sky to the earth.[1] Nature hails Zarathushtra at his birth as an athravan.[2] He is the very first and foremost of the athravans.[3] Even Ahura Mazda himself takes this term to define one of his own innumerable names.[4] Like their Vedic bretheren, the Avestan people divided their society into different professional groups; and the athravans formed the first of them. Fire was their special charge, and it was their special duty to tend the sacred flame in the shrines, and also to go abroad preaching the religion of Mazda.[5]
The Medes and Persians of Western Iran. We have already seen that the Aryan race had established their settlements in Northwestern Iran from about 2000 b.c. and that the Kassites and Mitannis had ruled over considerable tracts between 1700 b.c. and 1400 b.c. The other two peoples of the same race that successively rose to great power during the first millennium before the Christian era were the Medes and the Persians. So close was their racial affinity that the Biblical and classical writers generally use their names as alternative terms. The Medes or Mada are first mentioned by their names in the Assyrian inscriptions in the ninth century b.c. They overthrew the Assyrian empire in about 708 b.c., thus replacing the Semitic domination in Western Iran by the Aryan.
The earliest mention of the Persians is made in the Assyrian inscriptions where it is said that the Assyrian King Shalmaneser II led a campaign against the people of Parsua in the Zagros in the ninth century b.c. These people were probably identical with the Persians who rose to power later in the further east. They lived in Pars, known in its Greek form as Persis, and were a tributary subject people under the Medes. Their ruling house was known after the name of Hakhamanish, the head of the royal house, known in history in its Greek form, Achaemenes. Cyrus wrested the royal sceptre from the Medes and founded the Persian empire in about 558 b.c.
Not long after the death of Vishtaspa, the royal patron of Zarathushtra, the Kingly Glory left the eastern line of the Iranian kings and thus flew to the west. With the shifting of the political sphere of influence, the centre of religious authority
