Mark
You replied to Dennis that
> This seems to be an unresolved question. My reading suggests a very
deep date for Zarathustra.
>
> Some reference to the bible might be in order. We have Daniel, who
is putatively writing a book during the Babylonian exile, but all
responsible exegetes say these stories are Hasmonean in date.
Similarly, we have First, Second and Third Isaiah; the first would
seem to contain authentic pre-Babylonian material, while the second
would seem to be Babylonian and immediately post-Babylonian
interpolations; the third is the poet.
Good point
> History writing, in the modern sense, did not exist until
Herodotus.
Before Herodotus you don't so much have history as you have events
projected back or forward in time, as suits the mythic need, with a
great deal of editing involved. The authors of such books are not
writing history in the modern sense of the term.
Some have even argued that Herodotus's "Historia" is even not a
"history in the modern sense of the term". History, by whatever
definition you use it is "stories of the past", and whether these are
the analistic chronicles like those of Kings in the Bible, or the
Turin Kinglist of Egypt or the Sumerian Kinglist of Berosus and
others, history "exists" before Herodotus. Even the dream time
stories of Australian Aboriginal people are increasingly being shown
to be based upon real events - some 60,000 years old!
> Zarathushtra might not be particularly historical. C.f. the
historical Jesus vs. the Jesus as interpreted/created by the Church.
>
> The bible and Christianity/Judaism have been subjected to more
forms
of searching analysis than just about any other academic topic there
is. The Avestan religion has not been subjected to this searching
analysis and consequently many interesting questions remain not
merely
unresolved, but ultimately not even asked.
>
> Zarathrustra may be a creature of the Avestan religion, and not of
history. Whatever the case, however, it is clear that the Iranians
completely displaced the Indics in the South Caucusus and Persia --
in
fact, everywhere except India. The Iranians encountered the Indic
religion -- which seems to have been remarkably similar to their own.
As a matter of ethnic pride and social superiority, it seems they
differentiated themselves from the Indics they were displacing via
religion -- and were quite successful. Maybe it was the Sassanids who
did this, perhaps an earlier group.
Hmmm.... I think the earlier you argue for a Zarathustra, the less
"historical" he becomes. A later (7th century) Zarathustra would
have
more historic and less mythic elements possibly than an early (14th
century BC) one, remembered in Persian and Greek times.
> The question is not religion but caste. The elite Iranians needed
to
differentiate themselves from the 'pagan' Indics. If they did, they
succeeded wonderfully. The later conversion to Islam, and the
aftermath, would likely have extirpated whatever remains of ancient
Indic paganism which might have persisted into the 700-800s CE.
>
> Think of the ancient Christian apologetics, where the position of
the 'heretics' is recoverable only though the writings of those who
wrote against them. Would we know of the Cathari without the
polemics?
Would the surviving post AD 1, post AD 700s Indic-religionists of
Iran
have left records recoverable to us consequent to the Sassanids and
then later to the soldiers of Islam?
>
> The idea of 'sacred scriptures' seems to have first occurred
sometime after 700, progressing as time progressed. We get the
Avesta,
the first redaction of the Hebrew scriptures -- and even Confucius in
China. In Greece, we witness the canonization of Homer and Hesiod as
the basic books of the Olympian Religion.
This is Karl Jasper's "Axial Age". It was a period when culture
contact across large distances was calling traditional beliefs into
question. Religious reformers undertook to systematise the missmatch
of traditional hotch-potch and put it into a "system" which gave a
new
sense of "meaning" to a world which seemed to be otherwise
meaningless
- as a result of the successful challenges to traditional belief
systems. As the "historian" MacNeill showed, this period was that of
the "closure of the Afro-Eurasian Oecumene. Trade routes connected
sub-Saharan Africa to Korea. Along these trade routes, ideas, trade
goods, and diseases flowed.
> Whatever the Avesta is, it is not unreasonable to assume
Zarathushtra is the back-projected author, the religous author, the
religious founder, the Moses of Zoroastrianism, the Homer of
Olympianism. Zarathustra is probably historical, but he is also
mythic. We have to treat him as do Jesus and Moses and Homer.
Zaehner in his monumental "Dawn and Twilight of Zoroastrianism" gives
the kind of critical assessment you are seeking Mark. He argues for
a
late, and a high hisoticisty to the stories of Zarathustra. To me it
makes sense, but eh... each to his own eh?
Regards
John