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Accounts of what is real, each set out in its own terms and each with its own page.
All World Views Does God Exist?The Zoroastrianism timeline in the History of Worldviews.
Streams: All of Zoroastrianism Iranian Zoroastrian Parsi Zoroastrian Diaspora
Zarathustra (Zoroaster), priest and prophet, receives the revelation of Ahura Mazda and composes the Gathas, the hymns at the core of the Avesta. His teaching sets the enduring frame of the faith: one wise lord, the choice between truth (asha) and the lie, fire as the symbol of truth, and the renovation of the world at the end of time.
The Avesta, the scripture of the faith, takes shape over centuries: the Old Avestan Gathas and Yasna Haptanghaiti attributed to Zarathustra's circle, and the Younger Avestan hymns, laws, and liturgies composed after him and transmitted orally by priests until they were written down in the Sasanian age.
Cyrus founds the Achaemenian Empire. His inscriptions and the Hebrew Bible's portrait of him as the Lord's anointed (Isaiah 45) tie the first Persian empire to the faith's royal horizon, and the empire's rule carries Iranian religion from Central Asia to Egypt.
Darius I's great inscription at Behistun proclaims that he rules by the favor of Auramazda and sets truth against the lie in the prophet's own terms. Under Darius and his successors the empire is administered in Auramazda's name, and magi serve at court.
Under the Arsacid (Parthian) kings, Iranian religion lives without a single orthodox center: fire temples and priestly schools preserve the oral Avesta, Zurvanite speculation grows, and tradition credits the Arsacid king Vologases with ordering the collection of the scattered Avestan texts.
The Sasanian kings make Zoroastrianism the religion of state: a ranked priesthood, fire temples in every district, and an orthodoxy defined in the Pahlavi books. The empire's four centuries are the faith's classical age, and its fall in 651 opens the long minority centuries.
Ardashir I, founder of the Sasanian house, rises from Persis with the priest Tansar at his side and binds throne and altar together: the new empire is founded, in the tradition's phrase, on religion and kingship as brothers. The great fires, including Adur Farnbag, are enthroned under his house.
Under Shapur II the high priest Adurbad i Mahraspandan is credited with fixing the Avesta's canon, undergoing the ordeal of molten metal to defend the text. The written Avesta, in its specially invented script, dates to this Sasanian codification tradition.
The great Pahlavi compendia take shape: the Denkard, the acts of the religion, a vast apology and summary of the faith, and the Bundahishn, the primal creation, setting out the cosmology of Ohrmazd and Ahriman. Compiled in the ninth and tenth centuries from Sasanian materials, they preserve the classical system in Middle Persian.
The Arab Muslim armies defeat the Sasanians, and Yazdegerd III, the last king, is killed in 651. Persia passes under Muslim rule; over the following centuries most Iranians convert to Islam, and the Zoroastrians who hold their faith become a minority in their own land. The date here follows the table; the Denkard and Bundahishn were compiled after this conquest from older materials.
Zoroastrian refugees from Iran reach Gujarat on India's west coast, where the local ruler, in the later account of the Qissa-i Sanjan, grants them settlement at Sanjan on conditions of peace. Their descendants are the Parsis, and India becomes the faith's second homeland.
The Mughal emperor Akbar receives the Parsi priest Meherji Rana at court (from 1578) and, in the climate of his policy of universal peace, Parsi practice is honored at the imperial court; tradition holds that a sacred fire was kept burning there. The encounter secures Parsi standing in Mughal India.
From the 1670s and 1680s the English East India Company draws Parsi shipbuilders, brokers, and merchants into Bombay's rise; Parsi families such as the Wadias become the company's master builders, and the community's long partnership with British India begins.
Contact with the Zoroastrians of Iran in the early eighteenth century reveals that the Indian and Iranian calendars differ by a month. The Parsis split over which reckoning to keep: the Kadmis adopt the Iranian alignment, while the Shenshais hold the traditional Indian calendar. The two calendars, and later the Fasli, divide Parsi religious dates to this day.
In the nineteenth century Parsis stand at the front of Indian commerce, industry, and public life: Jamsetji Tata founds the Tata enterprises, Dadabhai Naoroji carries Indian representation to the British Parliament, and Parsi philanthropy builds schools, hospitals, and the Bombay skyline.
In 1861 London Parsis, among them Muncherjee Hormusji Cama and Cowasji Jehangir, found the Zoroastrian Trust Funds of Europe to serve the first settled Zoroastrian community in the West, with a house of prayer and a burial ground at Brookwood. It is the diaspora's oldest standing institution.
Parsi merchants, students, and travelers reach North America from the mid-nineteenth century, and small communities form in New York and other cities long before any temple stands. Their associations, prayer meetings, and newsletters are the seedbed of the organized diaspora, and in 1987 the associations unite as the Federation of Zoroastrian Associations of North America (FEZANA).
In 1906 the scholar Kharshedji Rustomji Cama and the Zarthosthi Fasli Sal Mandal promote the Fasli calendar in Bombay, realigning the year to the seasons and to the Iranian reckoning so that Navroz falls at the spring equinox. The three living variants, Shenshai, Kadmi, and Fasli, fix the New Year on different days, and the choice of calendar remains a marker of community identity.
The Islamic Republic proclaimed in 1979 recognizes the Zoroastrians of Iran as a protected religious minority with a reserved seat in the Majlis, under a constitution that also subordinates them in law. Many Iranian Zoroastrians emigrate in the revolution's aftermath, swelling the diaspora.
In 1983 the Arbab Rustam Guiv Darbe Mehr opens in the Chicago area, the first purpose-built Zoroastrian temple in North America, endowed by the Guiv charitable trust. The same endowment raises sister temples at Westminster in California, at San Jose, and at Houston, and the photograph on this record shows the Westminster temple, with its Faravahar and the words Good Words, Good Thoughts, Good Deeds over the door. Consecrated fire temples on the continent turn scattered associations into settled congregations.
Worldwide the community counts perhaps 110,000 to 120,000 souls and shrinks in its historic homelands: India's Parsi census fell from 114,890 in 1941 to 57,264 in 2011, and Iran's community ages under emigration. The decline drives the modern debates over conversion, the children of mixed marriages, and the counts themselves.
