Please subscribe to Hay Festival Anytime for access to this content (more details)

Subscribe for £20.00 or log in if you already have a subscription

Karen Armstrong talks to Melvyn Bragg

The Great Transformation

Hay Festival 2006, Saturday 3 June 2006

Between 800 and 300 BC there was an explosion of new religious concepts fundamentally transforming our understanding of what it is to be human. But why did Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jeremiah, Lao Tzu and others all emerge in this 500-year span? And why do they have such similar ideas about humanity?