Chapter 9. Zarathustra: The Prophet and the Problem of His Date

Part 2 starts with a figure whose existence most of the library’s scholars accept but whose date they cannot fix. Zarathushtra, called Zoroaster by the Greeks, is known first from seventeen hymns ascribed to him and then from a tradition that grew over two thousand years. The datings span more than six millennia, from “six thousand years before Xerxes” to the sixth century BC. Each follows from a particular reading of the evidence: Greek reports, Pahlavi chronology, comparative philology or the history of the steppes. This chapter sets out each dating with the people who hold it, then follows the biography as it grew into legend.

The name, the lineage and the priest

Jackson notes that the Avesta consistently gives the name as Zarathushtra, or more fully Spitama Zarathushtra. The familiar “Zoroaster” comes from the Latin Zoroastres, which is modelled on the Greek Zoroastres. He explains Spitama as a clan name derived from an eponymous ancestor, probably meaning “descendant of White”. Scholars agree that the second element of Zarathushtra is ushtra, “camel”, but the first element is still disputed. Proposed meanings include “one whose camels are old” and “one whose camel is fierce” [Jackson, Zoroaster, #55100, ch. II “The Name Zoroaster”]. Drawing on the Avesta and the Pahlavi books, Jackson gives the father as Pourushaspa and the mother as Dughdhova. A cousin, Maidhyoimanha, became the first disciple. Through the third wife, Hvovi, the future saviours, including the Saoshyant, are said to descend miraculously [Jackson, #55100, ch. II “Ancestry and Family”].

Boyce stresses his priestly office. In the Gathas he calls himself a zaotar, a fully qualified priest, and in her view he is “the only founder of a world religion who was both priest and prophet”. He also calls himself a manthran, a composer of inspired utterances. Tradition says revelation came to him at thirty, when he met Vohu Manah on a river bank at dawn [Boyce, Zoroastrians, #55117, ch. 2 “Zoroaster and his mission”].

The classical testimonies: “six thousand years”

The oldest Greek writers give the most extreme dates. West collects them. Pliny quotes Eudoxus as placing Zarathushtra 6,000 years before the death of Plato, which works out to 6347 BC, and says Aristotle agreed. Hermippus put him 5,000 years before the Trojan war (6184 BC). Xanthus of Lydia, as quoted by Diogenes Laertius, put him 6,000 years before Xerxes, which “is, B.C. 6485” [West, Pahlavi Texts V, #60400, Introduction §71]. Haug’s version of Xanthus differs: he reports “about 600 years before the Trojan war (about B.C. 1800)”. He also cites Berosus, who made Zoroaster a Babylonian king between 2200 and 2000 BC [Haug, Essays, #55015, Essay IV “The Age when Spitama Zarathushtra Lived”]. Windischmann and Geiger allow both readings, noting that Xanthus “may have written ‘six thousand’ or ‘six hundred'”. In their view he drew on good sources but perhaps misunderstood them [Windischmann & Geiger, Zarathushtra in the Gathas, #55095, p. 79].

Jackson explains the large figures as the Greeks “not having quite rightly understood” Persian teaching. That teaching set Zoroaster’s millennium inside a world-period of 12,000 years, during which his fravashi had already existed alongside the archangels for thousands of years [Jackson, #55100, ch. II “The Date”]. Carter gives the same explanation [Carter, Zoroastrianism and Judaism, #55114, p. 24]. West adds that in the Pahlavi system the prophet’s spiritual body was formed at the start of the fourth millennium, 6630 BC, which is close to all three Greek figures [West, #60400, §§72–77]. Other sources linked Zoroaster with Ninus and Semiramis, or with Nimrod and Abraham [Carter, #55114, p. 24]. If Semiramis lived about 1273 BC, Windischmann and Geiger note, Zoroaster belongs to the mid-thirteenth century BC [#55095, p. 131]. West replies that the “Magian king of Bactria” of that legend “can hardly refer to the traditional Zaratusht who is never represented as a king” [West, #60400, §74]. Moulton points out that apart from Xanthus no native Greek names Zoroaster before the mid-fourth century [Moulton, Early Zoroastrianism, #55011, Lecture II].

The tradition of “258 years before Alexander”

The native tradition is precise in a different way. Jackson cites Bundahishn 34, the Arda Viraf book and Zadspram, together with “abundant Arabic allusions (Albiruni, Masudi, and others)”. All of these place the opening of the ministry “at 258 years before the era of Alexander”. The prophet was thirty when his ministry began and seventy-seven when he died, and West corrects for a thirty-five-year gap in the Bundahishn list. On that basis Jackson concludes that tradition yields 660–583 BC. Tradition also says Zarathushtra converted King Vishtaspa at forty-two. Jackson denies that this Vishtaspa was Hystaspes, the father of Darius, an identification Ammianus Marcellinus had made [Jackson, #55100, ch. II and App. II]. West reaches the same date, and adds that the Avestan ancestors of Kavi Vishtaspa share no names with the Achaemenid pedigree on the Behistun inscription [West, #60400, §70]. Moulton reports that Justi, Casartelli and West endorsed Jackson’s case [Moulton, #55011, Lecture I, n.].

Haug rejected the Hystaspes identification for the same reason, but went much further than the tradition. In his view the Gathas stand at the head of a literature already complete by about 400 BC, and Yasna 9.14 calls Zarathushtra “famous in Airyana vaejo”, the ancestral Aryan home. On this basis Haug wrote: “Under no circumstances can we assign him a later date than B.C. 1000”, and he allowed that the prophet might have been a contemporary of Moses [Haug, #55015, Essay IV §4].

Philology against tradition

In his 1912 lectures Moulton treated the traditional date as “a minimum” and put the case for “a few more generations”. Gathic, “in many respects the more primitive”, had to be brought closer in time to the Rigveda. Time was also needed for the gap before the prose Yasna Haptanghaiti, and more still for the development to the Yashts, where the old Aryan religion has returned. He concluded that the matter is “Not Proven” [Moulton, #55011, Lecture I “The Sources”, pp. 19–22]. He quotes Geldner placing Zoroaster “as early as the fourteenth century B.C.”, and Bartholomae, who called a precise date “hopeless” but believed “we shall have to begin decidedly further back” [ibid., p. 18]. Mills argued from language that the Gathas came “long after the oldest Riks”, possibly around 1500 BC, or as late as 900–1200 BC [Mills (tr.), SBE XXXI, #60422, Introduction]. West, who defended the tradition, attributed scholars’ resistance to the classical figures and to the closeness of Gathic to the oldest Sanskrit [West, #60400, §78].

Boyce: a Bronze Age prophet on the steppes

Mary Boyce bases her chronology on the social world of the Gathas. From about 1700 BC, on her reading, bronze and the war chariot produced a class of rathaeshtars, “chariot-standers”, who raided for wealth. Zarathushtra does not use the word, and his hymns “reflect the ancient twofold social divisions of priest and warrior herdsman”. Yet “he speaks often of raiding, ruthlessness and bloodshed”. She concludes that he belonged to a pastoral tribe suffering from Bronze Age change, and places him “between 1400 and 1200 B.C., perhaps in some northerly region of the steppes” [Boyce (ed.), Textual Sources, #55116, §§1.2.7, 1.3.1]. Her table dates Kavi Vishtaspa’s rule “on the steppes” and the Gathas to c. 1200 BC [#55116, §1.9]. Her survey volume gives a different “reasoned conjecture” of 1700–1500 BC [Boyce, #55117, ch. 2].

Duchesne-Guillemin accepts that the dialect points to eastern Iran “some time before the rise of the Achaemenid power”, but notes that “no archaeological evidence has yet been found”. In his summary of Marijan Molé’s position, which held that the Gathas cannot be used historically, the prophet “might as well not have existed” [Duchesne-Guillemin, Religion of Ancient Iran, #38271, §II]. The reference shelf agrees that “there is no consensus on the dating of Zoroaster” [Wikipedia: Zoroaster].

Homeland: west or east?

Jackson considered that the “consensus of scholarly opinion” of his time placed Zarathushtra’s birth in western Iran, in Atropatene (Adarbaijan) near Lake Urumiah. He gives the mother as coming from Median Ragha, and notes a tradition that the prophet preached for a time in Seistan and Turan [Jackson, #55100, ch. II “His Native Place”]. Haug explained the Ragha tradition by Yasna 19, where the city seems to be governed by “the Zarathushtras” themselves [Haug, #55015, Essay IV]. Boyce, by contrast, notes that the Avesta “remained … Eastern Iranian in substance as well as language” and never mentions the Medes or Persians [Boyce, #55116, §1.1.2.1; #55117, ch. 4].

From man to legend

Moulton, quoting Geldner, contrasts the Zarathushtra of the Gathas, “a mere man, standing always on the solid ground of reality”, with the later figure who “rarely suggests the possibility of anything but myth” [Moulton, #55011, Lecture III]. The Younger Avesta calls him “the first priest, the first warrior, the first herdsman”, at whose birth Angra Mainyu fled [Boyce, #55117, ch. 4].

West gives the full legend from Denkard VII and the Selections of Zadspram, which he dates to about AD 900 and traces to the lost Spend Nask. Demons try to destroy the child before and at his birth, but Vohu Manah “made him laugh with delight and utter one form of the Ahunavair formula”. Karap priests try to kill him in infancy, and one “drops dead from his horse” after a quarrel. At thirty he meets Vohu Manah by the river Daitih and holds conferences with the archangels for ten years. At Vishtaspa’s court he is imprisoned and “saved from starvation by a miracle” before the king is converted. He dies “at the age of seventy-seven”, and other Pahlavi texts name Bradro-resh the Tur as his killer [West, #60400, Introduction §§6–7, 15–19, 29]. Lincoln studies one episode, in which a “golden-bodied” fiend claiming to be Spendarmad is banished with the Yatha ahu vairyo [Lincoln, Cēšmag, #60392, §I].

Esoteric writers give the prophet another kind of status. Annie Besant presents him as an initiate sent “at the beginning of this Iranian subrace”, who held the same place for the Iranians “that Manu held to the whole original Aryan” race [Besant, Four Great Religions, #55017, “Zoroastrianism”]. Haug offered a different explanation for the ancient confusion: “Zarathushtra” became a title of the high priests, whose sayings were later credited to one man [Haug, #55015, Essay III §III]. The library’s pamphlet volume #60431 shows modern disputes between orthodox and reformist Parsis. The text it actually preserves is Shiavax Vakil’s 1970 survey of the Jashan Committee controversy [Zoroastrian Pamphlets vol. 56, #60431].

Key points

• The Avestan name is Zarathushtra Spitama. In the Gathas he calls himself a zaotar (priest) and manthran [Jackson #55100; Boyce #55117].
• Jackson, Carter and West explain the Greek figures of about 6000 BC as misreadings of the Persian 12,000-year scheme.
• The Pahlavi and Arabic “258 years before Alexander” tradition yields 660–583 BC, defended by Jackson and West.
• Haug, Moulton, Mills and Geldner argue from language for an earlier date, from “not later than 1000 BC” back to the fourteenth century.
• Boyce places the prophet on the Bronze Age steppes: c. 1400–1200 BC in one book, 1700–1500 BC in the other.
• Jackson placed his birth in western Iran. Boyce and Duchesne-Guillemin favour the east, though no archaeology confirms it.
• Denkard VII and Zadspram turn the man of the Gathas into a miracle-worker who dies at seventy-seven.
• Besant treats him as the initiate-founder of a sub-race. Haug suggested that “Zarathushtra” became a priestly title.