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>I felt like sinking into the ground, and apologized profusely. I should have been more careful with my words. Fire in all its aspects had been sacred to Iranians, before even the birth of Zoroaster, its great prophet whose history was shrouded in mystery and imagination. According to classical sources, Zoroaster lived '258 years before Alexander' - that is 258 years before Alexander the Great destroyed the almighty Persian Empire and sacked its famed white-stone city of Persepolis in 330 BC. This gave a date of 588 BC, although there seemed no real indication whether this was when the great teacher was born; when he received his first visionary revelation at the age of thirty; when he converted his mentor, a central Asian king named Vishtaspa, to his new faith at the age of forty; or when he died at the age of seventy-seven. Nor was there any good reason to suppose that this date meant anything at all, for the creed of Zoroaster, or Zarathustra as he was known to the Iranians, was purely a revitalization of a much older Indo-Iranian religion of immense antiquity, preserved in its fullest extent by the Magian priesthood of Media
>Direct comparisons could be drawn between the material in the Zend-Avesta, the sacred writings of Zoroaster (Zend being an ancient Persian language), and the mythology and teachings found in India's oldest work of literature, the Rig Veda, which dates to c. 1750 BC - a time-frame often ascribed to Zoroaster himself. Other sources have suggested that there were not one but two, three, four or even more prophets of history who each bore the title 'Zarathustra', which struck me as the most sensible solution to the problem
>The Latin writerJustin wrote that Zoroaster was the inventor of magic and that he had made a study of the doctrine of the Magi, who, like their counterparts, the Brahmans of India, venerated fire as the sacred symbol of godhead
