There are many things that I noticed from the readings about Zoroastrianism. First I will discuss those ascribed to the great king Darius. This was extremely interesting, as I have often heard of the Behistan inscriptions before but never actually read them, also I have read much of Darius and the policies of the Achaemenid dynasty. The first thing I noticed was the stark contrasts between Cyrus the Great and his semi-maybe 5th cousin? Cyrus was famous not only for his mercy towards conquered citizens, but also for his religious tolerance (not hard when one is a polytheist). Darius seems to have done a complete 180 on the policy of his famous ancestor. This inscription portrays a militantly Zoroastrian figure, who portrays the conquest of conquered territories like Armenia with the same tactics as pacifying states that have gone into rebellion, with complete and utter destruction. Of course there is room for artistic license in these words. After all, if I were running a country, I would want to make it as hard as possibly for the people to revolt, but I might think twice before using words like druj (lie) to describe what was probably the vast majority of faiths in my kingdom, and allow others to destroy them.
Also on a partially irrelevant side note, it is interesting to see that on the Behistan inscriptions there is no evidence of contact with the Greeks, which suggests that Darius didn’t think them important enough to talk about. This is not unusual considering the size of Darius’s empire compared with the size of the Greek city states. I find it astonishing, how one people’s history can be so important to them, and to the whole history of western civilisation, and yet unimportant enough not to make it into another's history books.
Now concerning the real topic: the information on the Zoroastrian bible, the Gathas. I found a number of things interesting. First of all this must be the one religion most single-mindedly devoted to ritual I have ever heard of. After the required readings I looked up more on the Gathas on line, and the list is endless for the proper way to butcher cows, drink haoma, and avoid the various kinds of impurity that plague daily. Now the history of Zoroastrianism as an off-shot from early Hinduism has not escaped me, and although I can see certain similarities from my admittedly small understanding of the Hindu faith, the differences seem more prominent. For one thing, like many faiths that happen to be polytheist, Hinduism, it can be argued, is a religion that seems more tolerant of other gods, as a result of the sheer amount of gods they possess. However, it is clear that this faith is militant in all its dealings with all other faiths by the way that Darius says that all followers of the lie must be converted and equates them with generally bad people. Also I see no evidence of the caste system for which the Hindu faith is of course so famous in these writings. It seems from the Gathas that anyone who believes can not only go to heaven, but also take an active part in ceremony. It should be remembered of course that Zoroaster was an example that all people could and should follow. Also oddly enough, I see no evidence of reincarnation in either these stories or in the wider Zoroastrian mythos. If this truly was a rebel element of the Hindu faith, it is absolutely the most comprehensive revolution that I have ever seen, from origins to deity to daily life, the Zoroastrian community gutted everything but the kitchen sink when they separated from polytheism.
Of course one thing that they kept with them was the treatment of women, especially during menstruation. This emphasis on the impurity of menstruation as a contagion seems older than anything, which divides the human race. It can be found in the Bible, as well virtually every religion, and has been a key element in ensuring or justifying that woman have no real say in society. This is unsurprising but it does give you a real sense of their social structure, where even a women’s husband and children cannot go within 3 paces of her, several days a month. About the only that differs here is that there is no sense that a women in and of course herself has any control over who is near her, or even who sleeps with her at any given time. She receives neither condemnation nor punishment, when a man approaches her when she is in menstruation. This can be interpreted one of two ways the first of course is that this is a good thing, perhaps it shows that abuse or whipping of women was not tolerated in the society at large, but there is another way to interpret it, that the women was entirely passive in society and generally irrelevant. After all if someone has no control besides those that society gives one over their own body, one is not a major player in society. This tells us a lot in general about the society this was being written in. For example, in general hunter gatherer societies that we know of have rules that are far less strict for this sort of thing than agrarian. Which I find odd because all contemporary evidence points to the Gathas being written in a semi-settled lifestyle at earliest, of course, like many faiths this might merely be an addition added later.