Zoroaster

Zarathushtra Spitama|Zaraθuštra Spitāma}}
Also attested as . The epiphet itself means "abundant strength", and is thought to have been a clan or family name taken from an eponymous ancestor.}} more commonly known as Zoroaster}} or Zarathustra,}} was an Iranian religious reformer who challenged the tenets of the contemporary Ancient Iranian religion, becoming the spiritual founder of Zoroastrianism., meaning "Mazda-worship", and , meaning "good religion".}} Variously described as either a sage, and/or a wonderworker; in the oldest Zoroastrian scriptures, the Gathas, which he is believed to have authored, he is described as a preacher|translit=zaotar}}, cognate with the Sanskrit term होतृ (''hótr''), referring to Vedic priests.}} and a poet-prophet.|ərəšiš}}, cognate with the Sanskrit term ऋषि (''ṛ́ṣi''), describing an enlightened poet of Vedic hymns.}} He also had an impact on Heraclitus, Plato, Pythagoras, and the Abrahamic religions, including Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

He spoke an Eastern Iranian language, named Avestan by scholars after the corpus of Zoroastrian religious texts written in that language. Based on this, it is tentative to place his homeland somewhere in the eastern regions of Greater Iran (perhaps in modern-day Afghanistan or Tajikistan), but his exact birthplace is uncertain.

His life is traditionally dated to sometime around the 7th and 6th centuries BC, making him a contemporary of Cyrus the Great, though most scholars, using linguistic and socio-cultural evidence, suggest a dating to somewhere in the second millennium BC. Zoroastrianism eventually became Iran's most prominent religion from around the 6th century BC, enjoying official sanction during the time of the Sassanid Empire, 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 , a series of hymns composed in Old Avestan that cover 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. Provided by Wikipedia