Zoroaster and the Gathas: Prophecy and Reform

Zarathustra, known to the Greeks and to most Western scholarship as Zoroaster, is the traditional founder of the religion that bears his name, yet almost nothing about his life can be fixed with confidence. Later Zoroastrian tradition, recorded in the Pahlavi Bundahishn and other Middle Persian texts of the Sassanian period, places him "258 years before Alexander," a formula that would yield a date around 600 BCE, close to the traditional dates once assigned by 19th- and early 20th-century scholars. Linguistic analysis of the Gathas, however, has pushed most specialists toward a much earlier period: the language of these hymns is an archaic form of Avestan closely related to the Sanskrit of the Rigveda, suggesting a date somewhere between 1500 and 1000 BCE, most commonly placed around 1200–1000 BCE, in the Bronze Age or early Iron Age steppe and pastoral society of eastern Iran or Central Asia rather than the western Persian heartland later ruled by the Achaemenids. Mary Boyce, in Zoroastrians: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (1979), argued forcefully for this earlier dating on linguistic and cultural grounds, while other scholars, including Gherardo Gnoli, have continued to favor a somewhat later placement; no contemporary external source mentions Zoroaster, and his historical existence rests entirely on the internal testimony of the Avesta and later tradition.