“[If] there was a composer of the Gāthās, then it was Ahura Mazdā.”¹
 

Who founded the religions of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, or Greece? Although it is perfectly reasonable, using an anthropological lens, to assume that a number of individuals in these societies must have created various components of these religions, such a question seems anachronistic. The chronological inapplicability of this question appears to be related to the categorical difference between religions deemed polytheistic and religions deemed monotheistic. The consistency of religio-historical narratives of “prophet-founders” across the latter suggests that this building block is significant to that category of religions. In a modern world dominated by religions deemed monotheistic, it is easy to understand the religious schema underlying such a question asked above and the impetus to apply it, however inappropriately, to religions deemed polytheistic. This chapter examines the narratives of Zarathustra and Moses as two “prophet-founders” to whom are attributed authorship of the texts that construct them: the five Old Avestan Gathas and five Biblical Hebrew books comprising Torah, respectively. Serving as paradigms for the building block (“prophet-founders”) in later religions deemed monotheistic, these literary figures appear to be both expressions of their religious communities and tools for cultivating and maintaining such groups. The close relationship between these narratives, the texts in which they are preserved, and the social and geographic mobility of the religions of YHWH and Ahura Mazda, point to the importance of mobile pastoralist social and agriculturally marginal environmental contexts on the development of these building blocks.

An examination of art associated with the modern religions of Judaism and Zoroastrianism in the last chapter revealed the significance of people to the depiction of these religions. It seems that much of the art deemed religious linked to the respective histories of Mazda- and YHWH-worship depicts adherents, religious functionaries, ritual activities, or objects for (but not of) worship. Although the primary focus of this chapter is aimed at understanding the figuration and function of Zarathustra and Moses, within the texts, the last chapter points to three groups of people that might be deemed religious within these communities: adherents (most broadly, “the people”), functionaries (religious professionals), and founders (the most important “prophets”). Despite the fact that, in title and discussion, this chapter is focused on people, the significance of the Avestan and Hebrew texts to the identities, functions, and interactions each of these groups is hard to miss. Additionally, although the last chapter was titled “Art Deemed Religious,” it focused on visual art to the exclusion of other forms; this chapter, by including a discussion of the texts deemed religious of communities of worship centered on YHWH and Ahura Mazda, can be said to consider some of the literary art deemed religious that fell beyond the scope of the last chapter.