The questions of 'first' are hard, and 'first religion'
questions are impossible
- similar to 'when our species became human'.
By that, I do not mean to criticise the question, but ask for a benevolent
rating of this attempt to answer. Undoubtedly, when people cam to Persia,
they brought some religion with them.
These were probably Aryans (a words misused ba Nazis and supremacist)
http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/ANCINDIA/ARYANS.HTM
the Rig-veda
.. is closely tied to the pre-Zoroastrian Persian religion. ... Bal
Gangadhar Tilak, based on astronomical alignments in the Rig-Veda
which PinkFreud meantioned in her comment
It is uncertain how far back Zoroaster/Zarathushtra/Zartosht lived,
the Zoroastrian Scriptures as we now have them are a jumble of
fragmentsaround 1700BC.
Zoroastrianism figures in the Bible as the religion of the Magi in the
New Testament, and possibly as the state religion of the Medes in the
Old Testament.
Zoroaster (which unfortunately is more a Greek corruption of his name;
Zartosht is perhaps closer to the original) was himself a reformer, it
is suspected, of a Vedic religious tradition. The characteristic of
this reform seems to have been the promotion of the "creator" gods
(asuras) over the "warrior" gods (devas), a dichotomy which comes down
to us today as angels vs. demons, and far more than this, Zoroaster
elevates one particular asura, Ahura Mazda ("Lord Wisdom"), to be the
sole deity for worship.
In this view there would have been an established older religion that
revered the pantheon of warrior gods at the time that Zoroaster
composed his hymns to Ahura Mazda. Doubtless there had been an even
earlier epoch in which a male priest sincerely believed that his new
thinking of preemptive war was destined to replace the fuzzy-minded
liberal thinking of those feel-good fertility cults over in the river
valleys.
see also
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=571368
http://www.san.beck.org/EC7-Vedas.html
So, in summary, I vould day firt religion was that of Vedas
http://www.dalitstan.org/holocaust/negation/rkochhar.html
religion with same roots as hinduism
Rig-Veda: Persian Heritage In Hindu Traditions ·
http://www.experiencefestival.com/rig-veda
I thank other researchers for contributions to this answer.
Hedgie |
