Almost everything about Zarathustra's dates and location is contested. The Greek tradition placed him absurdly early; Zoroastrian tradition places him 258 years before Alexander, which yields around 600 BCE; and linguistic analysis of the Gathas, whose Old Avestan is close in age to the Rigveda, has led most modern scholars to a much earlier date, commonly 1500–1000 BCE, in eastern Iran or Central Asia. The gap between these positions is a thousand years and has not closed. What the Gathas themselves show is a trained priest — he calls himself a zaotar — turning on the priestly establishment of his time, condemning the karapans and kavis who sacrifice cattle wastefully and obstruct the truth. He is emphatically human: he complains of having few cattle and few men, asks for protection, and is not prayed to. His images, showing a bearded figure in white with a hand raised, are a nineteenth-century standardisation loosely based on a Sasanian rock relief.