Ideas: A History from Fire to Freud

The Israelites remained in exile in Babylon from 586 BC to 539 BC. While they were there, they found that their captors practised Zoroastrianism, which was the major belief system in the Middle East before Islam. The origins of this faith are obscure. According to Zoroastrian tradition, Zarathustra made his first conversion ‘258 years before Alexander’, which would put it at 588 BC, and therefore right in the middle of the Axial Age. But this cannot be correct. One reason is that the language of Zoroastrian scriptures, the Gathas, the liturgical hymns which make up the Avesta, the Zoroastrian canon, is very similar to the oldest layer of Sanskrit, the language of the Vedas, the sacred texts of the Hindus (see here). The two languages are so close that they are ‘little more than dialects of one tongue’, and not many centuries can have separated them from their common origins.⁹² Since the Vedas date to between 1900 and 1200 BC, at least, the Gathas cannot be very much younger.

However, while the Vedas were still set in the heroic age, with many gods, often acting ‘with the same nature as men’, and sometimes with great cruelty, Zoroastrianism was very different.⁹³ Zoroastrianism has one origin in the third millennium BC with the migration of the peoples known to archaeologists, pre-historians and philologists as the Indo-Aryans. As was mentioned above, there has been much debate as to where these people originated: from the region between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, between the Caspian Sea and the Aral Sea, in the lands around the Oxus river, north of Persia, as Iran then was, the so-called BMAC complex (Bactria Margiana Archaeological Complex, essentially northern Afghanistan), even the Indus valley. What seems more certain is that they split into two groups, one – further east – giving rise to the Vedic religion, which developed into Hinduism (see here); and the second, further west, giving rise to Zoroastrianism.

Certain aspects of Zoroastrianism appear to have developed from the cult of Mithras. Mithras, said to have been born out of a rock and often associated with bull sacrifice, appears first in the historical record on an inscription found at Boghazköy in eastern Anatolia, and dating from the fourteenth century BC. The inscription commemorates a treaty between the Hittites (whom we have already encountered, in an earlier chapter) and the Mitanni (a tribe with Aryan chiefs, across the Euphrates from what is now Syria) and mentions a number of deities who later appear in the Rig Veda, the Hindu scriptures. These deities include Mithra, Varuna and Indra.⁹⁴ Mithra, be it noted, is the old Persian word for contract, which is interesting for at least three reasons. One, and this is speculative, a god of contract recalls the Israelite idea of the covenant, which is essentially a contract with God – is this where the idea originally came from? Two, a god of contract also suggests an urban, or urbanising, culture, with a growing merchant class; but third, and arguably the most important reason, is that contract stood for fairness, and therefore justice.⁹⁵ And here, for the first time, we have a god who is an abstract concept – this was Zarathustra’s achievement. He broke with the tradition of a pantheon of gods.

Tradition variously puts Zarathustra’s birthplace in Rhages, the ancient town of Rayy, now on the outskirts of Tehran, or in Afghanistan or even as far away as Kazakhstan. By the time he was about thirty, however, Zarathustra had found his way to the court of King Gushtasp, the ruler of a tribe of people in the north of Iran, possibly the ancient site north-west of Kabul known as Balkh. There, he won over the king, and then the people, and his beliefs became the official religion.

The crucial importance – and the mystery – of Zoroastrianism lies partly in its introduction of abstract concepts as gods, and partly in its other features, some of which find echoes in Buddhism and Confucianism, and some of which appear to have helped form Judaism, and therefore Christianity and Islam. According to Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra was the source of the ‘profoundest error in human history – namely the invention of morality’.⁹⁶ Zarathustra envisaged three types of soul: the urvany, that part of the individual which survived the body’s death; fravashi, who ‘live the earth since the time of their death’; and daena, the conscience.⁹⁷ Either way, Zoroastrianism may well have been the fundamental set of ideas that helped shape the world’s major faiths as we know them today.