The Iranian plateau, Persia, gave the world one of its most influential religions and served as the birthplace of two more, spanning three thousand years. The oldest is Zoroastrianism, the faith of the prophet Zarathustra (Zoroaster), among the earliest of the ethical and (in a qualified sense) monotheistic religions: it centres on the supreme good creator Ahura Mazda, opposed by the destructive spirit Angra Mainyu, and on a cosmic and moral struggle between truth and falsehood in which every person must choose and in which good is destined finally to triumph, at a last judgement and renovation of the world. Zoroastrian ideas about heaven and hell, angels and demons, a coming savior, resurrection, and final judgement deeply influenced Judaism during the Persian period and, through it, Christianity and Islam.
From the same ground came Manichaeism, the third-century prophet Mani's radically dualist religion of light and dark that spread from Rome to China, and, in the nineteenth century, the Baha'i Faith, founded in Persia by Baha'u'llah as a universalist religion teaching the unity of God, of religion, and of humankind, for which its followers have faced severe persecution in their homeland. Persia thus stands as the source of a dualist-ethical vision of the cosmos that shaped the whole Western religious imagination, and as a continuing wellspring of prophetic religion.