Mary Settegast is a historian who has focused her scientific research on understanding the history and time of Zoroaster’s life. After years of academic research, she gained valuable achievements. She studied at the University of California, Berkley and Columbia.
Mary Settegast, an American researcher, began her research on the life and teachings of Zarathushtra in the 1970s, in New York. Her specialty is archeology with a focus on the Neolithic period of the Middle East and the Near East. What separates her research from the studies of other archaeologists is Settegast’s attention to the mythology of the classical era. She found this method by studying ancient Greece and Rome. In this way, Settegast investigated the late Paleolithic and Neolithic ages and achieved exciting results. She believes that no period of the human history is more fascinating than the Neolithic period; because that very distant era is full of secrets that motivate the researcher to find a way to open them.
Settegast’s field of interest was about how religion and agriculture evolved in the ancient periods. In the book she published in 1986, she examined the possibility that the expansion of agriculture after 6500 BC, which caused the Neolithic revolution of Iran (up to the Aegean Sea), was influenced by the teachings of Ashu Zarathushtra, the Aryan prophet.
Settegast continuously expanded her scientific findings, and twenty years after the publication of her book, she achieved more precise and detailed results. So she decided to increase the scope of her previous research. On this basis, Settegast estimated the lifetime of Ashu Zarathushtra as 6500 years BC and discarded other proposed dates. She gave a comprehensive and scientific report of her theory in her book “when Zoroaster spoke”. She talks about the Near East and the early Neolithic period of Greece and Middle East, and in a separate chapter, she writes about the “life and teachings of Zoroaster”; and in yet other chapters the birth place and legacy of Zoroaster. Settegast also mentioned the influence of the Zoroastrian religion on other religions.
Settegast’s book contains noteworthy ancient-time events. There are two translations of this book; one is that we mentioned earlier, and Askar Bahrami did its translation; the other is translated by Shahrabanou Saremi. Mary Settegast has been engaged in her academic research for many years and is known as one of the famous archaeologist professors.
