>>520952129
>Avesta
This wasn't even written down until the Middle Ages. Cyrus, the Persian king who freed the Jews, was a politheist worshiper of Marduk.

>It was not until around the 5th or 6th century CE that Avestan corpus was committed to written form, which lead to the creation of the Sasanian Avesta. This is seen as a turning point in the Avestan tradition since it separates the purely oral from the written transmission. The surviving texts of the Avesta, as they exist today, are assumed to derive from a single master copy produced by that collation. That master copy, now lost, is known as the 'Sasanian archetype'. The oldest surviving manuscript (K1) of an Avestan language text is dated 1323 CE

>Cyrus the Great does not make mention of Ahura Mazda in any of his inscriptions. In fact many of his inscriptions betray a sense of plurality that is not found in the texts of later kings of the Achaemenid dynasty. A very famous inscription of his illustrates this. This is the Cyrus Cylinder, found in Babylon, which contains a decree justifying his rule in the city of Babylon. In it he relates how Marduk, the local god of Babylon and chief god of Babylonia, appointed him to be king over Babylon. Later in the text he commands that temples be rebuilt and the various local cults be started up again. He then asks that these gods bless him. This text has a parallel in Ezra 1:1—4 in the Hebrew Bible. The portion of the text reads: “May all the gods whom I settled in their sacred centers ask daily of Bel that my days may be long, and may they intercede for my welfare. May they say to Marduk, my lord, As for Cyrus, the king who reveres you, . . .'”

>This inscription betrays in Cyrus a plurality which the later Achaemenid kings rejected. In this inscription he invokes Marduk and Bel, a title for Marduk, to bless him, and mentions a number of other gods