Publisher's Synopsis
Zoroaster also known as Zarathustra, Zarathushtra Spitama or Ashu Zarathushtra was an ancient Iranian-speaking prophet whose teachings and innovations on the religious traditions of ancient Iranian-speaking peoples developed into the religion of Zoroastrianism, which by some accounts was the first world religion. He inaugurated a movement that eventually became the dominant religion in Ancient Persia. He was a native speaker of Old Avestan and lived in the eastern part of the Iranian Plateau, but his exact birthplace is uncertain. Dating is uncertain as there is no scholarly consensus, but on linguistic and socio-cultural evidence Zoroaster is dated around 1000 BC and earlier i.e. somewhere in the 2nd millennium BC, however, other scholars still put him in the 7th and 6th century BC as a contemporary or near-contemporary of Cyrus the Great and Darius I. Zoroastrianism was already an old religion when first recorded, and it was the official religion of Ancient Persia and its distant subdivisions from the 6th century BCE to the 7th century CE. He is credited with the authorship of the Gathas as well as the Yasna Haptanghaiti, hymns composed in Zoroaster's native dialect, Old Avestan, and which comprise the core of Zoroastrian thinking. Most of his life is known from the Zoroastrian texts. By any modern standard of historiography, no strictly historical 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 that historicizes legends and myths.
