Zarathustra

Zarathustra — Zoroaster to the Greeks — is the prophet to whom the Zoroastrian tradition traces itself, and the composer of the Gāthās, seventeen hymns embedded in the Avestan liturgy that are the oldest Iranian religious texts we possess. In them a single visionary voice addresses Ahura Mazdā, the Wise Lord, as the one god worthy of worship, sets before every person the choice between aša (the Truth) and druj (the Lie), and looks to a final setting-right of the world. Whatever else is uncertain about him, the Gāthās are a real and singular document of early Iranian religious thought.

The problem of the date

When and where Zarathustra lived is genuinely unknown. The later Zoroastrian tradition, echoed by some Greek writers, dates him '258 years before Alexander', which would put his career around 600 BCE, a generation or two before Cyrus. But the language of the Gāthās is Old Avestan, so archaic and so close to the Sanskrit of the Rigveda that many linguists place their composition centuries earlier, perhaps 1200 BCE or before, in the eastern Iranian world of Central Asia rather than in Persia proper. The two kinds of evidence — a transmitted traditional date and the internal age of the language — have never been reconciled, and estimates still span the better part of a millennium.

Zarathustra and the Achaemenids

The Achaemenid kings worship Zarathustra's Wise Lord and make his Truth-and-Lie the axis of their ideology, yet no royal inscription ever names the prophet, and the state cult tolerates and funds other gods in a way a strict follower of the Gāthās might not. Whether the kings were 'Zoroastrians', heirs of a broader Mazdaean religiosity from which Zoroastrianism also grew, or something in between, is the oldest debate in the study of Persian religion, treated in the survey Religion & the Lie. The honest position is that the two are deeply related and not simply identical.