Persian Empire
Deep Dive 10 min read

Zarathustra: The Prophet of Ancient Iran and Author of the Gathas

Yasna 29, the Ahunavaiti Gatha, opens with a line that is, in the best translation I know, something like: “Now I shall proclaim to you, all of you gathered here, the teachings of the Wise Lord, the praises of Ahura Mazda, the glories of the holy spirit.” It is a man standing up in front of a congregation and saying, in effect, listen. The Gathas are seventeen hymns in five groups, in a dialect of Old Avestan so archaic that it sits very close to the language of the Rigveda, and they are the only texts in the Zoroastrian canon that most scholars will confidently say came from a single named historical figure. Reading them is, as Boyce put it, like listening to a man arguing with his god in the open air. The figure one gets is 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 historical context — when, where, and how this happened — is a question that has divided the field for more than a century, and a clean answer is not available.

Good places to start in English include Boyce’s Zoroastrians (1975) and the multi-volume History of Zoroastrianism (co-edited with Grenet and others), Gnoli’s Zoroaster’s Time and Homeland (1980), and the philological work of Jean Kellens. Helmut Humbach’s The Gathas of Zarathushtra and the Other Old Avestan Texts (in two volumes, with Klaus Faiss and others) is the modern critical text. Prods Oktor Skjærvø’s The Spirit of Zoroastrianism (2011) and Stausberg’s Zoroastrianism (2022) are the clearest short introductions. Almut Hintze’s essays in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism (2015) are the best short statement of the linguistic evidence. Joel P. Brereton and Skjærvø’s translation of the Gathas, long in preparation, is the most up-to-date English version.

For the connected clusters, see Zoroastrianism and Persian Mythology and Ahura Mazda. The long-tail page on Zarathustra gives a more compact account of the prophet’s life.

The name

The Avestan form of the name is Zaraθuštra; 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 by dissimilation of the medial /r/ and the tha > ta development), and it does not imply a different etymology. The claim that the Greek Zoroaster was derived from a separate folk-etymology connecting the name to zōros (“pure”) and astrē (“star”) is a modern invention, repeated in some popular works but not supported by the Greek or Persian evidence. The forms Zarathustra and Zoroaster refer to the same person.

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 alternatives (“old camel,” “golden camel,” “yellow”) are less likely. The etymology is irrelevant to the question of when or where Zarathustra lived; the name, in any case, is Iranian, not Babylonian or Sanskrit, and the figure is solidly an Indo-Iranian one.

The life of the prophet — the legend and the Gathas

The Pahlavi Zand literature — the Sasanian and post-Sasanian Middle Persian texts — preserves a developed legendary biography of Zarathustra, in which the prophet is a noble of the Spitamana clan, descended from the legendary kings of Iran, and is born to Pourushaspa, son of Haechataspa. The legend tells of the prophet’s temptation by the evil spirit, his encounter with Ahura Mazda, his vision of the archangels, his marriage to Hvovi, and his conversion of the king Gushtasp. 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 story has the value of an internal Zoroastrian tradition and is the basis of the traditional dating of the prophet to the sixth century BCE.

The Gathas themselves, 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 historical figure is somewhere in between. The Gathas are archaic enough to be older than the Achaemenid Empire and probably older than the Median one; the Vishtaspa of the Gathas is a local king of eastern Iran; and the Spitamana clan is identifiable as an eastern Iranian priestly family. The later legend, in which Zarathustra is the founder of the Persian monarchy and the religion of the whole Iranian world, is the product of centuries of accretion and is not historically reliable.

The Gathas in five groups

The Gathas are seventeen hymns in five groups: the Ahunavaiti (Yasna 28–34), the Ushtavaiti (Yasna 43–46), the Spentamainyush (Yasna 47–50), the Vohukhshathra (Yasna 51), and the Vahishtoishti (Yasna 53). Each group is named after its first word or phrase. The language is Old Avestan, the oldest stratum of the Avestan language. The metre is a variant of the Indo-Iranian gayatri, tristubh, and jagati patterns. The theology is built around the figure of Ahura Mazda, the Amesha Spentas as his attributes, and the doctrine of free will as the basis of the moral life.

The standard critical editions are Humbach and Faiss’s two-volume Gathas (with the German text and commentary), Kellens’ French edition, and the more recent English work of Skjærvø and Brereton. The translation by Humbach and Insler (The Gathas of Zarathushtra, 1994) is the most complete in English; the older translations of Dhalla and of Zaehner are now superseded. The Gathas are short — about 2,400 verses in total — and they are recited in the Yasna ritual of the Zoroastrian liturgy, where they are treated as the most sacred texts of the religion.

The theology of the Gathas is more austere than that of the later Avesta. The Gathic Zarathustra is a prophet, a poet, and a moralist; he is not a miracle-worker, and the developed legend of his temptations and visions is a later accretion. He is in conflict with the daeva-worshippers (the worshippers of the old gods, who are now demons) and the karapans (the priests of the older cult); he is a defender of the asha against the druj; and he addresses Ahura Mazda as a man addresses his lord. The figure of the Saoshyant, the future saviour, is not in the Gathas in developed form; the Gathas expect a righteous king, not a virgin-born saviour. The doctrine of the Frashokereti, the final renovation, is also Gathic in outline but developed in the later tradition.

The dates

The dating question is the most contested in the field. The linguistic evidence places the Gathas in a very old stratum of Old Avestan, with archaic features shared with the Rigveda. The long chronology — which places Zarathustra in the second millennium BCE, with dates ranging from c. 1500 BCE (Boyce, in some statements) to c. 1000 BCE (Humbach) — is the most widely cited. The short chronology — which places Zarathustra in the seventh or sixth century BCE, in the Median or early Achaemenid period — is the position of some Iranian scholars and of certain schools that take the Pahlavi Bundahishn tradition at face value.

The honest answer is that we do not know. The Gathas are datable to some point in the second millennium BCE on linguistic grounds, but that is not a date for the prophet; it is a date for the language of the hymns. The prophet could have lived later, in a society that preserved archaic linguistic forms — a not uncommon situation in priestly and liturgical traditions. I find Kellens right to be sceptical of the strong long-chronology claims; the Gathas are not securely datable on present evidence, and the second-millennium dating is a plausible but unproved inference from the linguistic data.

The traditional Zoroastrian date, in the reign of Gushtasp, places Zarathustra in the sixth century BCE and makes him a contemporary of Cyrus the Great. The identification of Gushtasp with a historical Achaemenid king (often Darius I) is a later harmonisation and is not supported by the Gathas. The traditional dating is still defended in Parsi scholarship (Purshottam Lal Bhargava, the late Hormusdyar Kutar), and the FEZANA and the World Zoroastrian Organisation have, at various times, taken positions on the dating question. The academic consensus, as of the 2020s, is that the question is open.

The homeland

The homeland is equally debated. The traditional Zoroastrian account, preserved in the Pahlavi Zand, places the prophet in the Airyana Vaejah, the “expanse of the Aryans,” which the Vendidad (the priestly code of the Avesta) locates in the eastern Iranian plateau. The Yashts and the Vendidad mention a list of rivers and regions: the Airyana Vaejah, the Harahvaiti (the Helmand), the Hapta Hindu (the “Seven Rivers,” the Vedic Sapta Sindhu, the Punjab), and several others. The river names suggest eastern Iran and the lands of the Oxus and the Jaxartes, with the Punjab as the easternmost extension of the Iranian world.

The most likely homeland, on the combined evidence of the Gathas, the Pahlavi Zand, and the geographical references in the Avesta, is the region of the Helmand and the eastern Iranian plateau, in what is now Sistan and Baluchestan on the Iran-Afghanistan border. Gnoli made this the central argument of Zoroaster’s Time and Homeland (1980). Some scholars place the homeland further north, in the Bactria-Margiana region, or further east, in the Hindu Kush. The question is not settled.

Legacy

The legacy of Zarathustra is, by any measure, substantial. The prophet is the founder of a religion that was the state religion of three Iranian empires — Achaemenid, Parthian, and Sasanian — and that survived the Arab conquest to become the religion of the Parsi and Iranian Zoroastrian communities of the modern world. The figure of Zarathustra has been the subject of major philosophical works, including Friedrich Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra (1883–1885), a literary figure rather than a historical one but the most influential European treatment of the name. Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem Also sprach Zarathustra (1896) is the most famous musical work associated with the prophet.

The influence of the Gathic theology on later religious traditions is a question that has been much debated and that the modern consensus, on the whole, treats with caution. The doctrine of free will, the cosmic dualism, the Frashokereti, the figure of the Saoshyant, the Chinvat bridge, the weighing of souls — these are present in later Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and the parallels are real. The question is whether the parallels are borrowing or parallel development. The older scholarship, in the early twentieth century, was inclined to direct borrowing; the more cautious view, represented by Shaked, Boyce, and Stausberg, is that the borrowing is real but partial, and that the Persian influence on the Abrahamic traditions operated through a complex network of mediators — Babylonian, Jewish, and Hellenistic — rather than through direct Zoroastrian-Jewish contact.

The figure of Ahura Mazda as the “Wise Lord” has sometimes been compared to the Jewish and Christian Logos, Sophia, and the Word of God, but the parallel is comparative rather than genealogical. The same is true of the Saoshyant and the Mashiach / Christos / Mahdi: the parallels are real but the borrowing is not direct, and the scholarly consensus is that the figures are parallel developments in related religious traditions rather than direct transmissions.

For further reading

  • Boyce, Mary. Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (1975).
  • Gnoli, Gherardo. Zoroaster’s Time and Homeland (1980).
  • Humbach, Helmut, and Klaus Faiss. Gathas I and II (with the German text and translation, 2009).
  • Kellens, Jean. Les Gâthâ (2013) and Zoroastrianism in the Greek Sources (2013).
  • Skjærvø, Prods Oktor. The Spirit of Zoroastrianism (2011).
  • Stausberg, Michael. Zoroastrianism (2022).
  • Hintze, Almut. “Zarathustra’s Time and Homeland” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Zoroastrianism (2015).
  • Brereton, Joel P., and Prods Oktor Skjærvø. The Gathas (translation and commentary, in preparation).