Zarathustra (Greek Zoroaster) was the founder of Zoroastrianism, the pre-Islamic religion of Iran. He is generally accepted to have preached in the 7th century BC but this is disputed, as is the question of whether the name refers to one or a number of people. Mary Settegast quotes[545] the Iranologist, Wilhelm Geiger (1856-1943), who supports[597] the view of a number of classical Greek writers who believed that Zarathustra lived 6,000 years before the death of Plato. Geiger quotes an ancient commentary that suggests that Zarathustra was ‘Greek or one of those who came forth from the Continent on the other side of the great sea’, which he speculates might have been Atlantis.
Settegast has now published a second book[546] on the time of Zarathustra.
