Zarathustra

   By about six hundred years BC the Zoroastrian religion appeared to have reached its nadir, and had it not been for the work of Zarathustra, who reorganized it, it would doubtless have vanished. His writings have come to us in the Zend-Avesta, which endeavoured to lay down a standard text for the stories forming the basis of the doctrine. He appears to have been a religious leader of the type of Moses, bringing the people back to their fatih. In 520 BC Darius substituted the new monotheistic religion of Zarathustra for the polytheism then existing. In 485 BC an attempt to suppress the new religion was put down by Xerxes. In 404 BC the old religion was incorporated in the new one.