Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud

by Peter Watson

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–furthereast–giving rise to the Vedic religion, which developed into Hinduism (see below, page 115); 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 chapte...