The man the Greeks knew as Zoroaster was born in the fertile plains of northeastern Iran to one of a number of Indo-Iranian, or Aryan, tribes that had branched off the Indo-European tree to settle across the Central Asian steppes. Aryan society at the time of Zarathustra was strictly stratified into three distinct classes. There were the warriors who protected the tribe from attack, the farmers and herders who fed the population, and the priests—generally known as the Magi—who presided over its highly ritualistic religious system.
