Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy

Thus spake Zarathustra, founder of what Mary Boyce calls “the oldest of the credal (as opposed to ethnic) faiths”, which has been known variously as Mazdaism, Magism, Parsism, “the Persian religion”, and Zoroastrianism. According to a Greek story Pythagoras sat at the feet of the prophet in Babylon, circa 600 bc, but most scholars now think that he must have been around much earlier. Professor Boyce on “the origins of Zoroastrian philosophy” is the first of 48 scholarly essays that make up this latest philosophical leviathan from Routledge. They have been arranged ‐ rather “artificially”, as the editors admit ‐...