A MANUAL OF "KHSHNOOM" - Traditional Zoroastrianism: Tenets of ...

INTRODUCTION
The controversy over the date of Zarathushtra has, arisen from
the fact that certain oldest Greek writers have stated that Zoroaster
lived 6,000 years before Christ. However, when the modern
philological scholars set themselves to calculate and verify that
distant date, they found a huge gap of some 5,500 years, for which
they could not find any historical chronicles, but on the contrary,
they found mention in Pahlavi of the religion having been
disturbed after 300 "years." Coincidentally, this period of 300
years was seemingly almost "synchronous" with the destruction of
Iran wrought by Alexander the Great in B. C. 320 or so. Thus this
statement of the Pahlavi writer supported the paucity of historical
chronicles, and strengthened the misguided belief of the scholars
in a much nearer date, and so they came to the conclusion that
Zarathushtra lived in the neighborhood of 600 B. C. Such, in
brief_ is the idea of how the controversy over the date of
Zarathushtra arose, and how its true distant antiquity of over 6,000
B. C. came to be reduced to 600 B C, According to 'Calculations
of the heavens' this distant antiquity is of 7551 B. C.
While modern scholars thus scale down the era to 600 B. C.
other foreign sources declare the same to be 8,900 years remote or
very near to it. Thus in "Oahspe, The Kosmon Bible"
(p.l) it is said: _
"Zarathushtra erroneously called Zoroaster a Persian Law
Giver who lived in the cycles of Fragapatti eight thousand
nine hundred years ago, the farthest back of all historical
characters" .
According to the above, the date of Zarathushtra comes to
(8900 minus 1955 =) 6,945 B.C. Similarly in September 1957
number of the "Mazdaznan" magazine (p. 2) published in Los
Angeles, California, we find the following under the heading
.'Zarathushtra" :
"On September 19th, the family of Mazda throughout the
world again celebrates the birthday of the thrice blessed
Zarathushtra, who according to our extant records, was born
6,900 B.c."
From the two quotations cited above it is clear that the ancient
Greek writers were not the only ones to have reported the era to be
beyond 6000 B.c.