Zarathushtra Spitama, more commonly known as Zoroaster or Zarathustra, was an Iranian religious reformer who challenged the tenets of the contemporary Ancient Iranian religion, becoming the spiritual founder of Zoroastrianism. In the oldest Zoroastrian scriptures, the Gathas, which he is traditionally believed to have authored, he is described as a preacher and a poet-prophet.. Some have claimed, with much scholarly controversy, to find his influence in Heraclitus, Plato, Pythagoras, and, perhaps less controversially, in the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, particularly through concepts of cosmic dualism and personal morality..
Zarathustra spoke Avestan, an old Iranian language which scholars lent its name to after the Avesta, the corpus of Zoroastrian religious texts written in the language. Based on this, it is tentative to place his homeland somewhere in the eastern regions of the Greater Iran (possibly Bactra, now in modern-day Afghanistan). His life is traditionally dated to some time around the 7th and 6th centuries BC; though most scholars, using linguistic and socio-cultural evidence, suggest a dating even further back to the end of the 2nd and the beginning of the 1st millennium BC...
Zoroastrianism eventually became Greater Iran's most prominent religion from around the 6th century BC, enjoying official sanction during the time of the Sassanid Empire, until the 7th century AD, when the religion was persecuted following the Arab-Muslim conquest of Iran.. Zoroaster is credited with authorship of the Gathas as well as the , a series of hymns composed in Old Avestan that cover core Zoroastrian beliefs. Little is known about Zoroaster; most of his life is known only from these scant texts. By modern standards of historiography, no evidence can place him into a fixed period and the historicization surrounding him may be a part of a trend from before the 10th century AD that historicizes legends and myths.
His name likely means "he who manages camels", though its etymology has multiple interpretations, and the Greek form "Zoroaster" stems from later transliterations. According to Zoroastrian tradition, Zoroaster was trained as a priest from a young age and, around age 30, experienced a divine revelation which introduced him to Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, and the dualism of truth (asha) versus deception (druj). He is said to have gained royal patronage under King Vishtaspa, spread his teachings, and founded a community, marrying three times and having six children. Zoroastrian texts portray his philosophy as emphasizing free will, ethical responsibility, and aligning with asha through good thoughts, words, and deeds.
Name and etymology Zoroaster's name in his native language, Avestan, was probably . His translated name, "Zoroaster", derives from a later (5th century BC) Greek adaptation, (),. as used in Xanthus's (Fragment 32) and in Plato's First Alcibiades (122a1). This form appears subsequently in the Latin , and, in later Greek orthographies, as . The Greek form of the name appears to be based on a phonetic adaptation or semantic substitution of Avestan with the Greek (literally 'undiluted') and the BMAC substrate with .
In Avestan, is generally accepted to derive from an Old Iranian . The second component of the name () is thought to be the Indo-Iranian root for 'camel', with the entire name meaning 'he who can manage camels'. Reconstructions from later Iranian languages—particularly from the Middle Persian (300 BC) , which is the form that the name took in the 9th- to 12th-century Zoroastrian texts—suggest that might be a zero-grade form of . Subject then to whether derives from or from , several interpretations have been proposed.
If is the original form, it may mean 'with old/aging camels', related to Avestic (cf. Pashto and Ossetian , 'old'; Middle Persian , 'old'):Paul Horn, Grundriß der neupersischen Etymologie, Strassburg 1893 'with angry/furious camels': from Avestan , 'angry, furious'.. 'who is driving camels' or 'who is fostering/cherishing camels': related to Avestan , 'to drag'.. Mayrhofer (1977) proposed an etymology of 'who is desiring camels' or 'longing for camels' and related to Vedic Sanskrit , 'to like', and perhaps (though ambiguous) also to Avestan . 'with yellow camels': parallel to Younger Avestan ..
The interpretation of the () in the Avestan was for a time itself subjected to heated debate because the is an irregular development: as a rule, (a first element that ends in a dental consonant) should have Avestan or as a development from it. Why this is not so for has not yet been determined. Notwithstanding the phonetic irregularity, that Avestan with its was linguistically an actual form is shown by later attestations reflecting the same basis.
In Middle Persian, the name is , in Parthian , in Manichaean Middle Persian , in Early New Persian , and in modern (New Persian), the name is .
The name is attested in Classical Armenian sources as (often with the variant ). The most important of these testimonies were provided by the Armenian authors Eznik of Kolb, Elishe, and Movses Khorenatsi. The spelling was formed through an older form which started with , a fact which the German Iranologist Friedrich Carl Andreas (1846–1930) used as evidence for a Middle Persian spoken form . Based on this assumption, Andreas even went so far to form conclusions from this also for the Avestan form of the name. However, the modern Iranologist Rüdiger Schmitt rejects Andreas's assumption, and states that the older form which started with was just influenced by Armenian ('wrong, unjust, idle'), which therefore means that "the name must have been reinterpreted in an anti-Zoroastrian sense by the Armenian Christians". Furthermore, Schmitt adds: "it cannot be excluded, that the (Parthian or) Middle Persian form, which the Armenians took over ( or the like), was merely metathesized to . ".
Date
There is no consensus on the dating of Zoroaster. The Avesta gives no direct information about it, while historical sources are conflicting. Some scholars base their date reconstruction on the Proto-Indo-Iranian language and Proto-Indo-Iranian religion, while others use internal evidence. While many scholars today consider a date around 1000 BC to be the most likely, others still consider a range of dates between 1500 and 500 BC to be possible.: "At present, the majority opinion among scholars probably inclines toward the end of the second millennium or the beginning of the first, although there are still those who hold for a date in the seventh century.".
Classical scholarship Classical scholarship in the 6th to 4th century BC believed he existed 6,000 years before Xerxes I's invasion of Greece in 480 BC (Xanthus, Eudoxus, Aristotle, Hermippus), which is a possible misunderstanding of the Zoroastrian four cycles of 3,000 years (i.e. 12,000 years)..... This belief is recorded by Diogenes Laërtius, and variant readings could place it 600 years before Xerxes I, somewhere before 1000 BC. However, Diogenes also mentions Hermodorus's belief that Zoroaster lived 5,000 years before the Trojan War, which would mean he lived around 6200 BC. The 10th-century Suda provides a date of 500 years before the Trojan War. Pliny the Elder cited Eudoxus which placed his death 6,000 years before Plato, . Other pseudo-historical constructions are those of Aristoxenus who recorded Zaratas the Chaldeaean to have taught Pythagoras in Babylon, or lived at the time of mythological Ninus and Semiramis.. According to Pliny the Elder, there were two Zoroasters. The first lived thousands of years ago, while the second accompanied Xerxes I in the invasion of Greece in 480 BC. Some scholars propose that the chronological calculation for Zoroaster was developed by Persian magi in the 4th century BC, and as the early Greeks learned about him from the Achaemenids, this indicates they did not regard him as a contemporary of Cyrus the Great, but as a remote figure..
Zoroastrian and Muslim scholarship Some later pseudo-historical and Zoroastrian sources (the , which references a date "258 years before Alexander") place Zoroaster in the 6th century BC, The Seleucid rulers who gained power following Alexander's death instituted an "Age of Alexander" as the new calendrical epoch. This did not appeal to the Zoroastrian priesthood who then attempted to establish an "Age of Zoroaster". To do so, they needed to establish when Zoroaster had lived, which they accomplished by (erroneously, according to Mary Boyce some even identified Cyrus with Vishtaspa) counting back the length of successive generations, until they concluded that Zoroaster must have lived "258 years before Alexander".. This estimate then re-appeared in the 9th- to 12th-century Arabic and Pahlavi texts of Zoroastrian tradition, like the 10th century Al-Masudi who cited a prophecy from a lost Avestan book in which Zoroaster foretold the Empire's destruction in 300 years, but the religion would last for 1,000 years.
In Zoroastrian scriptures, King Yima (Jam) and the legendary Pishdadian dynasty preceded the time when Zoroaster proclaimed his teachings.
Modern scholarship In modern scholarship, two main approaches can be distinguished: a late dating to the 7th and 6th centuries BC, based on the indigenous Zoroastrian tradition, and an early dating, which places his life more generally in the 15th to 9th centuries BC.
Late date Some scholars propose a period between 7th and 6th century BC, for example, or 559–522 BC. The latest possible date is the mid 6th century BC, at the time of Achaemenid Empire's Darius I, or his predecessor Cyrus the Great. This date gains credence mainly from attempts to connect figures in Zoroastrian texts to historical personages; thus some have postulated that the mythical Vishtaspa who appears in an account of Zoroaster's life was Darius I's father, also named Vishtaspa (or Hystaspes in Greek). However, if this was true, it seems unlikely that the Avesta would not mention that Vishtaspa's son became the ruler of the Persian Empire, or that this key fact about Darius's father would not be mentioned in the Behistun Inscription. It is also possible that Darius I's father was named in honor of the Zoroastrian patron, indicating possible Zoroastrian faith by Arsames..
Early date Scholars such as Mary Boyce (who dated Zoroaster to somewhere between 1700 and 1000 BC) used linguistic and socio-cultural evidence to place Zoroaster between 1500 and 1000 BC (or 1200 and 900 BC). The basis of this theory is primarily proposed on linguistic similarities between the Old Avestan language of the Zoroastrian Gathas and the Sanskrit of the Rigveda (–1100 BC), a collection of early Vedic hymns. Both texts are considered to have a common archaic Indo-Iranian origin. The Gathas portray an ancient Stone-Bronze Age bipartite society of warrior-herdsmen and priests (compared to Bronze tripartite society; some conjecture that it depicts the Yaz culture), and that it is thus implausible that the Gathas and Rigveda could have been composed more than a few centuries apart. These scholars suggest that Zoroaster lived in an isolated tribe or composed the Gathas before the 1200–1000 BC migration by the Iranians from the steppe to the Iranian Plateau... The shortfall of the argument is the vague comparison, and the archaic language of Gathas does not necessarily indicate time difference.
It has been suggested by Silk Road Seattle, using its own interpretations of Victor H. Mair's writings on the topic that Zoroaster could have been born in the 2nd millennium BC.
Almut Hintze, the British Library, and the European Research Council have dated Zoroaster to roughly 3,500 years ago, in the 2nd millennium BC.
Place