The writing was completed, he thinks, about 400 B.

The writing was completed, he thinks, about 400 B.C. It is not possible, he says, at the very latest, to put the time of Zoroaster after 1000 B.C., and he regards 2800 B.C. as a more likely date, while he may be very much older. [ Essays on the Parsis, by Martin Haug, Ph.D, Trüb’s Oriental Series, p 136]. Dr. Haug further remarks: "Under no circumstances can we assign him a later date than B.C.

1000, and one may even find reasons for placing his era much earlier and making him a contemporary of Moses. Pliny, who compares both Moses and Zoroaster, whom he calls inventors of two different kinds of magic rites, goes much farther and states that Zoroaster lived several thousand years before Moses". [ Ibid. p 299]. So we are gradually getting backwards, from 610 B.C. to 1500 B. C. from 1500 B.C.

to 2800 B.C and possibly very much earlier may be the first proclamation of the famous truths by the Prophet. Greek testimony, however, which is available - and it is valuable as being much more ancient than the views of our modern Orientalists - throws the date, once more,. very much further back.

Aristotle, for instance, places the date of the Prophet at 9600 B.C., putting it 6,000 years before the time of Plato, and we may say generally that this is the view which is taken by the Greek historians. Somewhere about 9,000 years before the Christian era would be the date assigned by them to the teachings of the Prophet. [ Essays on the Parsis, by Martin Haug, Ph.D, Trüb’s Oriental Series, p 298].

The discoveries now being made by European Archaeologists are very much helping the contention which pushes the beginnings of the religion further and further back; for inasmuch as we have to connect this Zarathushtrian tradition with the tradition of Chaldea, with the tradition of Nineveh, and of Babylonia, the late researches in those districts throw some light upon the question. You may remember that only a month or two ago in Lucifer , in a comment on an article by H. P.

Blavatsky, I mentioned some of the very latest discoveries which are being made in the country over which this religion once ruled unchallenged. We find there the history of that land, preserved in cuneiform writing, traced back to at least 7,000 years before Christ, and probably, the discoverer says, to 8000 B.C.