Okay. My name is Kobe Grandquist. To start off with, I started when I first found a Ruby in 2006. The first thing I did is I heard about the Ruby Meetups on Second Life. So I signed up for a Second Life account, and it's the only reason I went there. Those are my email addresses. I am part of the LA Ruby users group, which we are in the process of getting underway. There's a URL there for that. My side project, or one of my side projects with Carl Jungblood is Confreaks. You can see all the conferences we recorded at those URLs plus a number of others. I'm going to show you a plugin that was written by, or a plugin or a gem that was written by one of my coworkers, Jacob Dunphy. It's called Kablame. Why would you use Kablame? Basically, someone on your team isn't pulling their weight. Kablame. You can read the rest of the bullet points. I like the last one, which you'll see in just a moment is exactly why it was created.  This will show them. This is Kablame ran on the web tier of YellowPages.com and Jay Dunphy's got 21,000 lines. What Kablame does is it uses either Git or SVN and the blame function within it and evaluates all of the code in the repository or in the revision you're looking at and tells you who's responsible for how many lines. Very simple. So we took it with Yehuda and we ran it against Merb. And now you have the winner of that one. So it's a simple fun utility. It's more for humor than anything else because all it does is tell you who's responsible for the number of lines in the plug-in. The other PSI reference there, I also work for YellowPages.com. We build a consumer website. We're running on Nginx with Rails. We use no active record in the web tier. We have a service tier, which is also Rails on Nginx. We use a fast search engine as a back end. Everything's very restful. And we use NoracleDB when we don't get our data from the search engine. We also develop client apps. We have an iPhone native app team. We have a web app for the iPhone. We have a number of J2ME apps that are deployable on all the handsets. We also build a ton of stuff with search and data. We have huge business listing repositories, frequent updates from a wide variety of sources. We've got a bunch of interesting R&D projects going on. We do natural language search. We've got some really fun stuff. We're planning with web crawling and voice recognition. And at YPC, we're always looking for passionate talent, including Ruby developers, co-co-developers, and other smart people. And we have desks. And if you can't see the picture there, that's actually a Russian beer. And the way I refer to it is Ruby's the only language that the Russians found awesome enough to turn into a drink. So we've got a Russian beer. And that's it. Unless somebody actually has questions about yellow pages and does Rails scale. Yeah, Brian? A question about yellow pages. Say you're using Rails in the front end and you're actually talking like some restful stuff to a Rails app on the back end. Yes. That's my one time. Yep. Anything else? Yeah? We're doing a conference in Boston in November called Voices that Matter. Yes. So Mike's here for the S&W conference on Ruby Seriously. And one of the talks is going to be a case study on Ruby in the front end. Yeah, I'll finish plugging that. I'm presenting at the professional Ruby conference in November on yellowpages.com. The big rewrite because in June of 07, yeah, June of 07, they launched a new site through a quarter million lines of Java code and replaced it with, I forget the exact count, but a lot less lines of Rails. I spent the previous, I've been at yellowpages.com for four months. I spent the two and a half years prior to that as an independent freelancer similar to Toralian. You know, basically doing work out of Sulix in Utah. I looked at yellowpages, looked at the job position and looked at the fact that somebody gave a chief architect enough autonomy to throw away a quarter million lines of Java code and figured it was worth a try. So.


So today is the big reveal for my design the look dress Design the look is something I do every year on my Instagram with the help of style maker fabrics. I shared with you guys the fabrics that we have picked out for the 2020 design the look so if you don't remember last year we kicked this thing off you guys helped me design a Magnolia a deer and doe Magnolia dress out of this really pretty Crate panel. So this year we were inspired by the Pantone color of the year the classic blue and we have picked these two Fabrics that you guys are gonna vote on which everyone wins outright No matter how close it is That is the fabric I will use to make a garment and then tomorrow night We will give you pattern options and you'll vote on that and then Sunday night when that Voting ends you guys will get options for the pattern like sleeve length or sleeve options hem length If there's a bodice option, you guys will get to vote on that Sunday night, I'll get to work making the dress and or whatever it is dress skirt top and You'll see it on the channel a look that you designed for me. It's so cool This year everyone was presented with this butterfly eyelet and a rayon denim Shirting it was pretty much a runaway victory for the shirting So then they were able to choose between the sew over it vintage shirt dress and the sew house seven burnside bibs This was a much closer race, but the dress ended up winning out with that we let them vote on whether or not it should have sleeves the skirt hem length button colors and whether or not I should use a contrast fabric for the collar and button band After a weekend filled with voting the decision had been made I would be making the so over it vintage shirt dress out of a floral rayon denim Shirting with three-quarter inch sleeves and knee-length hem White buttons and no contrasting fabric. It really is so fun to let other people make decisions for you It's very liberating. I highly encourage it. I spent the weekend making my dress Giving tips to my Instagram followers along the way. You can see some of that process in my Instagram highlights Here she is. What do you think? Okay, let's first talk about the fabric when I first got it It felt soft, but with a bit of heft to it after pre washing though it somehow softened up even more and Revealed its true drape, which is fluid and amazing And it even had another little secret that neither eye or Stylemaker fabrics was prepared for the colors The background ended up becoming more of a true medium blue denim and the flowers all turned baby blue We tested the fabric in a front-loading machine with a color catcher and had similar results so what you see in the finished look is really what the fabric was meant to be all along and Truthfully, I love it even more than its dark denim and white flower counterpart. This just looks a lot more unique to me The pattern was a new one for me In fact, I'd never sewn any of so over its patterns before the instructions were thorough very detailed and easy to follow The only hiccup was converting from centimeters to inches for seam allowances You also have to pay a close attention to the seam allowances because they change from part to part and they are not consistent throughout the entire garment Everything was really easy to sew, but in my opinion the sleeve heads are a really unkind way to torture a sewist Even someone like me who is proficient in setting in sleeves with all the right tools and tricks I could not get them to set in without some gathering The most intimidating part of the dress though is the collar and I have to say that I thought it came together Super easy with beautiful results. The entire dress is also unlined which makes for a super fast sew The fit is pretty spot-on. It's a little tight across the back Which could possibly be due to the narrow sleeve head, but it's not uncomfortable However, if you have a broad back or full biceps You should definitely double-check these measurements and make a muslin The front of the bodice has plenty of ease as does the waist and skirt I will add though that I usually never have to lengthen or shorten my hems And this one is a tad short for my liking. I am five foot five inches for reference All in all, I'm super happy with the outcome of the dress I'm already planning a sleeveless version with a few tweaks I think it could be a tried and true for me And I know I'll be wearing this version a ton during spring some of summer and fall The fabric is such a versatile palette and print It would work styled in many different ways for multiple seasons So if you are one of my Instagram followers who participated in design the look, thank you I love my dress and if you aren't you better go follow me right now So you don't miss out on the next opportunity to design a dress for me But that's going to do it for me today. Thank you all so much for watching. I will see you very soon. Bye


And Stephanie Bayer is giving the talk. Hello. I want today give a short overview how one can construct an efficiency of a knowledge argument for correctness of a shuffle. And this is joint work with Jens Kroos from University College London, and I will start with some motivation. And I picked as a motivation e-voting. We all know in a vote, the voter cast the secret votes, and in the evening the authority reveals this vote in random permuted order. And in this e-voting scheme we are looking at, at the moment, the voter cast their votes on a computer, and sends the vote to a server. And this server sent in all votes to a central authority, and the central authority reveals the votes in random permuted order. So obvious to have a safe and secret vote, we have to decrypt our votes. So we will be using algorithmic encryption in our setup. And the property we are most interested in is this homomorphic property. It means if we have two ciphertexts and multiply them together, we get a new ciphertext, which contains the product of the original messages. And with this we can define the re-encryption operation. So what we want, we have a ciphertext. We want to get a new ciphertext, which contains the same message, but looks completely differently. And we can do this by multiplying the original ciphertext by a random encryption of one. And we use this re-encryption to define a shuffle. Here we have a bunch of input ciphertext. And we pick a permutation and permuted input ciphertext. And then we re-encrypt them by multiplying this encryption of one to it. And this gives us output ciphertext. And because we use this re-encryption, the output ciphertext looks completely different to the input ciphertext. And because we permuted some ciphertext, we don't know which original input ciphertext belongs to which output ciphertext. And this server in our setup, so we vote, we send this vote to the server, shuffle the votes and send this to the central authority. And to make this more secure, we use a mix-net between it. So we have our voters, the voters' votes, encrypt their votes, and send them to the first server, who picks a permutation, shuffle everything, and send it to the next server. This next mix server, again, picks a permutation, shuffle, and send it on. So we're using a lot of mix servers here. And in the end, everything gets decrypted using threshold decryption. So threshold decryption here ensures that all parties have to work together and nobody can break anonymity. And we see the output here as the original messages, which we inputted in the mix-net, but they are in permuted order. And this permutation pi is a product of all permutation used in the mix-net. And that means each server knows only part of this permutation and nobody knows the whole permutation, so nobody can link a message to a person. But what happens if one mix server is corrupt? So let's assume the first mix server is corrupt, and instead of shuffling everything, he replace some votes with some new ciphertext. So nobody can see that he replaced vote. This shuffling operation normally prevents people to link input to output, and if we replace some ciphertext with new ciphertext, this looks completely different to the input as well. So what's happening in the end after the next shuffling? We see after the decryption that part of the messages are replaced with something new, and if we are in this voting scheme, that means that this server can change the outcome of the election. So we have to prevent this. And to do this, we force all mix server to send together with the output ciphertext, a zero-knowledge argument. And this means if the next mix server accept this, we know no message is changed because a zero-knowledge argument should be sound. And we also know in the end after the decryption, so we know after the decryption all messages are the same as we input in the mixnet, and we also know that the permutation is still secret because we are using a zero-knowledge argument, and the part of the permutation, this pi1 is still secret, the pi2 is still secret. Let's have a closer look at a zero-knowledge argument. So here we have our approval and our verifier. Both knows the public key for the encryption, the input ciphertext and the output ciphertext. And the prover also knows the permutation and the randomness he used in the shuffle. And they can talk back and forth, and the verifier asks challenges to the prover, and the prover has to answer them, and then the answer verifier should accept and say, yes, the shuffle was done correctly. And what we want, obviously, if the prover does everything correctly, the verifier accepts. And we want, if the prover tries to cheat, the verifier rejects this overwhelming probability. And the easiest way to get soundness and correctness is for the prover to give the verifier his permutation and the randomness he uses. And the verifier takes this in the input and constructs the output himself and then compares the original output and his new output, and if they are equal, he accepts. And that means we have to open the permutation and the randomness. And so the verifier learns the part of the permutation and we have a lot of mixed net, and everybody sends a zero knowledge in an argument that he's done everything correctly so in the end everybody learns the permutation and that contradicts the anonymity. So that's the reason it's important to have a zero knowledge proof so that nothing but the truth is revealed and that the permutation and the randomness is still secret. And we are looking at real-life applications so it should be efficient. So we want to have small communication and small computation cost. In e-voting we want to have the results as soon as possible after the pooling station close and not days, weeks later. So more precisely what we are doing, we have the prover verifier statement and both knows also the setup of the group we are using for the algorithmic version and some common reference string. So verifier picks the challenges randomly uniformly from ZQ so we are in public coin and we are constructing an honest verifier zero knowledge argument. It means as long as a verifier is honest he learns nothing. That's not what we want in real-life but it's possible to convert a zero knowledge argument in a standard zero knowledge argument with only constant overheads. And our contribution is now a honest verifier zero knowledge argument for correctness of a shuffle in the common reference string model which takes nine rounds. And complexity is for n equals m times n ciphertext we have sublinear communication m plus n k bits so for instance if we pick this m equals square root of this n we get a complexity of square root n our prover takes log mn exponentiation and the verifier has some exponentiation with a linear in this n. Let's compare this to form of work. So we see that our verifier takes for an exponentiation and this is as low as we can get using algorithmic encryption and if we are not using any special tricks to calculate the exponentiation we see our prover takes to log mn exponentiation if we have constant rounds so this is not really optimal we want to have something linear here but if m is not chosen too big we are still in the same range as form of work and even if m is a little bit bigger we have a very quick verifier so in total time of a shuffle argument is in the same range as before and we can also get the cost of the prover down to something linear if we allow more interaction between the verifier and the prover and we also see that our communication cost is lowest so far, nobody achieved this and there are few reason why we got this so first is the kind of commitment we used so what we want we have one vector and we want to commit in one single argument and this single argument should be smaller than the original vector so we want to have lengths with using commitment scheme this commitment scheme should also be computational binding and perfectly hiding and this commitment scheme should be homomorphic so if we take two commitments to two different openings and we multiply them we get the commitment to the sum of the openings and the commitment scheme we used to is the general Peterson commitment so the public key here is the H and the generators G are in a group and we have a randomness here and these are the elements we want to commit to besides of this length with using commitments and batch verification which was done before in shuffle arguments we used a special kind of challenges instead of picking random challenges the verifier picks just one challenge and verifier and prover both construct this vector of fundament vector and this helps to reduce the cost dramatically so this gives us a sublinear communication cost so where do we use this so this is our situation both parties know input and output ciphertext the public key for encryption the public key for the commitments and the prover knows also the permutation pi and this randomness R1 and the prover now wants to convince the verifier that he has done everything correctly that he permuted the input ciphertext and then re-encrupted them and to do this the prover first commits himself to this permutation by committing to the values 1 to an impermuted order he then gets a challenge x from the verifier and then the prover commits himself to the permuted wonderment challenges and this is the same permutation as he used here and he then gives an argument that both commitments are constructed using the same permutation and he knows this permutation and he also gives an argument that the output is constructed correctly and using this permutation here and he knows these re-encruption factors to do this in more detail the prover first commits himself in a as a commitment to the values 1 to n and we call these values 1 Ra to an and he also commits in b to this permuted wonderment challenges x to the pi, x to the pn which we call bi to bn and he first gives this product argument for imb such that both these products are the same and we see the ii as a permuted values 1 to n and the bi is also permuted wonderment challenges and on this side we have only i and xi so if i, i and bi are permuted with the same permutation these two products should be the same as this is just some polynomial where the roots are permuted this is very inexpensive so please see full paper for details and secondly the prover gives also a multi-explanation argument such that the product of the output ciphertext to this permuted wonderment challenges equals the product of the input ciphertext to the xi times some re-encryption where this row depends on the randomness proven used this is expensive so I will try to sketch the idea here and we will focus only on soundness zero knowledge is something which is very easy and cheap to add on top of it and we will assume for a moment that this row equals zero so that means we don't have this factor here and we can think of the situation that we only permuted the input ciphertext to get the output and never re-encrypted them that means this side and this side has to be the same and we will focus on this idea so some notation our big commitment B contains of commitments B1 to BM where each commitment where B1 is a commitment of the first and element of the permuted wonderment challenges and the last commitment of the last and element of the permuted wonderment challenges we will arrange our ciphertext in an m times n matrix so we get m vectors of ciphertext and having these vectors B i here and the C i's here we can construct an inner product so if we take a vector C i to the power B j this equals the product of the entrywise exponentiation and this simplifies the left side multi-explicitation statement this is the left side to this product which runs only over m elements and we call this C so now to the main idea we have here our vector C1 to the m and we have here our permuted wonderment challenges and we can construct this matrix out of it each entry is a C i to the B j and we see if we take the product along this diagonal we get our C so this is our statement we want to prove the prover can also calculate the product along the parallel diagonal so to get the e k and the e minus k and the prover now send this value to the e k to the verifier and get the new challenge back challenge wire and the prover first opens his commitments to this vector so the commitment to this product of commitments to this vector this should convince the verifier that the prover knows what's going on that he knows what's inside the B and the verifier then computes this vector C which the verifier knows the output so he knows the vector C i so he can calculate this product and the verifier checks if this vector C to this B equals the C which can be constructed now for simplicity out of the inputs so that's the input ciphertext to the wonderment challenges times this product of the e k and we're using wonderment challenges why here and why here and we have wonderment challenges inside of the e k so a lot of this value cancel themselves out and we can see with basic mathematically transformation that this left hand side should equal the right hand side and if this is i equal the verifier accept that the prover has shuffled correctly and we see this is efficient we only need two m ciphertext here the verifier sends only two m ciphertext here and n cipher elements in set q here and for the verifier the verifier needs n ciphertext exponentiation to construct this vector C and n ciphertext exponentiation to construct this C and two m ciphertext exponentiation here so we get in total the sublinear communication cost which depends linear on m and n and the verifier computation of the 4n so each ciphertext exponentiation consist of two q element exponentiation so we get to 4n plus something sublinear so what about the prover if we try to construct this matrix naively we construct each entry so we need m exponentiation for each entry we have m squared exponentiation in total so we would end up with m squared times n equals m times n ciphertext exponentiation that's quite expensive but luckily we are only interested in this product along the diagonal so we don't have to compute the whole matrix we can use techniques for multiplication of polynomial to use them in the exponent of the ciphertext and we looked at fast Fourier transform and this gives us this log m and exponentiation for the verifier and this doesn't add any extra round for the prover because this is one operation for the prover or we can use more interactions so verifier and prover talk more with each other then we need log m more rounds but the number of exponentiation are linear and we tried, we implemented to see how our argument behave, how quick it is we used c++ and we used the NTL library by scope and the GMP library and we looked at different level of optimization multi exponentiation techniques and fast Fourier transform and for our range of parameters the multi exponentiation techniques works better if m is small so it takes a while till the asymptotic of the fast Fourier transform kicks in and that's similar to if we want to multiply polynomial the polynomials have to be big before fast Fourier transform kicks in and we also looked at this extra interaction and we used to cook to multiply parallels of the matrix and last I want to compare our work so we compare it here with the verificatum library by Wigström and we looked at modular arithmetic where our group has a order of 160 bits and we looked at 100,000 ciphertext and for this result we choose m equals 64 and having two extra rounds of interaction and we see our argument takes two minutes to verify a shuffle so verificatum library takes around five minutes so this is a special parameter which gives us a best value so we can't say we are two times quicker than verificatum it depends on some variables verificatum is written in Java we use t++ but both arguments are usable in real life application I mean that's quite quick for 100 ciphertext and it's not a powerful machine but what can we say when we look at the argument size our argument beats the verificatum argument by a factor of 50 so that's much much better in a setting where we want to have a very small argument size our shuffle argument is more efficient than verificatum and also former works before so that's all I want to say thank you for your attention


It's a very special evening tonight. A very warm welcome to all of you. Thank you very much for coming to have this evening with us and celebrate the first officially invited lecture we host at the Chaporgy Palongy Institute. It gives me a huge pleasure to introduce our first speaker tonight on this event, Professor Philip Cranebrooke, who is by no means new to Sowers. In fact, Professor Cranebrooke is an alumnus of Sowers. After doing his first and second degrees at the University of Amsterdam and Ytricht, Professor Cranebrooke came to Sowers to do a postgraduate degree in Zorastianism, Old and Middle Iranian Languages and Ingujarati. I assume you studied here with some of our great people at Sowers, Professor Mary Boyce of course and Professor Nicholas Sims-Williams and other colleagues. Professor MacKenzie, of course Nicholas was so young. He was here at Sowers and studied Iranian studies. Then he took up a lectureship at the University of Ytricht while completing a PhD at the University of Leiden. He was awarded his PhD in 1982. Between 1988 and 1996 Philip was then Senior Lecturer in Modern Iranian Languages. Between 1988 and 1996 you were Senior Lecturer in Modern Iranian Languages here at Sowers. Then you were invited to take up a chair in Iranian studies at the University of Göttingen from which you retired in 2017. Professor Cranebrooke's wide-ranging research covers the areas of Zorastianism, of Yezidism, of minorities' religions among the Kurds, oral literatures and culture, ancient Iranian literature and memory in Iranian cultures. Of course it's impossible in this short introduction to do full justice to the breadth and the depth of his work, but I would just like to highlight two particular areas in which he has made huge contributions. One is Zorastianism and the other one is Kurdish religion and Yezidism. Professor Cranebrooke established himself as an authority in Zorastian studies with a study of Srausia in the Zoroastrian tradition, a book published in 1985. The core text of this deity has survived to the present day in our western and Middle Persian versions and Professor Cranebrooke has provided a pioneering edition translation commentary of both of these versions and a very detailed study of the figure of Srausia. Another of Professor Cranebrooke's key contributions to scholarship is his collaborative work with a high priestess, Dr. Feroz Kojwal, on the priestly treatises in Herbatistan and Nyrangistan. Professor Cranebrooke published, together with Feroz Kojwal, a seminal work in four volumes between 1992 and 2009, making a very poorly transmitted text and difficult text in our western and Pachlawi available to an academic and non-academic readership. This was actually the first publication, visit translation of the Pachlawi version of this text. Professor Cranebrooke's collaboration with members of the Zoroastian community has continued and in particular he worked with Shenaz Munshi on the living traditions of the Zoroastians in India and in this work he was crucially supported also by my colleague Dr. Sarah Stewart. This work led to the publication of a book entitled Living Zoroastianisms. Living Zoroastianism, urban parties speak about their religious lives and, as it happens, we have an exhibition on, at Zoroastia, at the moment with exactly this title. This title occurred to me after I thought of that title. There is this book by Professor Cranebrooke with exactly this title and Professor Cranebrooke has very graciously had no objection of us using this same title for the exhibition, which is currently on show. You will all have the opportunity to see it after our proceedings have come to a conclusion here as we will all go next door to the Brunai Gallery for a reception and you can venture into the exhibition room, which is just next to it, next to the reception. Now, this work on Living Zoroastianism by Professor Cranebrooke and supported by Shenaz Munshi describes the reality of modern Parsi religions through 30 interviews. In these interviews, Parsi's speak and Parsi's who belong to different social milios and religious schools of thought and they discuss various aspects of their religious lives. Here we get an amazing glimpse of Zoroastian thought in the contemporary community. Another area of Professor Cranebrooke's research is the religion of the Kurdish people, Yazidism in particular. The fruit of this work is his monograph on Yazidism, its background, observances and textual tradition published in 1995 and is only one of his many outputs on the religion of the Yazidis. This particular volume is based on Professor Cranebrooke's own field work with the Yazidi community in northern Iraq and it includes texts and translations of 19 Yazidi hymns with a commentary on points of theological and theological interest and this is the first ever publication of these materials which up to then had been living only in their oral traditions. Professor Cranebrooke's work combines work on the written and on the spoken word. He is a great expert in both of them and tonight he will speak to us on Zoroastian studies and the question of orality. Please welcome Professor Cranebrooke. Thank you very much Professor Hintzer for those very kind words. Ladies and gentlemen, first may I say how delighted I am to be here as the guest of the new SOA Shapur Jepalungi Institute for Zoroastian Studies. Until recently we could only hope and dream that something like the donation that gave rise to this institute would ever happen. And now the future of the study of Zoroastianism is ensured which is an enormous relief for most of us. Now to come to the subject of tonight Zoroastian studies and the question of orality, the fact that most Zoroastian texts have been transmitted orally for many centuries is now theoretically recognised by most scholars but the implications of that haven't always been truly taken into account by some while others are looking for prescriptive general rules ruling oral literature in order to understand the workings of oral transmission whilst most specialists on comparative oral literature are agreed that no such general rules exist. Many scholars of Zoroastianism therefore are not sure how to deal with orality. As a colleague of mine once said, if we all went your way we'd have nothing left to study with some, you know, was a bit worried about it and what I'd like to do this evening is to convince you that that's far from the truth and that ancient Zoroastian studies can benefit very much for modern insights and approaches such as oral studies in itself and discourse analysis. To achieve that we will always need philology as a key element of our study but we should also keep in mind that the texts we have are merely expressions of a much wider and more complex Zoroastian discourse than the ages of which we can only catch the occasional glimpse. Now first of all I'd like to introduce these two methodological approaches I was talking about and the implications of their insights for Zoroastian studies. Then I would like to discuss the history of the transmission of some Zoroastian texts as I imagine it, taking into account the available mechanisms for transmitting oral texts. You can't do that as you can do it when you've got books. After that we can briefly discuss the way these texts were memorised and therefore conceptualised by ancient Zoroastian priests and then we can bridge the question as to to what extent we can gauge the history of an oral text. Normally an oral text develops and you can't just say very much but the question is can we do something in the case of Zoroastianism and that because it's about Zoroastianism will bring us to the role of Zaratustra, the beginnings of Zoroastianism and I will end by proposing an imagined way, a way that the Gathas can be understood in the light of a number of these findings. Now first, discourse analysis. I'm not going to go deeply into the various ways in which a lot of people now define and practice discourse analysis. DA is a philosophy that involves studying the way a certain phenomenon is spoken of and therefore made intelligible in a given culture over a certain amount of time. DA itself is a philosophy, not a methodology, but has given rise to some methodological approaches that can be helpful for Zoroastian studies. What's most relevant here is that discourse analysis imagines every utterance, even what I'm saying now, as the result of a long and brewed series of similar utterances, part of which have taken place here at SOAS, and the context in which they took place. If there had been such history, what I was saying would be incomprehensible. And everything one says, according to discourse analysis, adds to the discourse. Nothing one says is neutral. According to Foucault, who's a central figure in this field, the developments that such long and broad streams of discourse undergoes are governed by a set of rules, which are perhaps parameters. Premises of which the speaker may not be aware, but which determine what he can and cannot say about a certain subject. Foucault then says that these rules are generally determined by power, and he may be right, he's very much into power, which I'm not. Written words are seen as manifestations of the discourse of a given time, so they are just part, they're crystallisations of something that is going on and has been going on for a long time and will have further a future. Foucault stresses that there are usually breaks of the discourse. Things don't stay the same. There are things change, and these, he says, are generally connected with changes in power. Of course, most people who actively use and debate DA generally focus on very different discourses, but it seems to me the fundamental insights of discourse analysis can help us place the evidence of the Zoroastrian text in a clearer context. Also, whereas most students of modern discourse analysis have depth, we have length. We can imagine the extent written Zoroastrian text as snapshots, as it were, of part of a much broader and more differentiated Zoroastrian discourse. That discourse, reflected by the text, shows some breaks in the tradition, but mostly we see a remarkable continuity from the prehistoric authors of Zarathustra sometime before 1000 BCE to the works of the Sasanian priests and beyond. So, after a time when, academically, new definitions of Zoroastrianism have become so wide as to be actually meaningless. We'll come back to this. We can now, I hope, adopt approaches based on discourse analysis and oral studies to help us to rediscover the rules, the parameters that govern Zoroastrian discourse. We're coming to Zoroastrian oral studies where we find that there are currently two or three different lines, different types of Orientalists who focus on Zoroastrian studies. On the one hand, there are those who work deductively, who believe that it's possible to discover prescriptive laws governing orality and who reason deductively. There are others who reject this approach completely and stress the need for an inductive approach when, one, that first examines each tradition separately. Scholars like Otto Scherver and John Kellans belong to the first group. I and I thank Dr Stewart firmly belong to the second. Professor Hensiswag, examining the extent to which general theories are applicable to Zoroastrian texts, combines deductive and inductive elements and comes to very interesting conclusions. Now, the background to this miniscism about orality, to only a few players, is as follows. In the 1930s, Milman Parry, at the time assistant professor at Harvard University, studied and recorded oral epic poetry in Bosnia in the Serbo-Crowhead language with the help of Albert Lord, his assistant. The resulting insights have come to be known as the Parry Lord theory. Briefly, they have shown that some epic bards do not learn vast tracts of texts by heart, but learn the relevant themes, or topoi, and they learn certain rules and tricks of performance, which allows them to some extent to extemporize. Now, this is very interesting, and that is absolutely true. I'm sure about the Serbo-Crowhead epics, but it was then taken up by the classicists, especially at Harvard, and they understood Parry and Lord's findings not as referring to just the Serbo-Crowheads, but to all general, all oral poetry, and they applied their findings to Homeric studies. The resulting theories were hotly contested among Greek scholars, but they have a staunch advocate, a staunch defender in the Harvard professor, Dr Gregory Nodge, who is a specialist on Homer and who is doing excellent work. I'm not saying anything against him because I think his theories are applicable to Homer. But the problem is that the Harvard erranist, Dr Showe, best known for his purely philological work, was introduced to oral studies by Nudge. He then sought to apply what he believed to be, quote, the principles of oral literature, unquote, to the Avesta, which resulted in a number of publications, and particularly in a publication I rather regret, hymnic compositions of the India Vesta in 1994, which was promptly praised by Kellans in 1998, because, quote, it proposes a scheme of the history of the Avesta in text based on the common laws of oral literature, unquote. Well, as you know, I don't believe such common norms exist. Here we have two scholars, well-known admirers of each other's work, accepting a generaliser who, without any first-hand knowledge of the workings of oral transmission, have accepted a generalisation of Parian Lorde's work and proceeded deductively to apply theories based on the practices of modern Serbo-crowet epic poets to the religious traditions of ancient Iran. Outside Harvard, students of comparative oral literature have moved on and have generally come to the conclusion that few, if any, positive general rules can be formulated here. Each particular case needs to be studied inductively by a close examination about how the tradition functions and what its contents are. Contents are very important. Insights deriving from other countries may prove very helpful indeed. They often do, but this can only be accepted if it can be positively proven. In what follows, I will therefore start more or less from scratch on the basis of some familiarity with the modern academic literature on orality and of my first-hand experience of the transmission of the sacred literatures of the Azidis and Yoresan or Ahlehaq of Kurdistan. Now, what I would like to do in the rest of the lecture is first examine the question, what do we really mean by oral tradition, a term that is very often used in Zoroastrian studies also. Secretary, the history of the texts, then the process of memorising, as we know it from the Vesta, the units of texts that were memorised, the question of the development of certain texts, particularly the Yashts, the question of Zoroastrianisation. I'm sorry, I mean the extent to which Zoroastrian ideas were introduced to texts that originally were maybe pre or non Zoroastrian. And then oral studies can add some aspect to our understanding of that attitude which I would like to share with you, which finally results partly because of a major finding by Professor Hensa in a new way of looking at the garthers. Now first, oral tradition. It is quite misleading because the expression oral tradition is often used in Zoroastrian studies and elsewhere as an omnium gathering for a number of different traditions which together constitute the whole discourse. There is, on the one hand, religious texts, either memorised verbatim or memorised in a free or free transmission, not quite free, probably as we shall see, priestly knowledge, which again has at least two sides. There is an exegesis of a Vesta text already in the Yasna 19-21, but there is enough evidence to show that there was a great deal more general knowledge among the priesthood which they transmitted among themselves. Then the third category, which may or may not be a category, but I think it is important religious knowledge as it was discussed or negotiated between priests and laity. It is not the case that the laity always just listened. One way of listening, which happens, which I have seen often among Yazidis and others, is the priest holding forth and the audience listening uncritically, like being told a story and they just accept whatever they are told, but on other occasions we can see this. There must have been debate and there must have been, the audience must have been listening critically and saying yes, but what about nodium, astrology for instance, I mean in the Achaemenid period, they didn't have that and suddenly it enters the tradition. That seems to be the result of interactions between priests and laity and also interactions between the Vesta tradition, the Zoroastrian tradition and local culture, which played a role. There is also purely lay discourse on religion, which quite often repeats traditional knowledge, myths, stories, things about Zaratistra, how he laughed when he was born, I don't know, all these hagiographic things, but there was also discourse concerning Gregidgen and society, which might be inspired in my view. I have written about that a number of times that I believe the inscriptions are not so much objectively true as the result of what the kings wanted the people to believe. There is a religious aspect in that, but it is very clear that that was a way of influencing a lay discourse. There was also sometimes discourse seeking a break in tradition, namely for instance Mazdag, who was, if you ask me, a Zoroastrian priest who was very unhappy with the current situation and said this is not according to the teaching of Zoroastrianism and invoked the teaching of Zaratistra and created a revolution throughout the realm of Iran. After that, every continuity, I mean every interest of the laity in the Zand in the tradition was cut short because the king said now a laity are not allowed to learn the Zand and that continues, but we can't go into that too much unfortunately because there's no time. Now, we come to the history of the text. First of all, what we can, I think, say with certainty is that the Indo-Iranian tradition, the common tradition of the ancient Indians and ancient Iranians or proto-Indians, proto-Iranians, whatever, were contained on the one hand, mantic poetry, meaning texts that formulated hidden truths in order to compil the divinities as it were, to do what the poet wanted, and other poems which mainly praised the divinities and told them they were wonderful and told the people what these divinities had done. Now, Zoroastrian discourse begins with Zaratistra's message, which, as we shall see, constituted a clear break in the Indo-Iranian religious discourse. We also see that, in contrast to other texts that continued to be transmitted freely, the Garthas and the Astaghaptang Haity were memorised verbatim from an early stage and that language was never consciously adapted to the natural speech of those who recited them later. Those texts are said to be an old Avestan. Other texts, whose language continued to evolve together with the natural language of the people and whose text came to be fixed later, are said to be a young Avestan. After a time of development in the mid-6th century BCE, Zoroastrianism can be seen to have come to the Achaemenid Empire, to Persia, from the east to the west, and in Persia a different language, respectively, or different languages, they didn't speak Avestan. But Avestan continued to be the sacred language of the Zoroastrian tradition, in spite of everything. I mean, that's very interesting that the great powerful state of the Achaemenids did not say, oh, well, but now you're going to speak another language. They say, no, this is your sacred language. That is how it continued. Now, probably initially the priests representing Zoroastrianism in Persia were probably native speakers of Avestan or people who at least had a good active command of that language. But there was also, at that time, an established native priestly class in Western Iran, the priestly speaking, the Persian speaking Maghush. I won't be going on about old Persian, middle Persian, new Persian. The forms of Persian, obviously under the Achaemenians, Persian was old Persian, but I mean, I don't want to do it all the time because it gets boring. So the Persian speaking Maghush and the Elamite priesthood, the Shatim. And as Zoroastrianism, with its Avestan liturgy expanded, these other priesthoods apparently joined the new religious movement if it wants that. The development that gave rise to Zoroastrianism becoming the main religion in Western Iran. So let's call it a religious movement. Well, that meant they were required to recite Avestan liturgical text, but unlike the Indians, the Iranians don't seem to have developed any theoretical knowledge about language, so there had no technical means of teaching a foreign language. I mean, they could learn them by going somewhere, but for the whole Western Iranian priesthood it was probably impossible to learn Avestan as a language, so that you have a complete command. So instead, what they did, instead of learning Young Avestan, which would have allowed them to continue the tradition, making additions to it, or then saying, well, this is no longer a relevance, so we'll leave this out, they started learning to it by heart, the whole text by heart, word for word. So not just Agathas, which had always been recited, probably syllable by syllable, but now, I think, in the Achaemenid period, the other Avestan texts were also taught that way. That meant that a body of text that had so far been transmitted rather more freely now came to be transmitted in a fixed form, although there was still no way of writing Avestan. As it became ever more difficult to understand this ancient Avestan language, the priesthood solved the problem by developing a somewhat primitive method of translating an Avestan word with a fixed Persian equivalent, and teaching this translation, which was a bit problematic but comprehensible, as the basis of advanced priestly studies here by this tongue. Eventually, it was not just the Avestan text and the translation, but important commentaries by prominent teachers became a fixed part of the text to be memorised. So middle Persian translation and commentary were called Zand explanation or exegesis. Later again, in Sasanian times, a system was developed for writing Avestan adequately. That had not existed earlier, which meant that until then it had probably been impossible to read an unknown Avestan text from the page. There must have been attempts to write Avestan in cuniform or in whatever, but it wouldn't have been possible if you didn't know the text to read, say, middle Persian and say, well, I can read it. So until then, once a text had ceased to be recited, it was lost forever. But now that that was an alphabet, a book, a collection of sacred texts, which came to be known as Avestan, was written down. The idea was that this was the holy book of the Zoroastrians, which hadn't existed until then. That was the den, the tradition of which the priests knew and which other people didn't know. But now there was a sacred book. There is a theory that the word Avestag meant testament. I thought the word was borrowed directly from the Christians because there was no word for such a book. I think it is very likely, but a colleague of mine who is a specialist in Greek says yes, but they used a different word for the testament. I don't know, but it seems to me that if it isn't true, it was well invented. Then we come to what these priests actually memorised. As you know, the Zoroastrian priesthood is hereditary and in priestly families the children, the sons at least, were made to memorise the liturgical text at an early age and were generally taught by their parents, by their fathers or by someone else in the family, as Avesta says. The way they did it, oh gosh, well this is what I was just saying, I'm sorry. First, the candidate had to just listen to the teacher reciting the texts. That was Fframar concentrating, maybe counting the words, but I think Fframar really in Middle Persian means concentrating on, I mean giving your full attention to something. When that phase was over, they were allowed to recite the Holy Word softly, carefully, not to make it sound like a formal utterance, because as you know, if you pray Avesta formally and you make a mistake, that's a grave sin. So, that had to be avoided and people drun ja ia. Drun ja ia is something that's definitely not an official proper Avesta. After that, they were allowed to recite formally. The way Zarathustra is said to have recited the Gathas the first time, that was sarawaya. But if that was all right, they were really word perfect, they could also take part in rituals and they were allowed to perform it ritually, that is, yas. Now, if you think back to the Serbo-Crowats, much praised by Chavo, they extemporised, if you have this process of learning texts, of going, I mean, all liturgical texts were learned that way. It's hard to see how people would extemporise later on, so I don't believe in that. Anyway, the units of Avestan texts, I mean, it stands to reason really.  Then a number of verse lines, when they were new the first verse, then they came to a stanza, or bachasthashti.  And we find them in the text, we see that those units exist. Then in the case of some texts, a number of those stanzas, bachasthashti, belonging together, formed a yasnog careti, which is a ritual, really, a performance of a small ritual of praise, but which in fact later was called a carde. A carde is a part of the text, which is meant to be coherent in itself, and ends with a characteristic conclusion. Ahay, ahay, ahay, ahay, et cetera, et cetera, and then ending with a young heart tongue. Finally, a sequence of a number of those cardes, or other longer sequences of texts, were also sort of learnt by heart, and those are now known as yasht, hym, or if they've formed part of the yasnog as a haiti or ha, or that's a chapter. Oh, I'm sorry. Well, we see that these categories really worked in the tradition, for instance. We occasionally see a single verse line emerging in more than one place. This is much more normal for a stanzal verse. You find them here, there, and everywhere. No, no, not that, but you find them in appropriate places more than once. It's sometimes, you find the same or a very similar carde in different yashts, suggesting that those units existed in the minds of the priests in a fixed form, and could be used as part of larger units. As to these larger units, for instance the yasht, which are quite long, most of them, from the point of view of content, first lines and stanzas are usually logically coherent. I mean, it's clear what is being said. The same is true of most, they're not all, cardeys, but on the other hand, when you look at the structure of many yashts, you find a very different picture. The same passage may occur twice in the same yasht, and again in a different yasht, yashten, cardeys 8, 8, 13, yasht 17, carde 4. Contradictory images occur next to each other, while cardeys dealing with the same aspect of a yasht as nature may be strewn more or less all over a yasht. That could mean, and that is only a theory, I can't prove it, but it seems to me logical, that original text used to praise the yashtas in pre-Achimenean times were much shorter, that the ritual themselves could be maybe shorter, than our yasht, and in fact consisted of one or more cardeys, and that different cardeys were transmitted in different families. Obviously, the priests didn't interact with each other in a priestly family, one transmitted one's knowledge, and since priests in Chora san were not in touch with priests in Paris, they would have developed different cardeys. Now the next, so the yasht might then have been composed on the basis of a collection of cardeys, praising a particular yashta from different traditions, which were put together as best the composers could, which was not an easy task. The next question would then be when and why the long yasht were composed. Logically, this would have been impossible during the time the texts were memorised at a young age, and transmitted in separate families over huge stretches of territory. But there simply would not have been a way in oral transmission, you can't just, I mean the government can't say, and now we're going to use a different version of the Bible also, because those books are not available. You can't reach people who have memorised a text in a certain way and wish to continue memorising in that way. But there is one point I can see, a bottleneck point in the history of Zoroastrianism, where this might have happened, namely during the Achaemenid period, when, if I'm right, a comparatively small number of native Avestan speakers taught Avestan texts to a much larger number of Western Iranian priests, Magwsh and Shaten, and they memorised the texts verbatim as they were taught them, and then passed them on to their children. Now that generation, or under those circumstances, priests could have been taught a new group of texts, a newly formed group of texts, in such a way that a longer type of Yast was introduced. It seems to me the only possible time and contingency where this could happen. Also, of course, we see, well, yes, we see that the sequence of the Yastes, as we know them, follows that of the days of the calendar, and the calendar was probably instituted, as we know, in Achaemenid times. So, presumably, the Yazetas of the calendar now had to be praised with their own Yastes on their name day, and that Yastes had to be a bit elaborate, not just, oh, we worship Mithra, thank you very much, I mean, Mithra is fantastic, Mithra is great, Mithra did this, and then a long thing, because that was agreeable to Mithra, I suppose. So, as a hypothesis, I would suggest that this is, when short characters in praise of different Yazetas, of which there must have been a great many, were combined into what we know as the Yastes. Now, if we study the Yastes, we also see that a corpus of verses dedicated to a Yazeta can often be preceded by a few verses showing the overlordship of Ahura Mazda over that divinity. Ahura Mazda, I think, created Mithra and said, we're good. Ahura Mazda did something to Advisura at night, I can't remember whether he created her or greeted her, but, I mean, you'll find at the beginning, typically at the beginning, which is easy to remember, not in the middle, which is more difficult in all text, you'll find these texts. That suggests that older texts could continue to be recited, more or less as usual, but some verses referring to key elements of Zoroastrian beliefs could be added to them, a process that I would like to call Zoroastrianisation, partly because Kellan's accuses me of believing in Zoroastrianisation, which in his view is terrible. I do indeed believe in such a thing, but academically speaking, the gradual realisation that the extant Zoroastrian texts do not represent all Zoroastrian discourse has led a number of scholars to claim that any ancient religious phenomenon in the Iranian realm must be Zoroastrian, and that we're not capable of ever distinguishing between what is typically Zoroastrian and not typically Zoroastrian. The lamented and dear friend Patricia Crane goes so far as to state that the belief in reincarnation and in the manifestation of divine beings in human form could have formed part of what she calls provincial Zoroastrianism. In other words, to use discourse analysis, in Crane's view, Zoroastrian discourse developed without any perceptible rules. It could go any which way. There were no boundaries. And as far as the teachings were concerned, now much as I appreciate Patricia Crane's work, I find it fantastic, but here I beg to differ. If one accepts that Zoroastrianism represented a clear break in the Indo-Iranian religious tradition, beginning with Zaratustra, and that its rules, its parameters, gradually affected all religious texts, or many religious texts recited by Zoroastrians, then, to me, it seems to follow that although the boundaries of Zoroastrian beliefs were definitely wider than was once thought, the continuity found in the texts suggests that certain boundaries did very much exist. Such topoi as Ahura Mazda himself, to my view, is a Zoroastrian divinity, only Zoroastrian. The Amesha Spintas, the key oppositions between good and evil, the idea of a judgment after this life, as well as quotations from the garthers and references to Zaratustra, can, in my view, all be regarded as typically Zoroastrian elements. Reincarnation, I'm sorry, cannot. Of course, if that is true, it's only relevant if there was truly such a thing as Zoroastrianism, and not just a vague movement that happened to believe in a person who didn't really exist, or persons, but, well, I'm trying to imitate Kellan's. I can't because I've never really understood him. But if we believe that there was such a figure as Zaratustra, we can wonder what oral studies and discourse analysis can add to our knowledge of him. Now, we know that the poetry of Zaratustra is relatively similar in style and content to ancient and Indian Vedic texts, and that after centuries of developing a shared religious tradition, the Proto-Indians and Proto-Iranians then separated and had been apart for some considerable time at the time when Zaratustra lived. So, since Zaratustra does it, does compose mantic verses, it may legitimately conclude that the Indo-Iranian tradition of composing new mantic verses that used well-formulated truth as a means to force to go on to comply with the poet's wishes must have existed among the Iranians before Zaratustra. It is clearly in a rural culture that he can only have learned this priestly craft from living teachers, as there were no books available. So, we may assume that this tradition of composing mantic poetry must have gone on among the Iranians, otherwise Zaratustra wouldn't have been able to do it. Now, in the Vedas, the words of great seers were memorised together with the names of the authors. So, in a cognate Indo-Iranian tradition, the names of many seers are remembered until this day, and Zaratustra must have learned his craft from these earlier seers who did this. So, if that is so, why do the extant Iranian texts not mention any other seers or attribute any text to them or any good seers, one or two evil ones, the wicked, so on, so on? I mean, we find only references to Zaratustra. There, or all studies, has a good solution because we know that in Kurdistan, there is quite often the question of conscious forgetting the two tribes that have been at war with each other and had songs calling each other. I don't know what and bad names and saying how terrible the enemy was, make peace, and the Bard consciously said, no, no, we won't recite those songs anymore because that's not good. So, there is such a thing as deciding not to repeat certain things in oral tradition, and once one generation stops repeating it, the situation is gone. Again, no books. So, together with the fact that the Gathas were memorised verbatim, which suggests that they were particularly holy or potent, we also see that instead of the Indo-Iranian tradition of naming all previous authors of successful texts, older Iranian mantrans are deliberately forgotten, consciously omitted, presumably because only Zaratustra's texts were felt worthy of being used to address the divinities. So, Zaratustra's status in early Zoroastrianism may have been fundamentally different from that of the Indo-Iranian seers, that of the Veda, because he was seen as the only figure believed to have perceived the will of the Ahuras. We might even speak of the first Indo-Iranian prophet, but I wouldn't, well, you know, commit myself to that because I leave it to people who know what exactly a prophet is, but it seems to me it was a very, very special figure in the Indo-Iranian tradition. Now, we come then to the Gathas, where we have to understand some points. I've already mentioned the truth mantra, which is very much the genre that Zaratustra uses. He shows the gods that he knows the hidden truth, and, therefore, he asked them to help him. But there's another thing that is quite interesting. In a recent work, Cianus Rezzania, now Professor in Bochum, has shown that in Zaratustra's view, there are two times, and we know that, there are two times, an endless time in Zoroastrianism and a limited time. We have always thought that that meant that you had endless time, endless time, and then break, there is limited time, end of limited time, and it goes on. What he has proven, and which is borne out by the traditions of the Aziris and the Atahak, that this is not true. In our time, the two realities coexist at the same time, and very much of religious poetry has to do with the interaction between our earthly sphere and this absolute sphere. As I understand this, Cianus Rezzania has just said this about endless and limited time, but as I understand it, Zaratustra believed in the simultaneous existence of two different modes of reality, an essential, unchanging reality, which was typically the sphere of Ahura Mazda, and the mundane, changing reality that we experience on Earth. Ahura Mazda created the fundamental laws, mantras, which I like to translate as algorithms, governing this temporary state, but he's hardly ever depicted as interfering in it directly, at least not in the garthons. Once or twice, there is a reference, but normally he stays in his sphere, and the angels, the Amishas Panthas and other Yazartas, especially Mithra and Srascha, can move from one sphere to the other. A gifted mantec priest can also reach the eternal from the temporary sphere by means of his sacred poetry. If his formulation of truth is exceptional, it may bring about direct contact with the supernatural. Now something which might interest you, which I find interesting, to illustrate the use of the discourse analysis, this is an article by Philip Graham, Thomas Keenan, and Anne-Marie Dowd on the historical analysis of George W. Bush's declaration of war on terror, where they say they compare George Bush's declaration of war with speeches by Pope Urban II from 1095, Queen Elizabeth I and Adolf Hitler, no less, to exemplify the structure, function and historical significance of such texts in Western society over the last millennium. And they identify four generic features that could have endured in such texts throughout this period. Those are an appeal to legitimate power, to a legitimate power source outside the orator, and which is presented as inherently good, say Ahura Mazda. An appeal to the historical importance of the culture in which the discourse is situated. May the evil spirit not break the order of the world a second time. The construction of a fairly evil other, such as Angra Manu, and an appeal for unification behind the legitimating external power source. In this case, possibly Zaratustra. Now, as I see it, I mean you could see this coming, it's not a surprise, I think, to understand George Bush. It also makes sense when one studies the Gathos. So, we can say about Zaratustra that he was, I mean he was calling people to arms. He was probably not calling the Ysatras to arms. He was calling his own people to arms. So, he wanted to motivate his followers to engage in a conflict with a group that he regarded as religiously misguided. First of all, that means a break in traditional discourse because, as Bernfried Schliera has already seen, phedic texts are always addressed exclusively to the gods. In the case of the Gathos, Zaratustra is both seeking to address the divinities with formulations of truth, but at the same time he's presenting his message to his followers, seeking to convince them of the truth of his teachings and calling them to arms to follow him. That's another major break. And, as Professor Hinze has remarked, if Zaratustra was conveying a message to his human audience, then they must be understandable. They must be comprehensible to that audience, which implies that if we're lucky, it may be possible for us to catch at least a glimpse. Now, the last element is something that all oralists would have thought and that until Professor Hinze came along, no philologist believed because we were taught that the sequence of the Gathos was an artificial one, the sequence based on meter. That was, I mean, that was gospel. Now, Professor Hinze has used philology to prove that the sequence we have was indeed at a very early time, if not the original one. It was probably the original one. This part of oral studies as well, as oralists would have said, yes, there's no way someone who learns these difficult texts by heart and usually repeats them every night, so as not to forget them, would suddenly start changing sequences. But that's all an oralist could have said. Professor Hinze has shown that this is the case that we have the proper sequence of texts. And that helps us. This is a key insight which allows us to look at the Gathos in a new way, focusing on the actual contents, like looking at Yasna 28 as a beginning. So now I have to get out of here and do something else. I'm sorry, I'll find it. This is as the... Is this visible? No, no, no, it's getting... OK. Well, this is my summary of the Gathos. I've been working on the Gathos for the past six years or so, and quite hard since I retired. I'm not saying that my translations and interpretations are better, but they do make sense in terms of what I believe the texts were about. So we can look at it. And then I'm trying to show you that most of the Gathos can be understood by the liturgy of a ritual in its own right with a mysterious culmination, the Yasnahtanghaiti, which we can discuss. First, we have... before the actual Gathos begin, we have the end of Yasnaht 27, prayers, y fawr iaethau hŵr fawr i ŵr, asyn fawr hŵr i ŵr iaethau hŵr, prayers mostly to the gods. Not so much for the people, it's their prayers for God to understand. Then we begin Yasnaht 28, which indeed begins as a beginning. Zarathustra, with outstretched hands, announces that he's a knowledgeable priest who intends to compose new mantic poetry for Mazda. And if Mazda comes to Zarathustra's aid by inspiring him, then Zarathustra will help to make the world as it was in the beginning. Zarathustra is saying time and time again that gods want the good things, but they need people to realise them in this world because they can't, they haven't got the physical power. Now, the next thing, the next Ha that has been quite often neglected by scholars because here we have to do with a cow speaking and many of my colleague found that embarrassing. I mean a prophet who says that a cow can speak. I have a different way in my view this is a key text, a theodicy. A theodicy is a statement as to why God means well even though there are horrible things in this world. I think the fundamental problem here is defined by using the plight of the cow at the hands of the other party as an example. Now the creator of the cow who is a sort of advocate of the cow who can talk to Mazda, why the cow is subjected to such maltreatment and then Ahura Mazda says something very important to my mind a key pronunciation. He says that he has created a good mantra algorithm for the cow, namely the cow was made for fat and milk and that was good, but what is lacking is a ratu is someone to make it all right to cause a rata, a rata to come to earth and that we are led to understand might will be that ideal ratu, zaratustra well why not. So God has created perfect fundamental rules for the world in his absolute sphere, but in our temporary sphere it's up to humans to implement those in the correct way so that God's will can be done meaning God is ideal God is absolute but in this world there is a problem and it can only be fought for by humans. Immediately after that it is totally logical is an explanation, why is that well that is because there are two forces in the world, good and evil two principles, they were seen as twins in a dream those who make the wrong choice following the principle of evil and that is God's as well as men quite unlike the Veda I mean I've never heard of sinful God but anyway maybe you have ruined the world and will eventually be punished now this is clearly a formulation of truth but it seems to be addressed primarily to a human audience and not so much to Yazartas who presumed he knew this but for the audience it must have been quite a shocking idea that the world was not as the Gods wanted it but in fact there were two there was an evil power as well as a good one in the world that's the cause of the problem Zarathustra then says he and his theories will win Ahura Mazda's approval because he recites true words and asks for further help he begins asking rhetorical questions leading the audience to understand that Zarathustra's theory is right and that the opponents do not adhere to the right beliefs and will come to a bad end then 32 is as one could imagine is almost a discourse on sin the text introduces the concept of of sin as exemplified by the wicked Grachma who is a wicked person I don't quite know what he did and then sin he says it is implied is inherent in the world because even the good Yma Jamshid eventually became sinful and was therefore removed but sin here is mostly firmly associated with the DIY worshipers who will face punishment never mind the Yasnaf 28 that we can't go into that I mean there are many correspondences between different texts but that's too then again something which I think is essential for understanding Zarathustra's view he's not a Mohammed who says I'm a nobody please I'm your slave God he says I'm a person I mean nothing against Islam but I mean I'm just saying that in Abrahamic religions mostly men are small and God is almighty here he says well we're the only ones who can actually carry out your things you must understand that and we can't do it without you he says that Zarathustra is a ratur who acts in accordance with primeval laws and because he's a good ritual priest his act of worship will allow the divinities to acquire the physical strength if they come to attend and this way Zarathustra strengthens the divinity while they must give him aid so it's a do o des I mean it's an interaction between the two and then something very spectacular happens at least to me maybe well I find it very spectacular here we have a text that says there is something important coming it begins by indicating that a key point in the ritual has now been prepared goes on to describe aspects of the ritual as if they were about to occur and would result in a direct contact with our Amazda through which the world might become ideal now one could read the latter part of the text as an announcement of an imminent chance like state of vision he says when I'm asleep and it is always well he can't go to sleep when he's doing a ritual so it can't be sleep but supposing it is something like sleep well when I'm asleep Zarathustra hopes to perceive the great truths and then climax intermission Zarathustra is silent stops is somewhere else but we have another text a text that is not the same genre as the dagathas which is its ritual prose rather than poetry it is the community speaking we worship so we think this and that we think not our Amazda Zarathustra saying me no call to action rather an affirmation of belief in our Amazda and other key elements of Zarathustra there's no question of oh well we're very much against the dialogues we believe in this, we believe in that we worship all manner of things Professor Hintzer then has very interestingly suggested that this moment a fire might be lit because fire imagery is very strong in this this is quite true I mean I don't know but it could well be true and it's a very interesting point I thought that maybe simultaneously Zarathustra might be having a vision I mean it might be a reenactment of what priests do all the time of the time that Zarathustra who saw a vision coming actually had this vision and was therefore silent all the people the community well entertained well you know what I mean I mean they entertained the divers they had to say something so then there comes an interesting text which is not part of the Ysdabdanghaity which we will skip here but then we go back to a new garther the second garther the Ustavaiti which tells us about an approach to a vision there is an introductory passage where I'm a bit bothered by an hour's subjunctive mung high which I can't place quite but anyway it is as though he repeats that he was looking for a vision but then immediately afterwards there is someone he asked Mazda to let him be in touch with the long life which is an expression also used elsewhere meaning presumably the absolute world I'm over running I'm nearly finished then someone approaches him interrogates him and apparently causes him to realise many hidden things Zarathustra quote was instructed about the primeval stage he prays for foresight which Mazda can give and which will help Zarathustra achieve Mazda's purposes next Ha goes on about the revelation Zarathustra is now in direct contact with Mazda asking him rhetorical and real questions through which he also expands his own world view to his hearers and gradually he comes away from the vision and he begins to talk about the community he says that there has to be a good community and that the divers were never good rulers and other communities are not worth a fig I mean we must be you know then once more the fundamental opposition between good and evil is in the light presumably here of Zarathustra's recent vision there's a clear references to a community again like-minded people opposition between good and wicked communities is stressed and there's an explicit exposition of Zarathustra's teaching he then sums up the teachings towards the end of that gartha we're clearly past the culmination of the ceremony and Zarathustra aims to link the social and political affairs of his community to the insight he's just gained new gartha on the great role of Spinta Minu Spinta Minu who's the lord of this world not Ahura Mazda Ahura Mazda is above our world Mary Boyce wouldn't believe this but I think it's absolutely true Ahura Mazda is she's everything but cannot interfere directly Spinta Minu is the good lord of this world and he is on the side of the writers the original perfect order of the world which he represented was upset by the evil one Ahura Mazda is said again as it's created the laws governing the world and in doing so has established the fundamental laws of the dinar which maybe mean the ways that Zarathustra sees things then sin again again we come back our themes come back not the grammar this time of the wicked Bandwa who's stolen Zarathustra's grain if I'm not mistaken and wicked people generally that is we know by now but then he introduces his patrons which is fairly typical at the end of a text in Indian literature I mean people want money or rewards from the patrons but when they come to the end they start mentioning the patrons and he does it here he shows them his power to communicate and then at the end of that Zarathustra asks for reward for his skills and suggests the ritual is ending I shall send you the best mantras ask for rewards and that is the last of that which already suggests an ending but this ending is very clear and the next gartha which is only one ha to my mind the conclusion of the ritual summing up the message good versus evil Zarathustra's patrons are mentioned again very clearly more clearly than that I think that is indeed the end of the ritual because there's a ystaf 53 which I absolutely can't do anything with I mean I've tried but it seems to me strange and the same is true of a recent author M. L. West unfortunately he's died in the hymns of Zarathustra who said this may be the only gartha that's not by Zarathustra I'm not saying it but I mean I could, I can imagine he may be right in any case that ystaf 53 is not part of my idea of this ritual the last gartha is only the aria man is your prayer which harks back to the beginning where there were prayers typically to the gods here it's a prayer for the community so I'm coming to the end you must be very relieved to hear it to sum up in the light of the mythological approach we've discussed the gartha is a ystaf 53 it can be understood as an early liturgy in their own right constructed around a climatic event possibly the lighting of a fire or perhaps originally a re-enactment of Zarathustra's original moment of vision all this invites further question about many things that I hope I've convinced you that a modern approach to Zarathustran studies may worth trying thank you very much thank you very much Professor Crainbrooke for this enlightening lecture taking us through all of the garthas and many aspects of this fascinating Zarathustran tradition which has so much depth to it that invites us to explore all the various aspects of it and we see more and more the significance of the orality that underlies this tradition up to the present day


It is my very special pleasure—hoi—to settle down, people—too much coffee this morning, I think. My very extreme pleasure to introduce a fellow New Zealander to speak to you all this morning. Mickey Willidan is a very good friend but also part of the founding group of the ancestral health society of New Zealand under the inspiration of Brent and his team. We've decided to set up our own society down in our little corner of the world. As you'll be very well aware, these things don't happen on the back of one person or two people. You need a very good team behind you. Mickey has kindly stepped forward and she's one of our key members helping us out. I think just about all the kiwis that we've dragged over here are involved in some way or another. I'll leave you in the very capable hands of Mickey as she talks about her experiences with Primal Pacific and our experiences down in New Zealand trying to get this ancestral paradigm underway. Mickey. Thank you, Jamie. Good morning, everyone. Before I go through my presentation, I'd just like to go through a few acknowledgements. Of the people who made our research possible. So first, obviously the participants in the Primal Pacific study, which were Pacific employees of Middlemore Hospital, which is a large hospital, one of the three hospitals in Auckland, New Zealand where we are based. Also, our Faculty of Health and Environmental Sciences for the Research Grant, which enabled us to conduct the research and resources provided by County's Manukau District Health Board, which is the health board where the hospital, which is part of the hospital, is part of the system of. The Human Potential Centre, which is our research group who provided a lot of the resources and managing of the project. And finally that this research was approved by the AUT University Ethics Committee. So like many indigenous populations, if you look back in the literature about references to people in the Pacific Islands, you'll see comments such as this as illustrated by Westinay Price, which is just up in my slide there and I won't read out.  However, this is what modern-day prowess really looks like now. So Pacific population in New Zealand makes up about 7.5% of our New Zealand population and Pacific nations are not limited to but are predominantly Samoan, Tongan, Nuaian, Cook Island and two-thirds of those people reside in the Auckland area, which as I mentioned is where I'm from. However, they are disproportionately represented in our health statistics. So 59% and 64% of male and female Pacific people are obese and that's compared to 28% and 32% respectively of New Zealand European. The diabetes rates are three times greater in Pacific people and there is three and a half times the amount of chronic kidney disease in Pacific people compared to the general population. Cardiovascular disease is four times greater in Pacific people and there is one and a half times the mortality from ischemic heart disease. And finally, life expectancy is four years lower in Pacific people. And like other populations around the world, they are disproportionately represented in our lower socioeconomic statistics also. So there is a higher rate of food insecurity. So there's limited access to quality food, there are higher rates of unemployment, there are lower rates of literacy and also lower rates of access to health services as well. And typically, as you know, these things do come hand in hand. With the Pacific people, their culture is centred around family, faith and music and every celebration is punctuated by a feast and a large feast. However, you'll probably agree with me that the traditional food choices of Pacific people are likely not the contributing factor to their poor health outcomes. Because their traditional diet is centred around the types of foods that we've been hearing about and discussing over the last few days. Traditional Pacific foods are abundant fresh fruit, tropical fruit, vegetables, fresh meat and seafood and starchy tubas such as taro and plantains and coconut as well. Of course though, both in New Zealand and back in the Pacific islands, this traditional diet is, I guess, overlaid with that standard westernised diet. So foods which are nutrient poor, energy dense, easily accessible, convenient are foods much as we find everywhere else in the world. It is this combination of a food-based culture and the standard westernised diet which is a large contributor to the health problems that I was describing earlier. Now because of this, there are a number of organisations which are set up to try and help promote healthy physical activity patterns and healthy eating within these at-risk groups. One such group is the Pacific Health Development Team which sits inside Middlemore Hospital and Counties Manukau District Health Board. Now the Pacific Health Development Team are responsible for administering the Lotomoi programme and this is a church-based programme which promotes healthy eating physical activity components within the Pacific churches around the Auckland area. And while Lotomoi is well received by the participants, it has made little traction with regards to improving the health outcomes of the Pacific people. And therefore the PhD team approached us to try and find a different way to promote healthy eating in such a way that would actually make a difference to those health outcomes. And that is how we developed the Primal Pacific programme which effectively the Primal Pacific project wanted to test the effectiveness of a lower carbohydrate, higher fat whole food diet culturally appropriate to Pacific people compared to New Zealand best practice recommendations for weight loss. So the two diet groups, and I'll explain the design of the study in a moment, the two diet groups that we looked at were these best practice recommendations and our Primal Pacific plan. And you'll likely be familiar with at least the best practice recommendations, which was based on a calorie restricted diet that was low in fat, moderate in protein and moderate in carbohydrate intake. And that is, as I'm sure you're aware, the conventional approach to weight loss and improved health outcomes which the programme Lotomoi is predominantly based on in their health messages. Our Primal Pacific plan was a much more whole food approach to diet. So it was carbohydrate restricted at 100 grams or below and those carbohydrate choices were based on those traditional based Pacific tubers of taro, but also kumara or sweet potato, potato and fruit as well. As I said, it's minimally processed and the type of fat that we promoted was what was higher in fat, but also the naturally occurring fats such as coconut oil, coconut cream and things like that. So people in our Primal Pacific group were encouraged to incorporate dishes which they may have traditionally eaten such as palasami, which is coconut cream baked in taro leaves and also otta, which is fresh fruit or sorry, fresh fish in a coconut cream base. The diet trial itself lasted for eight weeks and we had a follow up period of 12 weeks. At baseline, we collected dietary information to base our calorie restriction on for the best practice recommendation group and also physical activity information. I've just listed the measures there that we took at both baseline and at week 8 as well and they included blood lipid measures, body fat percentage measured by biological impedance. We looked at mood based on the profile of mood state scale, weight waste, HBA1C etc. and we started with 26 participants. We also had intensive one-on-one nutrition counselling at the start so we provided them with really thorough information on their dietary protocol and we caught up with them every two weeks to do limited anthropometrical measures and also a mood scale and for that additional nutritional support. Throughout the eight-week period, we also had an 0800 number set up which is, I believe, a 1 800 number in the United States so if ever there was a question about diet, we were at hand to provide dietary information. And then at week 8 we did the same baseline measures to see what effect the different dietary protocols had on these health outcomes. There was no contact in between week 8 and week 20 because we wanted to see how the participants went when they were just left on their own and then we followed up with a focus group. What I would love to be able to now tell you about is the amazing changes in health we saw from the participants of our primal Pacific protocol when compared to the best practice recommendations. However, some of you may be able to see that down at that right hand side of my slide I've got complete results for just five participants out of the 26 that started. So we had six participants drop out from weeks one to eight and then we had a focus group with just six of the participants at the end of our overall study period. The results we got were wildly unspectacular actually. And so I figured there was no point in showing you slide after slide of these minimal changes and no difference in health outcomes when we compare what we have for those under the best practice recommendations for weight loss and also the primal Pacific approach. I've got these as percentage changes from baseline to post-intervention. And you can see there the percent change in weight and body fat. There was minimal movement over weeks from week zero baseline to week eight but just minimal. And in fact participants from week one and two on these slides were from the best practice recommendation group and participants three, four and five were from primal Pacific. Likewise if we look at blood pressure, there's very minimal difference with our changes in blood pressure as you know an independent risk factor for heart disease and also weight and also insulin as well. Possibly the main result from this study is illustration that when you work with people who are not paying for your nutrition services it's really difficult to motivate these people and actually research with real people is incredibly challenging to administer and roll out and get buy-in. Even when you've got the buy-in of those people within that organisation to begin with and key people in the organisation. When we ran our focus groups we asked them about what the challenges were with regards to the dietary protocol and I've basically got them listed up there. Because food is such a massive part of Pacific culture there was always going to be these social gatherings or support for dietary changes is necessary to enable them to happen. Now due to our funding constraints and when we had to spend the money we had to conduct this research in the latter part of last year. In the lead-up to Christmas actually so the time of year also made it challenging for our participants. When we went through the dietary protocol for those undertaking in fact both the best practice recommendations and our primal Pacific diet. And the time taken to prepare the food when you're advocating for a minimally processed diet was certainly a factor for some of our participants. And some of them really just didn't like the concept of a higher fat approach to diet. They probably appreciate that it wasn't that they didn't like it but more likely that they didn't really trust it. Of course those who did do the primal Pacific diet actually really enjoyed the level of satiety they got from eating a higher fat diet and some of them did enjoy the food. One of the aspects that we looked at and were interested in was the cost of our primal Pacific approach to just a typical diet. And in fact this was a positive for our participants. So they noticed if anything that was a benefit of our approach. And equally because we tried to encourage a more culturally getting them back to eating some of those dishes that are traditional in their culture some of them really did enjoy the food. So some of the limitations of our research was the timing of when the study was conducted and also the design. So the Pacific Health Development Team thought it was more appropriate that participants self-selected into which group they wanted to go into and researchers in the audience would appreciate that that's not the best design for a study. However it was one of those I guess challenges of working with that we were working in with. And also engagement of our participants as well. Obviously if you end the study and you've got just complete results for five participants there were also challenges there. However the whole purpose of primal Pacific was to test the feasibility of our primal Pacific approach at improving health outcomes. And part of it was the accessibility and the acceptability of this approach. Because there is no point in conducting this type of research if the overall goal is not to somehow get it out into the community and help those most at need of improving their health outcomes. So we do have in development a larger trial underway that does include a physical activity component as well. And equally our whole food carbohydrate restricted approach is going to be trialled in other groups as well. And those of you who were listening into Dr Karen Zinn's research yesterday will be aware of our low carb kids trial that has got funding from our Health Research Council which is quite a big deal for us in our Human Potential Centre in New Zealand. And I do actually have a video which I would love to be able to show you because the Primal Pacific trial was showcased on a Pacific television programme that runs on our free-to-eat TV but I have run out of time which is a shame. So I am made sure a little bit. So thank you and I just need to pop out of my slides. It's not only the exercise that will help keep you healthy and to be honest for me it's about the food honestly. I struggle with my weight. And often regarding diets we're often told to keep the fat out of our diet. Yes but could fat hold the key to weight loss and I think that's what I've been telling people. Here's John Utanga with the latest on a new way of looking at food. Middlemore Hospital South Auckland. It's like your whole body went into shock. It's almost like you have withdrawal symptoms. We're giving some feedback. The first thing I was scared of was what's my cholesterol going to be like and I'm not really going to do this. It's feedback about a nutrition plan they've all been on. I can have my pork, I can have my bacon and egg for breakfast and that's very filling which it will last me until lunchtime. They're talking about the Primal Pacific eating plan. It was part of a trial which took place over Christmas where participants were told to eat fewer carbs. Carbs like our staple and instead eats more fatty foods foods made from say coconuts like coconut sauce and rich coconut cream.  Lots of variety, this is what we are after. The interesting thing is that the concept is actually not new at all. We used to eat in a low carbohydrate high fat way before that. We were doing fine. The trial puts one group on a standard nutrition plan and the other on the Primal Pacific plan just before Christmas. Possibly not the best time to do a food trial as there were dropouts from both groups. But a key message for the Primal Pacific group eat fat.  Because it was a Primal Pacific focus the emphasis was on coconut products such as coconut flesh, coconut milk and coconut cream to use within their cooking as one would in the islands. For trial participants denying themselves some Pacific staples was a huge ask. Every time you cook meat you expect taro to go with it. But when they say none of that that was really, really hard to adjust to because it means almost for me it means I'm denying my heritage. However the results speak for themselves. I was 110.9 when I first started this but now I'm 96. Through the Christmas time because that's the hardest time because it's a festive season eating all these different food. So from that time up to now I managed to keep my weight. When I tried it for like two or three days and then weighed myself oh I've lost a kilo and that was like strictly no carbs and so I thought okay this can work. The individual changes we saw were really promising and it would be really great to take these lessons learnt from the focus groups and design another trial and this is what we are intended to do with a larger group. One other thing researchers have learnt in this exercise eating plants have also got to work in the real world. I think one of the main things that we want to do with Primal Pacific is show that a whole food diet which is essentially what this is with a Pacific flavour if you like is actually achievable at that household level because there is no point doing research and recommending people eat this way if they cannot actually afford it and if it's not able to be translated into the household and to take that message out to the community. Thank you.


Hi, I'm Tereza Liguori from Italy and I studied WTG and conflict resolution in IHE from 2008-2010. It was the first year that at IHE they had this course. And now I work at the World Water Council that is based in Marseille. Stockholm Motor Week is one of my favorites conference. It's the second year actually that I come to Stockholm to attend this event. And I like it very much and I always enjoy coming here because of the discussion. I think that logistically it's very well organized. And also the content of the sessions are very, very interesting and I always learn something. Hello, my name is Peter Kovac, I work for the Hungarian Ministry of Interior at the World Water Manager. I am alumni of the IHE UNESCO from Deltos. I graduate in 1992-93 as an environmental engineering course. So now I work mainly on international water related issues in my country and also international water. And this is also a good result of my studies in Deltos that I can speak English, which I can use everywhere all over the world. At present I'm also chairing one of the UN Convention in Stockholm Water Week, which is also a very interesting and challenging job. I came to the Stockholm Water Week also to have some special sessions and also a very working cooperation and also to meet with people in the working. I'm from Surinam. I studied hydrology and water resources in IHE. I graduated in April 2018 and currently I'm working for management training at the ATF Water Company based in the Netherlands in Rotterdam. Yes, based on my master thesis I got accepted that job but also because I'm doing a 3S traineeship which actually gives you the opportunity to work at different departments in a water supply company to let you explore also what are the different possibilities and what are the different job types to carry out in the water supply company and for yourself to explore in which department or if it's actually something you would like to develop your skills for. It's actually nice to pass by the IHE booth at the Stockholm Water Forum and I'm still honored to pass by now as an alumni of IHE and that's great. And how did you get this opportunity? I'm here at the Stockholm Water Week representing the Water Unit We hosted a session where we're having a booth connected to this year's team where we're doing this and not to connect young people from around the world and also to help increase the voice of young people in water related discussions.