Introduction

Zoroastrianism (also called Mazdaism) was the religion of peoples speaking Iranian languages who, coming from Central Asia circa 1000 bce, settled on the Iranian Plateau. Iranian languages are related to the Indo-Aryan languages (Sanskrit, etc.), and the common proto-Indo-Iranian language may have been spoken by peoples inhabiting the area south and southeast of the Aral Sea, who split into Iranians and Indo-Aryans around 2000 bce. Archaeology has revealed dense settlements in this area of Central Asia, but attempts to correlate them, especially the so-called Bactrian-Margiana Archeological Complex circa 2200–1700 bce, with the people among whom Zoroastrianism originated remain inconclusive because of the lack of written testimonies.

The Zoroastrian sacred texts collected in the Avesta were composed orally between circa 1500 and 500 bce, but they contain no historical information about the Iranian people who created them. The geographical horizon of the composers of the Avesta spans the area from the modern Central Asian republics, through what is modern Afghanistan, to the Helmand River basin, reflecting their southward migration. Since the Iranians did not use writing, the archaeological records from the areas they may have occupied can be only tentatively correlated with them. Thus, the historical-cultural settings of the various stages of the religion of the Iranians before the Achaemenids (550–331 bce) cannot be determined.