Zoroaster's name probably means something like 'he who manages camels'
The prophet behind one of the world's oldest surviving faiths may have been named for handling camels. Nobody even agrees when he lived: estimates stretch across a thousand years, and ancient Greek writers placed him thousands of years before Xerxes. What survives is a set of hymns preaching truth against deception.
Zarathushtra Spitama was an Iranian reformer who broke with the old religion of his people and became the spiritual founder of Zoroastrianism. Tradition holds that he composed the Gathas, the oldest scriptures, in Avestan, which hints at a homeland in eastern Greater Iran, possibly around Bactra in present-day Afghanistan. According to tradition he trained as a priest and, at about thirty, received a revelation of Ahura Mazda, the Wise Lord, and of the clash between asha, truth, and druj, deception. His teaching stressed free will and living rightly through good thoughts, words and deeds.
The familiar name 'Zoroaster' is a Greek adaptation from the fifth century BCE, seemingly reshaped to suggest 'undiluted star'. The Avestan original likely ended in the Indo-Iranian word for camel, but the first part is disputed. Proposals range from old or angry camels to driving, desiring or yellow camels. Armenian Christians may even have twisted one form of the name to echo their word for wrong or unjust.
Dating him is harder still. Classical Greek writers, including Aristotle, put him 6,000 years before Xerxes invaded Greece in 480 BCE, possibly misunderstanding Zoroastrian cosmic cycles. Later priests calculated that he lived 258 years before Alexander, partly to rival the Seleucids' new calendar era. Modern scholars split between a late dating in the seventh and sixth centuries BCE and an early one. Mary Boyce pointed to the Gathas' close kinship with the language of the Rigveda, and many now consider around 1000 BCE most likely. The European Research Council, working with Almut Hintze, put him roughly 3,500 years ago.
His faith became Greater Iran's leading religion from about the sixth century BCE and held official status under the Sassanid Empire until the Arab-Muslim conquest in the seventh century CE. Some claim, with much controversy, to detect his influence on Plato or Pythagoras; a link to Judaism, Christianity and Islam through ideas of cosmic dualism and personal morality is less disputed.
Source: Zoroaster
