I just read a really interesting paper by Abolala Soudavar that offered a revisionist account of the history of Zoroastrianism in which the Achaemenid Empire (post-Darius in particular) appears not as a passive receiver of Zoroastrian ideology but as an important agent in shaping that ideology. That way of approaching the problem fits well with suspicions I’ve had about certain structural features of Zoroastrianism, like the importance of truth-telling, that feature prominently in Darian propaganda and in post-Achaemenid Zoroastrianism but not in the oldest Gathas. When and why does lying become the worst vice for Zoroastrians, when the earliest parts of the tradition depict it as one vice among many, and not even the most serious of them? It would certainly be easier to answer that question if we could decide that Darius’ use of Zoroastrian ideology in the Behistun Inscription was actually an abuse that later came to have the force of tradition behind it, rather than assuming, as most scholars do, that Zoroastrianism already existed in something like a completed form in the 7th century BCE.
The frustrating thing about Soudavar’s argument, though, is that it spuriously connects a totally appropriate skepticism about conventional narratives of the history of a religion to (what strikes me as) an equally inappropriate positivism about that religion’s founder. Soudavar thinks the reason Zoroastrianism hadn’t been “completed” by the reign of Darius was that Zoroaster himself lived in the late 7th century, which is to say that he was practically contemporary with the earliest Achaemenid rulers. From this it would follow that the Avestas in their entirety basically postdate the Achaemenid Empire and were written in the context of, not to say with the goal of supporting, that empire.
There are serious problems with that proposal from a linguistic standpoint: despite Soudavar’s protestations to the contrary, the Gathas, which are the most archaic part of the Avesta, must be very old indeed for them to show the similarity (in grammar, lexicon, idiom and even formula) to Vedic Sanskrit. Beyond that, scholars have pretty well proven that a linguistic stratification in the Avestas distinguishes at least two and possibly more dialect strata of composition. That would seem to give the lie to Soudavar’s explanation for the (for him apparent) archaism of the Gathas, which is that they’re actually written in an archaizing dialect by a prophet intending to impress. If the archaizing dialect was actually impressive, and actually available to a 7th-century writer, then why doesn’t the whole of the Avesta show a uniform “archaizing” flavor? The reason is rather that not all crafters of Avestan texts were equally competent in the Gathic dialect, because not all of them lived at a time when it was (at least close to) the spoken language; some of them lived much later, and so the composition of the Avesta has to be stretched out over centuries if not millenia. Soudavar’s compressed timeline for the authorship of the Avestas is therefore basically a non-starter.
Then why pursue that thesis in the first place, since it involves so much special pleading and is actually incidental to Soudavar’s substantive claims about the relation between Zoroastrianism and the Achaemenid Dynasty? I think it must be that Soudavar still accepts received ideas about the identification of Zoroastrianism with the founding prophet after whom this religion (in the West at least; compare MP mazdesn, which just means “worshiper of Ahura Mazda) ended up getting named.
What is the history of that connection, the history of an idea (which may be, to give away the ending, all that Zoroaster is)? As an etic interpretation, it goes pretty far back in the West, although not so far as you would think: as far as I know, the earliest mention of Zoroaster by name in Greco-Roman literature is by Pliny the Elder in the first century CE. He identifies Zoroaster as a wizard, not a prophet, and he ascribes this identification to a Greek scholar working some two centuries earlier named Hermippus. That, you could say, is just the kind of misunderstanding we should expect from Greeks and Romans who were more interested in the idea of Persia as a mysterious oriental other than they were concerned to know what actually went on there. However, Herodotus – writing in the 5th century BCE and extremely interested in details about Persian history – makes no mention of Zoroaster at all. Nor do the fragmentary remains of Ctesias, a physician who served at the Achaemenid court and would thus (if Soudavar’s views on the early spread of Zoroastrian belief are correct) have spent decades in an intensely and evangelically Zoroastrian milieu.
Greco-Roman interest in Zoroaster as prophet peaks among the gnostic-tending Neoplatonists of the 4th c CE and after, a set of sources that, in parallel contexts, scholars have rejected out of hand as transmitting historical realities from a millenium before. The same milieu – indeed, the name of Porphyry stands prominently in both narratives – also provides us with our most detailed accounts of the life of Pythagoras, but nobody now accepts that material as genuine. Of course, it reflects the accumulated results of centuries of mythmaking around a philosopher who probably left no written testimonia of his own, a source of error that would only have been compounded by the barriers of language and culture separating a Porphyry from any notional Zarathustra. More recently, we’ve begun to recognize another set of biases that distort late antique accounts of Pythagoras – the interest of writers in finding a “substitute Jesus” that could enable their schools of philosophy to compete with Christianity on an even footing. Zarathustra could serve that purpose just as well.
The difference between Zarathustra and Pythagoras is that, in the former case, we’re supposed to have sources “in the original language” that go back further in time and preserve a notionally independent tradition. But how true, really, is the conventional wisdom on this point? The majority of extant literature in Middle Persian, which certainly does represent Zoroaster as a prophet, dates no earlier than the 6th century CE for the simple reason that the alphabet in which it is written did not exist before that point. It may have circulated in oral form earlier than that, but ask any anthropologist about the lability of oral narratives in an oral culture.
The earliest datable evidence for Zoroaster’s place in the history of Zoroastrianism comes from early Sassanian-era inscriptions. These, indeed, reflect a consensus view among historians, for which there is ample evidence, that the Sassanians tied their imperial rule to Zoroastrianism as a legitimating institution. What remains unclear is the status of Zoroastrianism, and of Zoroaster particularly, in the age before the Sassanian revolution of the 3rd centure CE. The religious dimension of the Parthian inscriptions with which I am familiar is minimal. When we go back further, to the Achaemenid royal inscriptions, we find a forceful assertion of religious identity from which, however, the name of Zoroaster is entirely absent. Darius credits his victories to the aid of Ahura Mazda, whose worship he promotes; he could thus be correctly said to be a mazdesn, but not a Zoroastrian.
The picture is further complicated by a lexical feature of epigraphic Old Persian which Soudavar notes: the word in that language for god, baga, is not the one used in every Zoroastrian context known to us, yazata in Avestan and yazd in Middle Persian. Darius moreover presents Ahura Mazda as one baga among many, whereas Middle Persian writers do not to my knowledge give yazd as an epithet to Ohrmazd; to do so would be somehow to diminish him. Since tradition traces yazata as a lexeme back to Zoroaster’s own usage, we then have to admit that Darius talks about the gods in a language distinct from the one that Zoroaster himself is supposed to have employed. How likely does it seem, in light of this, that the religion of the Achaemenid kings took its inspiration from Zoroaster? Or that Zoroaster even existed as a source of authority in the same religious sphere?
The evidence critically points, then, not to skepticism about the conventional dating of Zoroaster’s floruit (Soudavar’s position), or even (though it also does this) to doubts about whether Zoroaster ever existed at all. The questions raised here are of a different order, because it turns out that the nature of our archive doesn’t even allow us to draw positive conclusions about Zoroaster’s existence or not. What the archive will allow us to do is to trace the history of Zoroaster as an idea. And we may even conjecture that the idea of Zoroaster was invented substantially later than the date of 618 BCE that Soudavar associates with the prophet’s life.