I need a bit more information here: Google turns up no-one by that name than a couple of Byzantine lawyers from a thousand years after Pythagoras.
This quote I was able to substantiate, in this text of Diogenes chapter 3 "Plato". It is at the end of a list of the places Plato did travel (Italy, Asia Minor, the Middle East, Egypt) and the people he did talk to and were influenced by. It says he wanted to go to Persia, but was never able. So, OK, he did think there were some people worth talking to there, but he never did, which is why we don't any shred of a trace of Zoroastrianism in his writings.
According to this and other sources, the "Magians" that Eudoxus was referring to were not the Zoroastrians, but their enemies the polytheists (like the faction that tried to usurp from the Achaemenid dynasty during the "pseudo-Smerdis" affair) and astrologers, whose lore he believed was derived from the Chaldeans (as opposed to having originated in Iran); his assertion was that the Mesopotamian civilization was older than the Egyptian (which is correct). Whether the "Magians" that Plato wanted to visit were of this kind, or the Zoroastrian kind, or whether Plato even knew anything about the multiple religious factions in the east, I cannot say.
Not at all "in the same way": like the Abrahamic God, Ahura Mazda is conceived as a personal being, who creates emanations by acts of will; Socrates was harshly critical (see the Euthyphro in particular) of any such view, insisting that The Good was prior to the will of any being, "divine" or otherwise.
I take it you are not a citizen? *I* got to vote.
The tribal chiefs are an unelected, self-perpetuating class which tyrannize over the rest of the population. They are frequently on the edge of violence with each other, because they are raised to be unaccustomed to having their self-will thwarted. A jirga in which neighboring tribal chiefs can settle their differences is better than perpetual warfare, but often amounts to trading away their subject people as a kind of "property": the notorious case where a "Romeo-and-Juliet" romance between teenagers from rival clans led to "Juliet's" clan feeling insulted, so that their men were allowed to gang-rape a woman of "Romeo's" clan to balance the dishonor, is not remotely similar to anything that would happen in America, and to call this "democracy" is ridiculous.
It does me no good for you to tell me that someone I don't know "makes a good case" when you don't tell me anything about what his case was. All I find is that no Greek from before Alexander, not a single one that I can find, mentions the name "Zoroaster" at all; and that when "Magians" are referred to, they are not just non-Zoroastrians, but actually anti-Zoroastrians.
If he implies that, then he is just wrong. Didn't we just look at the primary source saying that Plato thought of going to Persia but never made it? And Aristotle was not much of a traveller at all, getting as far east as the isle of Lesbos once, but otherwise sticking between Athens and Macedonia.
A vague similarity in concepts does not make much of an argument that one is the source of the other. In particular, the Platonic forms do NOT arise from the will of any personal being; Zoroastrianism with Ahura Mazda completely deleted would be quite a different thing.
That's a big "if".
No, the Persian frontiers did not extend there. They were REPULSED, remember? The invaders and defenders did not discuss philosophy with each other during the battles.
I don't know what you are referring to as "Medism" in this context. The Medes were enemies of the Persians, and in accounts of the "Smerdis" affair the polytheistic "Median Magi" are the opponents of the Achaemenid regime and its Zoroastrian religion.
You could not possibly be more mistaken. Our votes determine who the electors are, and it is the role of the electors which is "merely symbolic", as they pre-announce who they will cast ballots for, so that it does not matter at all who they individually happen to be.
Uh... that's exactly what you are doing when you name tyranny by an unelected small class of unaccountable "elders" raised to be ego-driven as a "democracy".
Nothing that Afghanistan has ever practiced as far back as we have any record resembles "democracy" in the slightest.
Afghanistan has ALWAYS suffered from internal wars of tribe against tribe, because of its tyrannical system. This has made it a tempting target for invasion, although invaders have often found it very slippery ground.
No. He describes an elective monarchy, although in practice the choice of successor was determined by inheritance or violence and the vote purely a formality; and once in power, the monarch was absolute and unchecked.
Well, I'll look him up, but I have to say that I never what I'm going to get from your sources, sometimes good information and sometimes stretchers and thorough misinterpretations. I know of Anaxagoras, whose philosophy was thoroughly atheistic, and am stunned to see his concepts considered "similar to Ahura Mazda"; the imaginative reconstruction of "Persians" in the play by Aeschylus shows no particular knowledge of their religion, the line "The temples of all our gods are in danger" especially indicating that he did not know they were monotheistic; Socrates as I keep having to tell you was a strong opponent of the notion that Ideals such as The Good arise from any willful personal being, etc.
And when the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1978 all the way to Beirut the people threw flowers at the soldiers and expressed their love for Israel, a sentiment which rather changed when the Israelis left. The Ukrainians expressed similar enthusiasm for Germans when the Nazis moved east, and for the Soviets when the military movement went westward. Temporarily expedient political expressions have nothing to do with religious ideology.
I don't.
In November of 2008. "Obama" was on the ballot, but the vote actually went toward a slate of electors pledged to cast the state of Michigan's ballots for Obama; the names were public and I could have looked them up, but nobody bothers because they don't do anything else. The identity of the chosen electors was entirely determined by my votes and the votes of my neighbors; if enough of us had ticked "McCain" instead, the McCain electors would have had the job of casting the formal ballots.
That varies from state to state; the reason not all states actually require it dates back to a debacle in 1868, when Horace Greeley lost so badly that he had a heart attack and died listening to the November returns. Some Democratic electors scattered their votes (didn't matter; Grant electors outnumbered them) but some were compelled to formally vote for a dead man.
An "elder" gets his job by being born into a leading family and by outliving his cousins-- or, often enough, by killing his cousins. Nobody else has anything to say about it, and this class of people is raised to be arrogant and self-willed.
NO!!! I call it "despotism" as did the Greeks. The lack of any right to have any say about major issues was what frightened the Greeks about the Persian system and led to their fierce resistance. You have things totally backwards. Greek authors note that subjects of Persia did not even have the economic freedom to buy and sell in open markets: farmers sold their crops and customers brought their bread from whoever the government granted the local grain concession; this sounds like the old Soviet Union, except that I would bet it was more corrupt, with the grain-factor giving the minister who granted him the monopoly some cut of the profits, and everyone taking it as a given that this is just how things go.
There is no such thing as "destabilizing" Afghanistan. It has no internal stability, and never did.
There have been genuine examples of this kind of system: in early modern Poland all the "nobles" (which included some rather small land-holders; as many as a quarter of the population may have been entitled to call themselves "nobles" in some periods) elected the king, who then held office for life; there were often genuinely debated elections with multiple candidates; the eldest son of the old king might be a sentimental favorite, but it was often preferred to draft an outsider, a second son or cousin from a foreign royal family who might provide a useful military alliance.
Untrue. Solon was elected archon of Athens in 594 BC; before him only the eupatrids ("well born") voted, and we do not know how long that had been the system; after him the franchise was extended to all "freeborn Athenian sons of freeborn Athenians" (immigrants and freed slaves did not get the vote, nor their children, but after another generation they were admitted to full citizenship; women, of course, didn't get to vote). At this time Persia was still a subject province of the Medes, and the system apparently was that the throne was bequeathed by the old king's will: Teispes, an early Achaemenid, decided to give both of his sons a piece of the realm ("Anshan" was the bigger piece, but was reunited with "Persia" when the Anshan direct line died out).
NO NO NO. The king was God's Representative on Earth, and "justice" and "righteousness" were whatever he said it was. Cambyses was the most infamous, forcibly "marrying" his sister by raping her, and killing his brother, among other atrocities.
Depends on what state you live in: I think more states allow electors to change their mind than forbid it (because of that old conundrum about what if the candidate dies suddenly). But you are missing the point completely. When I ticked "Obama" on the ballot, it is true that technically I was not "voting Obama for President" which the electors legally do; but I was voting for Obama to be the one who DECIDED WHO ALL THE ELECTORS WOULD BE (and if Obama picked an elector who could not be trusted to vote Obama for President, well that was his mistake; but really, that doesn't come up much). This system of multiple-indirections is not a good one, I will grant you (there is a tedious history behind it), but to compare this with "elders" who were not chosen by anyone, owing their positions strictly to parentage and longevity, is way wide of the mark.
Both. First of all, once the monarch was in power, he could do anything-- anything at all-- and no-one could stop him except by armed revolt. Secondly, the "election" was never genuine, as far as we can tell: whenever there were actually multiple candidates, the issue was settled by preponderance of armed force (as in the "election" that Xenophon personally took part in) and no-one dared defy the victor in battle. Thirdly, we don't know the membership of this "Council of Elders" but I think it safe to assume they weren't chosen by anybody, only by parentage and longevity.
The rest of the world was totally accustomed to absolute monarchy. The Greeks, and only the Greeks, had developed and come to value a tradition of individual liberties.
The satraps were either family members of the Persian royal family, or castrated slaves. They had no autonomy whatsoever.
This is my personal conjecture, which I have posted to some long-range linguistics boards; it is not from anybody else. The origins of the Polish people are somewhat mysterious: they seem to "spring up out of the earth" in medieval times. Before the Hunnish invasions, the area where Poland now is had a vibrant economy (the "Przeworsk" culture) marked by a network of log-roads reaching all the way to the northern sources of amber and furs, extensive glass-works producing wares of high quality, and considerable metallurgical foundries exploiting the coal and iron ore resources; then it all vanishes abruptly, and it is centuries before there is a thick population there again, now Polish although before then the "Przeworsk" peoples were, I believe, many Vandic-speaking ("Vandic" is a now-extinct branch of Indo-European, only fragmentarily preserved). The desparate and violent long migration of the Vandals has given them a bad reputation, but their very cohesive organization and military skills indicate that they were far from "barbarian"; I believed they suffered a disastrous reverse when the Huns moved into the Carpathian redoubt ("Hungary" and neighboring territory) and pushed out the Sarmatians who had been living there, who largely vanish from the history at this point with few further references-- but I think those Sarmatians were not all massacred, but instead pushed north, into what had been "Vandalia" but now became "Poland".
Utterly identical to the "elders": they were the senior members of the leading families. Why is that "democracy" in Afghanistan, but not in Greece? Persia was moving into a system of limited voting rights only for the favored few, just when Greece was moving past that to a broader-based system.
They knew nothing at all about Teispes except the name. He was described as the leader of a tribe of Parsagadae, supposedly the origin of the name "Persian"; actually, Pathragada was not a tribe, but a royal residence, built by Cyrus the Great generations later than Teispes (abandoned in favor of Persepolis forty miles west, under Darius), whose name was unrelated to "Persian" (two consonants got switched to create the accidental resemblance). This is just the usual: little bits of information, somewhat garbled-- what do you expect?
Whether the king felt either gratitude to God, or any sense of duty, was entirely up to him. As far as anybody else was concerned, the king WAS "God" or might as well have been.
An extreme case, but far from "isolated".
The candidate who gets to choose the electors is THE ONE THE PEOPLE OF THE STATE VOTE FOR. Nobody in Afghanistan ever voted, directly or indirectly, for a member of a "jirga" until the Americans imposed this previously-unheard-of concept on them. A system in which over 90% of the people have no say whatsoever in what happens to them, and are treated as property by an unelected, unaccountable, self-perpetuating small clique is not "democracy" in any way, shape, or form; your insistence that it is goes beyond annoying to the level of infuriating.
I am not going to defend the "electoral college" relic, but again: your vote absolutely does "go to the candidate" in the sense of conferring on him the power to choose the electors for your state. Some funny things have happened with the electoral college: sometimes a "plurality" (nobody got over 50% of the popular vote) gets converted to a "majority" by the state-by-state weighting of the electors (as long as the candidate who got the most votes does win, this is arguably how it should be); once the second-place finisher won because of the state-by-state weighting (1884, Cleveland won New England states by wide margins but lost New York narrowly; so Harrison took it despite having fewer popular votes); sometimes the electoral college fails to resolve the issue requiring the House to settle it (1800 and 1824) and sometimes both popular and electoral vote totals have been disputed and the matter had to be thrashed out irregularly (1876 and 2000; I dispute the legitimacy of both outcomes, for what it matters). In no case whatsoever has your hypothetical of electors violating their pledges to change the result ever come close to happening (and if a candidate is so stupid as to choose electors who don't really want him, arguably such a candidate has thereby proven himself unworthy of the office anyway).
Only the Persian ethnicity was represented.
"PARTY"??? That's a totally alien concept. There was one and only one royal family; there might be multiple candidates from within that family, in which case there would be several ARMIES, and the battle between those armies would determine the outcome.
I don't call multiple centuries a "short" period.
The "elections" in Iran were never genuine, just ratifications of results achieved by armed force; and the monarchy was an absolute one, with no shred of pretence at constitutional restraints.
The satraps had three jobs: regulating trade in important goods (through the grants of monopolies to favored traders); raising taxes for the central government (with a cut for himself, naturally); and recruiting and leading armed contingents (the reason his loyalty had to be absolute). What we might think of as core functions of a local government, such as providing "police" to apprehend malefactors and "courts" to resolve inheritance or property disputes etc., were just not in the satrap's job description. Local religious authorities filled that void.
The novelty of allowing local communal freedom of religion under Cyrus was strongly emphasized in Professor Mendenhall's Biblical History that I took at University of Michigan. In elementary and high school, nothing about ancient history got any more than the briefest rush-through.
Of course, if Zoroaster had not sought out converts, there wouldn't have been any "Zoroastrians" at all. But it quickly became just the "local theology" for the Persian ethnicity, and not even for the other ethnicities under Persian rule. The influence of Zoroastrianism on the Persified Judaism which the New Testament takes for granted, and therefore on Christianity and ultimately Islam as well, is a significant topic for religious-history classes, but elementary and high schools tend to avoid religious topics like the plague (too easy to create offense, and then litigation). You are straining to make Zoroastrianism relevant to the political history as well-- but your views are just horribly wrong-headed in that regard. "English" class? English literature has lots of allusions to Biblical stories, and Greco-Roman myths, so those come up often; nobody in English literature ever mentions stories from the Avesta.
Slavic for "white" is bel. Russian Rus "Russia" is from older Rossiya (still used poetically) from still older Rossolya (Ptolemy spells the name of the people north of Scythia as Roxolani, probably his attempt at Rossolyani). It was once thought to be from the name of the Viking tribe from which king Rurik derived; this was based on Finnish Rus "(despised) foreigner" which especially meant "Swede" when Sweden ruled Finland and switched to meaning especially "Russian" when Russia ruled Finland; but it seems that it meant "Russian" first and that no Swedes ever used the name "Rus" for themselves. This took a while for scholars to accept because the evidence was first published under Stalin and was taken to be an example of "Russian chauvinism" (emphasized that "Russia" didn't owe anything to anybody else), but I take it as established that the name is ancient and native in Russian. Unlike the Sarmatians (Poles and Czechs?), however, this branch of the Slavs was never under Scythian rule, so an Iranian etymology would be particularly unlikely.
The Slavic word is mir (no trace of an "h") and means "community": can mean "village" (a small community) or "the whole world"; "peace" is a secondary meaning.
This one I like. The usual Slavic word for "king" is knez but the self-name Czech is from an early chieftain (roughly contemporaneous to Charlemagne) who founded a long-lasting royal line; a connection to shah is by no means unreasonable.
I can find the Iranian Simurgh but nothing about any Slavic "smergl" or "Smargel": source?
The word is a German borrowing (from Geschlecht "ancestry"). The origins of the class were mysterious already in medieval times, and the "Sarmatian" theory was just one of several, often fantastic, attempts to trace them back to ancient times. It might be the correct theory (I myself think so), but a late and disputed tradition about it is not good evidence for that.
Not that particular set of atrocities, as far as I know (among the Romans, Caligula married his sister-- consensually-- then sliced her open when she became pregnant; among Greeks, Romans, or anybody else, violent and murderous feuds between brothers is common enough but violence against sisters rather rarer); but neither do I know of another Persian with that particular history-- what I meant by saying Cambyses was "hardly isolated" is that Persian monarchs often did extreme things to demonstrate their absolute power (feeding a loyal retainer with the flesh of his son, to test him; "whatever the king wills, is good" is all he could say). Of course we can find lots of atrocities from Greeks too (Antiochus slicing off the hands and feet of seven boys, one after another, and frying them in a large pan; according to "3rd Maccabees" which might be just propaganda, but Antiochus did have a cruel reputation), but this is just an example of the "SO'S YOUR OLD MAN!" deflection on your part. I am not claiming that Persian kings were the only absolute monarchs, ever, or the only ones ever to show extreme cruelty; but answering "Haven't there been others?" is missing the point. The Persian kings WERE absolute, and WERE often cruel, because if they had that mind-set, there was nobody who could stop them; in your fantasizing about a Golden Age of Persian "democracy", you are light-years from facing up to this.
More like the "owners" of their tribes.
Why would he take anything except his narrow self-interests into consideration? It is not like any of the "little people" can do anything about it.
I am not going to defend the electoral college. But you think having the oldest members of the families with the most money be the only ones to vote is "more democratic"?
"Tribes" yes; "parties" no. A "party" is a group of people with no particular family relationship who share some ideas about how government should conduct itself. The concept is alien to Afghanistan.
You have a particular animosity against the Greeks, but look: tyrannical, oppressive, corrupt governments have been the rule and not the exception in the history of all peoples everywhere.
It was pointed out in my classes that even Athens gave no vote to women, slaves or even freedmen, immigrants or their first-generation children.
They do.
Nothing about this was transmitted to the West. I have no idea whether that was a Zoroastrian principle or not, because Zoroastrians have never made much effort to teach anybody else about their principles. The fact is, that prior to "Orientalist" scholarship starting in the 18th century, it is difficult to find any Western authors who know even the name "Zoroaster" let alone anything about his thought. This lack of influence on Western thought was a choice on the Zoroastrians' part. You seem to think that nobody in any other time or culture thought about "good" and "evil" at all unless Iranians taught them how; this is absurd, and why I call you a "chauvinist".
Thanks, but this isn't among Poles or Czechs so I don't see any relevance to the Sarmatian hypothesis. The Russians never had any Scythian overlordship, so any diffusion of this bit of folk-lore would be sometime later.
Along with the centum/s'atam shift, words like this go back to the common ancestor of Balto-Slavic and Indo-Iranian; that is why those two branches are considered a subgrouping within Indo-European.
There are numerous things wrong here. The Sarmatians were ENEMIES of the Iranian-style monarchy: the "Royal Scyths" were their oppressors, whom they overthrew; and there is no description of the Scyths that indicates any elective principle among them; if the Sarmatians indeed adopted such a principle, it would have been in opposition to the previous practices. Indeed now that I think of it, a possible Slavic borrowing from Iranian is East European slang shkuz "slimeball; despicable person" (entering American English as scuzz) which might be derived from "Scyth" (if pronounced something like Shkut, compare "Scot"; Assyrian had Ashkuz with prothetic vowel, becoming Hebrew Ashkenaz "Ukraine; eastern Europe" through a scibal error, waw changing to nun by the addition of a single stroke).
Like... absolute power of life and death over the rest of the tribe.
People with lots of property, or have lived to acquire wide connections, are always going to have a lot of influence on what happens, no escaping that. But should there be NO provision whatsoever for other people to be heard? You seem to prefer naked despotism to any democracy that is imperfect.
If the group is defined by ancestry, it is not a "party" or anything similar to a party.
Well look, there are occasional authors here and there throughout Western history who mention Persia, but you have to hunt hard for them. You don't have to hunt at all for Western writers who refer to Greek ideas and stories, or to Hebrew ideas and stories, because they are all-pervasive. If you are going to discuss the history of Western thought, you must give a lot of space and time to the Greeks and the Hebrews, and in the political area to the Romans.
They don't have time to give more than the broadest overview. The domestication of the chicken and pig by Southeast Asians was very important to the world's food supply; the invention of wind and string instruments in Anatolia was very important to the development of music; those things don't get covered either, because there is limited time.
Your sources run the full range from well researched through propagandistically slanted to crazily ranting; you don't seem to have much discrimination. I have learned a lot in this discussion that I didn't know about before, but I have also learned not to take your word for anything unless you show me what kind of source you got it from.
See now, I'd never heard of him before-- but I Google him and find that he is a dedicated and respectable researcher. I don't, however, find in the online-available extracts of his translation of "Vis and Rameen" what his argument is for connecting it to "Tristan and Isolde": the names don't look alike, and I don't know what the intermediates would be. The Wiki on "Tristan and Iseult" ("Tristan and Isolde" gives you a discussion of Wagner's opera, not the older texts) mentions the Persian theory but also Welsh, Irish, and Roman antecedents, calling the case for "Vis and Rameen" as the source purely "circumstantial". No disrespect to Dick Davis, but every scholar wants whatever it is that he is working to be vitally important to the history of the world!
Why? Their homelands were neighboring, Indo-Iranians in the steppes from the north shore of the Black Sea to the east of the Caspian, Balto-Slavics northwest of there out to the Baltic Sea. The Celts, in France and adjoining territories, are in a subgroup with the Italics-- does that seem weird to you?
There were no Iranians in Russia, ever. The ancient Rossolyani were beyond the reach of the Scyths; now in Ukraine (which any Ukrainian will proudly tell you is a different place from Russia), the "Royal Scyths" (Iranian-speaking) lorded it over the Sarmatian peasantry (Slavic-speaking) for a time-- but then the region was pretty much depopulated as it was stomped on successively by Goths, Huns, Avars, and Chechens; refilled largely with Turkic and Uralic tribes (Khazars, Magyars, Bulgars, and Pechenegs) who were chased west or largely stomped on by the Mongol invasion and then the Black Death; the present Ukrainians are a sub-branch of the Russians (although they don't like to be told that; their language is no further from Russian than Belarussian is, less than a thousand years of divergence, similar to the distance of Spanish and Portuguese) who filtered down there in medieval times.
Persia gave haven to the Nestorians, who taught that there is a sharp distinction between "divine" and "human" aspects of Jesus Christ: on the one hand there is the divine, eternal Word of God, and on the other there was the human, carpenter's son from Nazareth, who became the mouthpiece and servant of the Word of God after his baptism; and these two should not be confused. Many Christians today who would consider themselves quite "mainstream" would call this a more comprehensible view than the Catholic/Orthodox "Trinity" doctrine (in which the divine and human natures of Jesus Christ are fused into one "person" somehow), but at the time the Nestorians were considered terrible heretics. The Persian prophet Manigh tried to fuse Nestorianism and Zoroastrianism into his own blend; both Nestorianism and Manichaeism were "missionary" religions which made converts as deep into Asia as Mongolia in their day. The Sassanian regime despised this kind of "conversion" activity, as you say (Manigh was put to death by being skinned alive and chopped into pieces, to deter any stories about him "coming back from the dead" if his followers should be tempted to tell such).
I am talking about "political" parties, not "birthday" parties or "parties to a contract"; yes, of course the word "party" can be used in a lot of ways.
If you're expecting religious history to be taught at lower than college level, it ain't never gonna happen in America. Secular schools avoid religious topics like the plague, because that only asks for trouble; the Hebrew prophets don't get mentioned either. Christian schools of course teach that every element of Christian thought is the way it is because God revealed it that way: they don't want to hear "this bit is from Persia; that is from Platonist philophers; the other an adaptation to Germanic paganism" etc. A history class will mention that "Muslims" invaded here and there, but will never give a clue what "Muslim" even means. And why do you expect anything about Persia in "English" class, when Persians are mentioned no more often than, say, Turks in English literature?
So the web-site said, but as I told you, the extract made available online did not include any of his arguments for the position, so I have no way of assessing them.
They were the original inhabitants of the Ukraine, during the period when the Iranian "Royal Scyths" ruled it; but they themselves were Slavic-speaking, akin to the Russians ("Rossolyans") further north. The claim that Sarmatians themselves were Iranian is based on the survival of Iranian personal names among their chieftains, but does not reflect the actual affinity of the people.
Nice use of passive voice: "were supposed" BY WHOM? What is your source here? Ptolemy knows the Serbi as an easterly people, on the lower Rha (his name for the Volga); they only migrated to the Balkan Peninsula in the 8th century AD. Ptolemy was writing well after the fall of the Scythian realm, so there is no way of knowing whether the reach of the Royal Scyths extended that far; I don't know of any Iranian traces in the Serbo-Croatian language-- if you do, you need to point to a source.
"Are said" by whom? I need to see your sources.
Hardly.
#1. The Zoroastrians never wanted to convert anybody. Why? That's hard to say (I agreed with you above that it can't have been that way from the start or it never would have gone anywhere at all).
What??? No, "nations" and "parties" are not the same. Democrats and Republicans are not "nations". The US and Canada are not "parties".
Did your teachers spend time bad-mouthing Iranian culture??? All I got was that Persia was one of those ancient empires like Assyria and Babylonia that were big for a while and then gone. If you were Iraqi, I suppose you'd be arguing that there ought to have been blocks of time allocated to explaining the Assyrian and Babylonian influences on succeeding cultures.
That's a difficult question, one for specialists, hardly suitable for elementary school.
Ditto.
Ethics is important enough, of course, that OTHER PEOPLE HAVE THOUGHT ABOUT THE SUBJECT WITHOUT EVER HEARD OF "ZOROASTER". I get tired of you thinking that people only got notions of right and wrong because Iranians showed them how: you are just being silly. I can't think of any ethical thinker in the West, not one, who was influenced by Zoroastrianism: Nietzche's Also Sprach Zarathustra uses the name in a purely arbitrary way; nothing that he says has anything to do with real Zoroastrianism.
And that's it? They are two examples of the "Abrahamic" type of religion, and nothing about the content?
Again: the stories in Homer etc. come up in Western literature ALL THE TIME, Firdousi's stories NEVER.
You were claiming Iranian tribes as the source of those names. Sarmatians were the Slavic-speakers whom the Iranians oppressed. The "Serbi" are described by Ptolemy as living out on the Volga (they did not migrate to the Balkans until 8th century AD), further east than the power of the Royal Scyths probably ever extended, so these particular Slavs were never even ruled by Iranians as far as we know.
What??? People in the Roman empire may have had many reasons for not liking the Sassanid king, and the Roman emperors themselves of course had no intention whasoever of submitting to the Sassanid king.
