Zarathushtrian

Zoroaster,; fa, زرتشت, Zartosht, label=Modern Persian; ku, زەردەشت, Zerdeşt also known as Zarathustra,, . Also known as Zarathushtra Spitama, or Ashu Zarathushtra 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 Old Avestan and lived in the eastern part of the Iranian plateau, but his exact birthplace is uncertain.

There is no 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 ''Gathas'' as well as the ''Yasna Haptanghaiti'', 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 ''Zaraθuštra''. His English name, "Zoroaster", derives from a later (5th century BC) Greek transcription, ''Zōroastrēs'' (), as used in Xanthus's '' Lydiaca'' (Fragment 32) and in Plato's ''First Alcibiades'' (122a1). This form appears subsequently in the Latin ' and, in later Greek orthographies, as Ζωροάστρις ''Zōroastris''. The Greek form of the name appears to be based on a phonetic transliteration or semantic substitution of Avestan ''zaraθ-'' with the Greek ζωρός ''zōros'' (literally "undiluted") and the BMAC substrate ''-uštra'' with ἄστρον ''astron'' ("star").

In Avestan, ''Zaraθuštra'' is generally accepted to derive from an Old Iranian ''*Zaratuštra-''; The element half of the name (''-uštra-'') is thought to be the Indo-Iranian root for "camel", with the entire name meaning "he who can manage camels". Reconstructions from later Iranian languages—particularly from the Middle Persian (300 BC) ''Zardusht'', which is the form that the name took in the 9th- to 12th-century Zoroastrian texts—suggest that ''*Zaratuštra-'' might be a zero-grade form of ''*Zarantuštra-''. Subject then to whether ''Zaraθuštra'' derives from ''*Zarantuštra-'' or from ''*Zaratuštra-'', several interpretations have been proposed.

If ''Zarantuštra'' is the original form, it may mean "with old/aging camels", related to Avestic ''zarant-'' (''cf.'' Pashto ''zōṛ'' and Ossetian ''zœrond'', "old"; Middle Persian ''zāl'', "old"):
* "with angry/furious camels": from Avestan ''*zarant-'', "angry, furious"..
* "who is driving camels" or "who is fostering/cherishing camels": related to Avestan ''zarš-'', "to drag"..
* Mayrhofer (1977) proposed an etymology of "who is desiring camels" or "longing for camels" and related to Vedic Sanskrit ''har-'', "to like", and perhaps (though ambiguous) also to Avestan ''zara-''.
* "with yellow camels": parallel to Younger Avestan ''zairi-''..

The interpretation of the ''-θ-'' () in Avestan ''zaraθuštra'' was for a time itself subjected to heated debate because the ''-θ-'' is an irregular development: As a rule, ''*zarat-'' (a first element that ends in a dental consonant) should have Avestan ''zarat-'' or ''zarat̰-'' as a development from it. Why this is not so for ''zaraθuštra'' has not yet been determined. Notwithstanding the phonetic irregularity, that Avestan ''zaraθuštra'' with its ''-θ-'' was linguistically an actual form is shown by later attestations reflecting the same basis.. All present-day, Iranian-language variants of his name derive from the Middle Iranian variants of ''Zarθošt'', which, in turn, all reflect Avestan's fricative ''-θ-''.

In Middle Persian, the name is 𐭦𐭫𐭲𐭥𐭱𐭲 ''Zardu(x)št'', in Parthian ''Zarhušt'', in Manichaean Middle Persian ''Zrdrwšt'', in Early New Persian ''Zardušt'', and in modern (New Persian), the name is زرتشت ''Zartosht''.

The name is attested in Classical Armenian sources as ''Zradašt'' (often with the variant ''Zradešt''). The most important of these testimonies were provided by the Armenian authors Eznik of Kolb, Elishe, and Movses Khorenatsi. The spelling Zradašt was formed through an older form which started with ''*zur-'', a fact which the German Iranologist Friedrich Carl Andreas (1846–1930) used as evidence for a Middle Persian spoken form ''*Zur(a)dušt''. Based on this assumption, Andreas even went so far to form conclusions from this also for the Avestan form of the name. However, the modern Iranologist Rüdiger Schmitt rejects Andreas's assumption, and states that the older form which started with ''*zur-'' was just influenced by Armenian ''zur'' ("wrong, unjust, idle"), which therefore means that "the name must have been reinterpreted in an anti-Zoroastrian sense by the Armenian Christians". Furthermore, Schmitt adds: "it cannot be excluded, that the (Parthian or) Middle Persian form, which the Armenians took over (''Zaradušt'' or the like), was merely metathesized to pre-Arm. ''*Zuradašt''".

Date

There is no consensus on the dating of Zoroaster; the Avesta gives no direct information about it, while historical sources are conflicting. Some scholars base their date reconstruction on the Proto-Indo-Iranian language and Proto-Indo-Iranian religion, and thus his origin is considered to have been somewhere in northeastern Iran and sometime between 1500 and 500 BC.

Some scholars: "At present, the majority opinion among scholars probably inclines toward the end of the second millennium or the beginning of the first, although there are still those who hold for a date in the seventh century." such as Mary Boyce (who dated Zoroaster to somewhere between 1700 and 1000 BC) used linguistic and socio-cultural evidence to place Zoroaster between 1500 and 1000 BC (or 1200 and 900 BC). The basis of this theory is primarily proposed on linguistic similarities between the Old Avestan language of the Zoroastrian Gathas