page_title: Zoroaster
section_title: Western civilization
hierarchical_section_title: Zoroaster / Western civilization
caption_attribution_description: Italian&#58; Scuola di AteneThe School of Athenslabel QS:Lit,"Scuola di Atene"label QS:Len,"The School of Athens"label QS:Lel,"Η Σχολή των Αθηνών"label QS:Les,"La escuela de Atenas."
context_page_description: Zoroaster, also known as Zarathustra, Zarathushtra Spitama or Ashu Zarathushtra, was an ancient Iranian spiritual leader who founded what is now known as Zoroastrianism. His teachings challenged the existing traditions of the Indo-Iranian religion and inaugurated a movement that eventually became the dominant religion in Ancient Persia. 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. Most scholars date him in the 7th and 6th century BC as a near-contemporary of Cyrus the Great and Darius I, while some have speculated on datings as far back as the sixth millennium BC. Zoroastrianism eventually became the official religion of Ancient Persia and its distant subdivisions from the 6th century BCE to the 7th century CE. Zoroaster is credited with authorship of the Gathas as well as the Yasna Haptanghaiti, hymns composed in his native dialect, Old Avestan, and which comprise the core of Zoroastrian thinking.
caption: The School of Athens: a gathering of renaissance artists in the guise of philosophers from antiquity, in an idealized classical interior, featuring the scene with Zoroaster holding a planet or cosmos.
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