Zoroaster and the rise of dualist religion

Date

c. 1200 to 900 BCE

Category

Religion & ideology

Region

Greater Iran (Central Asia/Iran)

Era

Ancient Civilizations

Significance

The Iranian prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster) preached a reformed religion centred on a single supreme creator god, Ahura Mazda, and an ethical-cosmic dualism between Asha (truth and right order) and Druj (the lie and chaos), in which human beings must freely choose to side with good against evil.

His teachings are preserved in the Gathas, a set of hymns composed in an archaic Iranian language and traditionally ascribed to the prophet himself, forming the oldest layer of the sacred Avesta. Zoroastrianism introduced or sharpened ideas with a long afterlife in world religion, including a powerful cosmic struggle between good and evil, individual moral responsibility and judgment after death, a final triumph of good and the renewal of the world. Becoming the dominant faith of successive Iranian empires, it influenced later religious thought and is frequently discussed in connection with eschatological and dualist motifs in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Zoroaster's date is highly uncertain, with scholarly estimates ranging across several centuries.

Empires active in c. 1200 to 900 BCE

• New Kingdom of Egypt
  1550 BCE to 1077 BCE
• Shang Dynasty
  1600 BCE to 1046 BCE
• Hittite Empire
  1650 BCE to 1178 BCE
• Phoenician City-States
  1200 BCE to 539 BCE
• Elamite Kingdom
  2700 BCE to 539 BCE

Related religion & ideology events

• Enuma Elish: the Babylonian epic of creation
  c. 1150 BCE
• Akhenaten's Atenist revolution and the Amarna period
  c. 1348 BCE
• Composition of the Rigveda
  c. 1500-1200 BCE
• Construction of Solomon's Temple (First Temple) in Jerusalem
  c. 957 BCE
• Chavín de Huántar and the first pan-Andean religious cult
  c. 900 BCE
• Great Ziggurat of Ur and temple-centred religion
  c. 2100 BCE

Essential reading

• Tomb of Fu Hao: An Undisturbed Shang Royal Burial
  c. 1250 BCE
• Invention of Standardised Coinage in Lydia (the Lydian Stater)
  c. 630 BCE
• Senusret III's Nubian campaigns and administrative centralisation
  c. 1850 BCE
• Decline and De-urbanisation of the Indus Civilisation
  c. 1900 BCE

Further reading

A Little History of Religion

The wider story

A Little History of Religion

Richard Holloway

Accessible sweep of humanity's faiths and belief systems from prehistory to the present.

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