The rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame. And Thomas Carlyle is known as one of the proponents of the great man view of history, that history is nothing but the story of a series of great men who changed the direction in which humanity travels. So what we're gonna do in this video is think about whether it really is all about a great man or were there other things that were in the context of the time and space in which these things occur. This is what the world looked like in the year 600. Muhammad starts spreading his revelations in 610. And so you can see on this map, there's two major powers, the Byzantines, which is the Eastern Roman Empire, the vestiges of the Roman Empire, and you also have the Sassanid Persian Empire. The Byzantines are a Christian empire, and the Sassanids are Zoroastrian.