of religious authority. Among further relevant developments under the Sasanians is the increasing role that writing began to play. Writing, of course, affords a fundamentally different view of the past from that based on oral tradition. Since it became possible to consult contemporary sources for the past, objective historical truth slowly came to play a greater role in the Iranian's view of the past. One result of the increasing role of writing and Sasanian culture was that a need came to be felt for a written scripture. Interestingly, when this question was addressed, it was claimed that written versions of the Avesta had already existed in the past, that an ideal past had indeed existed until it was destroyed by Alexander the Accust, who is, you know, guilty of a great many sins. There are good grounds for guarding this as a myth. Such claims clearly represented tendency to legitimise new phenomena by claiming they had already existed in an earlier, better period. That means, incidentally, that when the later Sasanians look back to their past, their understanding of it must have differed considerably from that of their ancestors of future generation earlier. They believed in a past where a true form of Zoroastrianism had existed and where a written Avesta had also been available. All this would not have been known to Zoroastrians in early Sasanian times, I wouldn't have thought. Another important result of the increasing role of writing in Sasanian culture brought with it the desire to have a proper history of Iran, perhaps on the model of Greek histories. It's hard to overestimate the difficulty of achieving a profound transformation, the profound transformation that this required. From a set of narratives that were transmitted already and thus, in a sense, existed side by side set in the same undifferentiated past, people now began to wonder how various traditions, heroic, religious, historical, associated with the past could be fitted together so as to make something like a book, and a book is something, as you well know, that has a linear sequence with a beginning, a middle and an end. Oral tradition does not. I mean not in the same sense. That meant a very different way of looking back. Just imagine having to construct a linear history when all one has is, say, tales about Romeo and Juliet, Santa Claus, narratives from the Old Testament and the history of the Tudors. How does one fit these various storylines into a linear sequence who came first, Romeo or Santa Claus? Still, attempts to look back in a more historical linear way evidently began to be made at some stage in the Sasanian period, and the results of these attempts were referred to, in my view, by the term Fwydai Namag, book of kings, which I believe to have been originally a generic term for the whole range of such texts that tried to combine various traditions, a genre rather than a single word text of Fwydai Osishon army. However, the contents of the Fwydai Namag continued to be regarded as part of the Iranian cultural heritage, an essential part, long after the Sasanian empire had been defeated by the armies of Islam, and part of its contents eventually came to be included in a work that was to shape and determined the way Iranians looked back to their pre-Islamic past, Ferrosi's work integrated ancient Iranian traditions into Islamic Iranian culture, thus allowing the Iranians to look back to their past with pride, which probably played a key role in the development of a distinct Iranian Islamic identity, which in turn contributed to the emergence of other Islamic cultural identities, such as the Turkish or Indian ones. Now, we can only speculate, ladies and gentlemen, as to how much Ferrosi's Shahnawme itself meant for Zoroastrian communities at this early period. But there are good indications to show that Zoroastrians were familiar with many of the storylines found there. After the Arab conquest of Iran, the Zoroastrian community experienced something akin to the and ancestors' reaction to the time of Alexander. Millenialist ideas and other religions that prophesied that this bitter period would come to an end and would be followed by a restoration of Zoroastrian dominance. Once more came to appear very meaningful. Speculations about the saviour figure Bahram-e-Bazawand, which are alluded to in the Zandi-Bahmanyast, seemed to have become an important part of the living tradition of the community. Apart from that, after some two to two-and-a-half centuries, the Zoroastrian priesthood had become aware of the difficulty of keeping religious knowledge alive as a living oral tradition. Instead, they proceeded to write down whatever they felt was most relevant in their traditional knowledge. When doing this on the whole, they only had time and opportunity to commit to writing some text that formed part of a living and developing oral tradition, which was intended to be interpreted by a living dastur. But they were unable to develop this into a legal system such as feq in Islam of the type one normally finds in written cultures. It was an oral tradition fixed in written form. That meant that in certain fields their efforts to save the religious tradition resulted in the transformation of a living tradition that needed the personal input of a dastur into what appeared to be a fixed, somewhat archaic and exclusive legalistic system. After Khosro's reaction to the revolt of Mazdak, the laity never recovered its right to participate in religious debates as equals to the priesthood, which contributed to the difficulty of developing Zoroastrian teaching in a way that took current conditions into account. As the religion lost some of its sense of the official religion, I must say, lost some of its sense of actuality, an official religion focused mainly on questions of ritual and observance, looking back to an imagined ideal past, may well have become all the more important for the Zoroastrian community, but it did not have a voice at the time. We don't know exactly when the past is emigrated or indeed how this migration took place, but since there were an Iranian community on new land, Iran obviously became an ideal they looked back to with veneration, also in the form of having a sacred fire that came from Iran. At a later stage, from the 15th till the 18th century, leaders of the Iranian and Indian communities corresponded, and their correspondence, the Revniads, gives us some insight into, I wonder what, into what. Oh yes, the preoccupations of the priesthood, sorry. The knowledge those priests discussed were still of the same kind of that as that of the Pahlavi books, questions of ritual and observance. Essentially, then, these priests sought to look back at the religious knowledge of the Sasanian and early post-Sasanian ancestors without much reference to earlier and later times. But from the 16th century onwards we hear of a new religious movement in which Zoroastrianism played a role, such as the school of Azar Kevan, who lived around from 1530 to 1618 C.C.E., an Iranian who migrated to India during the time of the Emperor Akbar and became the founder of a school which Corban calls a representative of Zoroastrian Ishrach, or Illuminative Philosophy, in which he says, quote, helped produce a sort of philosophical and mystical revival in the Zoroastrian milieu. I know that we shall hear more about Azar Kevan tomorrow, and I can't really judge Corban's claims, but it wouldn't be surprising to find that in the heady climate of Akbar's religious policies, some Zoroastrians became interested in the teachings rather than rituals of their faith. Later, we see the appearance in India of other figures who claim divine inspiration for a new interpretation of Zoroastrian teaching, such as Behram Shah Shroff, the founder of Ilmik Shnoom and Ibanji Pundol. Now, one way of explaining this parallel development in Zoroastrian's perceptions of their religion would be simply to say that the cultural environment the Parsis lived in from the 16th century onwards lent some of them to seek new horizons. One might also put it in another way and say that the appearance of new religious teachers afforded those who needed it an opportunity of finding a more recent reference point to look back to. In fact, when we examine the spectrum of modern tendencies in Parsis Zoroastrianism, we notice that conditioned by the present perceptions of what the religion is or should be, various sections of the community are looking back to different kinds of the past, different forms of the past. For instance, there's what's usually called the Orthodox community who focus on the tradition as a whole and implicitly regard their Dastouls as the legitimate representatives of the spiritual lineage that began with Zarathustra. Others prompted perhaps by a more Christian concept of religion feel that the essence of a faith lies in its teaching and aimed to look back at Zarathustra's original message alone, rejecting the evidence of later sources as more or less irrelevant. Some occultist groups, one might say, believe that the past is still with us in a mysterious way and its representatives may materialise as they did, apparently, in the case of Behran Ramshar Shroff. Although a great veneration of the Prophet Zarathustra is common to all or most groups and myths and legends are told about him, the fact that this historical figure is shrouded in the mists of the remote past has clearly given rise in some quarters to the need to look back to more recent authority figures. In Iran, the Pahlavi dynasty represented the Iranian people with an ideal image of the pre-Islamic past in which Zoroastrianism played an important role. For many Iranians, that religion still symbolises their cultural independence and identity. This clearly affected the Zoroastrian community and helped it emancipate in a certain way. I have not enough evidence to attempt to sketch how the cultural climate of the Pahlavi dynasty and that of the Islamic Republic affected the Iranian Zoroastrians and we're all waiting for Dr Seras Tewit to publish a much-needed material on that subject, so I won't try to touch it. So, ladies and gentlemen, I'm coming to an end. You'll be relieved to hear. We've been looking back at the ways the Zoroastrians look back. Now, if we look back ourselves, what do we owe, what is important to us as Westerners? I'll take it. We're all Westerners at the moment here. I think, as I said, that Zarathustra have founded the first, well, you know, that came up with something that developed in what we would call a religion as opposed to a tribal cult or whatever. I think he offered the world a coherent worldview that implied that the world is not, as God intended it to be, and made it stick, made it coherent, which is a major thing. Zarathustrnism gave us the idea of heaven and hell, the rebirth, the fact that people will rise again at the end of time, and of a saviour born of a virgin. Zarathustrnism clearly contributed considerably to millennial-list ideas, and, as we all know, Zarathustra became an object of speculation for the Greeks and for many later thinkers in Europe. Finally, when we think of the achievements of the Achaemenids, the Sasanians and the Parsees, we can say that Zarathustrnism has offered us a view of the lofty ideals a religion can inspire in its followers. That religion, in short, has given its followers and the world at large a great deal. May it live long. Thank you. Professor Crenbroke, thank you for a fascinating lecture and for addressing the theme of our conference so succinctly with reference to the figure of Zarathustra and his teachings. So, from the idea of the two times and the major innovation of Zarathustra, namely that the world has not as God would have wished it to be and that it is up to human beings to restore it to its former perfect state, we've been taken through the entirety of the history of Imperial Iran, the post-Sarab conquest and the various ways in which Iranians have engaged with the past in order to preserve the authority of the teachings of their prophet. Ending with the Parsees in India, this has been a real tour de force and thank you very much again. Thank you very much.