Zarathustra (Zoroaster)

Zarathustra founded one of the earliest religions to teach a single supreme god and a moral struggle running through the universe. When he lived is genuinely unresolved: Greek sources placed him thousands of years before Plato, later Zoroastrian tradition around 600 BC, and linguistic analysis of the hymns attributed to him — the Gathas, composed in an archaic form of Avestan close to Vedic Sanskrit — suggests somewhere between 1500 and 1000 BC, among pastoralists on the Central Asian steppe. The Gathas are the only material plausibly from him, and they are hymns rather than a biography. His teaching begins with Ahura Mazda, the wise lord, as the uncreated creator of all that is good. Against him stands Angra Mainyu, the destructive spirit, and the world is the arena in which the two are contested. Human beings are not spectators: every person chooses between truth, asha, and the lie, druj, and the choice matters because the outcome depends on it. He taught individual judgement after death at a bridge that widens for the righteous and narrows to a blade for the wicked, a final renovation of the world, and the resurrection of the dead. He rejected the sacrificial cult and the daeva gods of the surrounding religion, and was, by tradition, driven out for it before finding a patron in a king named Vishtaspa. Fire is the symbol of truth rather than an object of worship. The religion became the state faith of the Achaemenid, Parthian and Sasanian empires, and its eschatology shaped Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Perhaps 100,000 to 200,000 Zoroastrians remain, chiefly in India and Iran.

• Lived: 1000 BCE – 900 BCE
• Nationality: Persian
• Roles: religious_leader