Zoroaster, also known as Zarathustra, is regarded as the spiritual founder of Zoroastrianism. He is said to have been an Iranian prophet who founded a religious movement that challenged the existing traditions of ancient Iranian religion, and inaugurated a movement that eventually became a staple religion in ancient Iran. He was a native speaker of Avestan and lived in the eastern part of the Iranian plateau, but his exact birthplace is uncertain. He founded the first documented monotheistic religion in the world and also had an impact on Plato, Pythagoras, and the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. There is little scholarly consensus on when he lived. Some scholars, using linguistic and socio-cultural evidence, suggest a dating to somewhere in the second millennium BC. Other scholars date him to the 7th and 6th centuries BC as a near-contemporary of Cyrus the Great and Darius the Great. Zoroastrianism eventually became the official state religion of ancient Iran—particularly during the era of the Achaemenid Empire—and its distant subdivisions from around the 6th century BC until the 7th century AD, when the religion itself began to decline following the Arab-Muslim conquest of Iran. Zoroaster is credited with authorship of the as well as the , a series of hymns composed in his native Avestan dialect that comprise the core of Zoroastrian thinking. Little is known about Zoroaster; most of his life is known only from these scant texts. By any modern standard 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. Name and etymology Zoroaster's name in his native language, Avestan, was probably . His translated name, "Zoroaster", derives from a later (5th century BC) Greek transcription,, as used in Xanthus's (Fragment 32) and in Plato's First Alcibiades (122a1). This form appears subsequently in the Latin , and, in later Greek orthographies, as . The Greek form of the name appears to be based on a phonetic transliteration or semantic substitution of Avestan with the Greek (literally 'undiluted') and the BMAC substrate with . In Avestan, is generally accepted to derive from an Old Iranian ; The element half of the name is thought to be the Indo-Iranian root for 'camel', with the entire name meaning 'he who can manage camels'.

From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Overview

Zoroaster, also known as Zarathustra, is regarded as the spiritual founder of Zoroastrianism. He is said to have been an Iranian prophet who founded a religious movement that challenged the existing traditions of ancient Iranian religion, and inaugurated a movement that eventually became a staple religion in ancient Iran. He was a native speaker of Avestan and lived in the eastern part of the Iranian plateau, but his exact birthplace is uncertain. He founded the first documented monotheistic religion in the world and also had an impact on Plato, Pythagoras, and the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. There is little scholarly consensus on when he lived. Some scholars, using linguistic and socio-cultural evidence, suggest a dating to somewhere in the second millennium BC. Other scholars date him to the 7th and 6th centuries BC as a near-contemporary of Cyrus the Great and Darius the Great. Zoroastrianism eventually became the official state religion of ancient Iran—particularly during the era of the Achaemenid Empire—and its distant subdivisions from around the 6th century BC until the 7th century AD, when the religion itself began to decline following the Arab-Muslim conquest of Iran. Zoroaster is credited with authorship of the as well as the , a series of hymns composed in his native Avestan dialect that comprise the core of Zoroastrian thinking. Little is known about Zoroaster; most of his life is known only from these scant texts. By any modern standard 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. Name and etymology Zoroaster's name in his native language, Avestan, was probably . His translated name, "Zoroaster", derives from a later (5th century BC) Greek transcription,, as used in Xanthus's (Fragment 32) and in Plato's First Alcibiades (122a1). This form appears subsequently in the Latin , and, in later Greek orthographies, as . The Greek form of the name appears to be based on a phonetic transliteration or semantic substitution of Avestan with the Greek (literally 'undiluted') and the BMAC substrate with . In Avestan, is generally accepted to derive from an Old Iranian ; The element half of the name is thought to be the Indo-Iranian root for 'camel', with the entire name meaning 'he who can manage camels'.

From Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Zoroaster, also known as Zarathustra, is regarded as the spiritual founder of Zoroastrianism. He is said to have been an Iranian prophet who founded a religious movement that challenged the existing traditions of ancient Iranian religion, and inaugurated a movement that eventually became a staple religion in ancient Iran. He was a native speaker of Avestan and lived in the eastern part of the Iranian plateau, but his exact birthplace is uncertain. He founded the first documented monotheistic religion in the world and also had an impact on Plato, Pythagoras, and the Abrahamic religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

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