Who Was Zarathustra? The Prophet of Ancient Iran
Zarathustra (Greek Zoroaster) was the prophet of ancient Iran and the author of the Gathas, the seventeen hymns in Old Avestan that are the oldest stratum of the Zoroastrian scripture and the only texts in the canon that most scholars will confidently say came from a single named historical figure. The dating is contested, the homeland is contested, and even the details of his life are mostly legend. What is firm is the Gathas themselves, and the picture of a wandering poet of the eastern Iranian plateau in conflict with the local chiefs and the priests of the older cult, searching for a royal patron. The cluster on Zarathustra as a prophet treats the life and teaching of the prophet in more detail, and the cluster on Zoroastrianism treats the religious tradition of which he was the founder.
The name
The name Zarathustra is the Avestan form; the Old Persian is Zaraθuštra; the Greek is Zōroastrēs; the Latin is Zoroaster. The Greek form is a regular phonological adaptation of the Old Persian (Zaraθuštra → Zaraustrēs → Zōroastrēs, with the dissimilation of the medial /r/ and the -θr- to -str-) and does not imply a different etymology. The forms Zarathustra and Zoroaster refer to the same person. The folk etymology that connects Zoroaster to zōros (“pure”) and astrē (“star”) — “star-worship” or “cosmic cult” — is a modern invention, not supported by the Greek or Persian evidence.
The etymology of Zaraθuštra is itself debated. The two principal elements are zara- (which can mean “old,” “yellow,” or “golden” in Avestan) and -θuštra- (a derivative of the verb θu, “to be able,” with the suffix -θra). The most defensible reading, in my view, is “owner of camels” or “manager of camels” — from a θuštra- meaning “one to whom camels are entrusted” — which is appropriate for a pastoral society on the eastern Iranian plateau.
The life of the prophet
The Pahlavi Zand literature of the Sasanian period gives a detailed but legendary biography of Zarathustra. According to this tradition, Zarathustra was born of a noble family, the son of Pourushaspa, son of Haechataspa, of the Spitamana clan, and was the seventh in descent from the line of the great heroes of the Shahnameh. The legend tells of the prophet’s birth, his early wonder at the world, his temptation by the evil spirit, his encounter with the Wise Lord, his vision of the seven archangels, his marriage to Hvovi, and his conversion of the king Gushtasp to the faith. The historical accuracy of this biography is, by scholarly consensus, low; the Pahlavi Bundahishn places Zarathustra in the reign of Gushtasp, identified by the Pahlavi compilers with Darius I (or, in some sources, with a Kayanid king of the legendary past).
The Gathas, by contrast, give almost no biographical detail. The prophet is married, has children, has cattle, and is in conflict with local chiefs (kavis) and a class of priests (karapans) whom he accuses of deceiving the people. He is in exile from his homeland and is searching for a royal patron; the patron he eventually finds is, in the Gathic texts, a King Vishtaspa — not a historical name we can identify with certainty. The Gathas also describe the prophet as the bearer of a revelation, the ahura Mazda-daēna, the religion of the Wise Lord, and they repeatedly call on the listener to choose asha (truth) over druj (the lie).
The dates of Zarathustra
The dates of Zarathustra are a major controversial question in the history of religion. The traditional Zoroastrian account places the prophet in the reign of the legendary king Gushtasp, in the sixth century BCE, but the linguistic evidence of the Gathas suggests a much earlier date. The Gathas, composed in a dialect of Old Avestan, have archaic features shared with the Rig Veda, and the linguistic evidence suggests that the language of the Gathas belongs to the second millennium BCE, perhaps as early as 1500–1200 BCE. This is the long chronology, defended by Mary Boyce, Helmut Humbach, and Gherardo Gnoli. The short chronology, which places Zarathustra in the seventh or sixth century BCE, is the position of some Iranian scholars and of certain schools that take the Pahlavi Bundahishn tradition at face value. Jean Kellens, who has done the most detailed philological work on the Gathas, treats the strong second-millennium claim as plausible but unproved.
The honest answer is that the question is open. The Gathas are datable to some point in the second millennium BCE on linguistic grounds, but the language of the hymns is not the same as the date of the prophet; archaic language can be preserved in priestly and liturgical traditions long after the archaic period. The traditional Zoroastrian date of the sixth century BCE, on which the prophet is a contemporary of Cyrus the Great, is no longer widely accepted in Western scholarship, though the Parsi community continues to defend it.
The homeland of Zarathustra
The homeland of Zarathustra, like the dates, is a major topic of scholarly debate. The traditional Zoroastrian account, preserved in the Pahlavi Zand literature, places the homeland of the prophet in the region of the Airyana Vaejah, the “expanse of the Aryans,” which the Vendidad identifies as the eastern Iranian plateau. The scholarly debate has tended to place the homeland in the region of the Helmand and the Oxus rivers, in present-day Afghanistan, Tajikistan, or Uzbekistan, but the precise location is not agreed. The Yashts and the Vendidad mention the rivers and regions of the eastern Iranian lands — the Harahvaiti (the Helmand), the Hapta Hindu (the Vedic Sapta Sindhu, the “Seven Rivers” of the Punjab), and several others — and the most likely homeland of the prophet is the region of the Helmand, in present-day Sistan and Baluchestan, on the border of Iran and Afghanistan.
The legacy of Zarathustra
The legacy of Zarathustra is one of the larger legacies in the history of religion. The prophet’s monotheism, dualistic cosmology, and ethical universalism influenced the development of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — though the influence is real but partial, and the parallels are better understood as a complex of mutual borrowings than as direct transmission. The figure of Zarathustra has been the subject of major philosophical works, including the Also sprach Zarathustra of Friedrich Nietzsche (1883–1885), the Zarathustra of the German composer Richard Strauss (1896), and the Zoroastrian Studies of the modern Iranian scholars.
The figure of Zarathustra in Nietzsche is a complex one. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is not the historical prophet of the Zoroastrian tradition but a literary figure, a prophet of the Übermensch, of the eternal recurrence, and of the death of God. Nietzsche’s use of the name Zarathustra was deliberate: he chose the prophet of the ancient Iranian religion as the mouthpiece of his philosophy of the future, and the work has become an influential philosophical text of the modern world. The long-tail page on Zurvanism treats the Zurvanite reformulation of Zoroastrianism in more detail.