Zoroaster

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 Yasna Haptanghaiti, 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.