Zoroastrianism Viraf Namag. All Middle Persian texts written on Zoroastrianism during this time period are considered secondary works on the religion, and not scripture. Nonetheless, these texts have a strong influence on the religion. Zoroastrianism was founded by Zoroaster (or Zarathustra), later deemed a prophet, in ancient Iran. The precise date of the founding of Zoroastrianism is uncertain. Zoroaster was born in either Northeast Iran or Southwest Afghanistan. He was born into a culture with a polytheistic religion, which included animal sacrifice and the ritual use of intoxicants, quite similar to early forms of Hinduism in India. Zoroaster's birth and early
Zoroaster that it was a form of rational Deism, preferable to Christianity. Zoroaster was the subject of the 1749 opera, "Zoroastre", by Jean-Philippe Rameau. With the translation of the Avesta by Abraham Anquetil-Duperron, Western scholarship of Zoroastrianism began. An early 19th-century representation of Zoroaster derived from the portrait of a figure that appears in a 4th-century sculpture at Taq-e Bostan in south-western Iran. In E. T. A. Hoffmann's novel "" (1819), the mage Prosper Alpanus states that Professor Zoroaster was his teacher. In his seminal work "Also sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spoke Zarathustra)" (1885) the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche uses the native Iranian