Iranian peoples


Iranian peoples, or Iranic peoples, are a diverse ethnolinguistic group who are identified chiefly by their native usage of any of the Iranian languages, which are a branch of the Indo-Iranian languages within the Indo-European language family.
The Proto-Iranians are believed to have emerged as a separate branch of the Indo-Iranians in Central Asia around the mid-2nd millennium BC. At their peak of expansion in the mid-1st millennium BC, the territory of the Iranian peoples stretched across the entire Eurasian Steppe; from the Danubian Plains in the west to the Ordos Plateau in the east and the Iranian Plateau in the south.
The ancient Iranian peoples who emerged after the 1st millennium BC include the Alans, the Bactrians, the Dahae, the Khwarazmians, the Massagetae, the Medes, the Parthians, the Persians, the Sagartians, the Saka, the Sarmatians, the Scythians, the Sogdians, and likely the Cimmerians, among other Iranian-speaking peoples of West Asia, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Eastern Steppe.
In the 1st millennium AD, their area of settlement, which was mainly concentrated in the steppes and deserts of Eurasia, was significantly reduced due to the expansion of the Slavic peoples, the Germanic peoples, the Turkic peoples, the Uralic peoples, the Mongolic peoples, and the Caucasian peoples; many were subjected to Slavicization and Turkification. Modern Iranian peoples include the Baloch, the Gilaks, the Kurds, the Lurs, the Mazanderanis, the Ossetians, the Pashtuns, the Persians, the Tats, the Tajiks, the Talysh, and the Wakhis. Their current distribution spreads across the Iranian Plateau stretching from the Caucasus in the north to the Persian Gulf in the south and from eastern Anatolia in the west to western Xinjiang in the east covering a region that is sometimes called Greater Iran, representing the extent of the Iranian-speaking peoples and the reach of their geopolitical and cultural influence.

Name

The term Iran derives directly from Middle Persian and Parthian . The Middle Iranian terms ērān and aryān are oblique plural forms of gentilic ēr- and ary-, both deriving from Old Persian , Avestan and Proto-Iranian *arya-.
There have been many attempts to qualify the verbal root of ar- in Old Iranian arya-. The following are according to 1957 and later linguists:
  • Emmanuel Laroche : ara- "to fit".
Old Iranian arya- being descended from Proto-Indo-European ar-yo-, meaning " assembler".
  • Georges Dumézil : ar- "to share".
  • Harold Walter Bailey : ar- "to beget".
  • Émil Benveniste : ar- "to fit".
Unlike the Sanskrit ārya-, the Old Iranian term has solely an ethnic meaning. Today, the Old Iranian arya- remains in ethno-linguistic names such as Iran, Alan, Ir, and Iron.
File:Darius I the Great's inscription.jpg|thumb|The Bistun Inscription of Darius the Great describes itself to have been composed in Arya .
In the Iranian languages, the gentilic is attested as a self-identifier included in ancient inscriptions and the literature of Avesta. The earliest epigraphically attested reference to the word arya- occurs in the Bistun Inscription of the 6th century BC. The inscription of Bistun describes itself to have been composed in Arya . As is also the case for all other Old Iranian language usage, the arya of the inscription does not signify anything but Iranian.
In royal Old Persian inscriptions, the term arya- appears in three different contexts:
  • As the name of the language of the Old Persian version of the inscription of Darius I in the Bistun Inscription.
  • As the ethnic background of Darius the Great in inscriptions at Rustam Relief and Susa and the ethnic background of Xerxes I in the inscription from Persepolis.
  • As the definition of the God of Iranians, Ohrmazd, in the Elamite version of the Bistun Inscription.
In the Dna and Dse, Darius and Xerxes describe themselves as "an Achaemenid, a Persian, son of a Persian, and an Aryan, of Aryan stock". Although Darius the Great called his language arya-, modern scholars refer to it as Old Persian because it is the ancestor of the modern Persian language.
The trilingual inscription erected by the command of Shapur I gives a more clear description. The languages used are Parthian, Middle Persian, and Greek. In Greek inscription says "ego... tou Arianon ethnous despotes eimi", which translates to "I am the king of the kingdom of the Iranians". In Middle Persian, Shapur says "ērānšahr xwadāy hēm" and in Parthian he says "aryānšahr xwadāy ahēm".
The Avesta clearly uses airiia- as an ethnic name, where it appears in expressions such as airyāfi daiŋˊhāvō, airyō šayanəm, and airyanəm vaējō vaŋhuyāfi dāityayāfi. In the late part of the Avesta, one of the mentioned homelands was referred to as Airyan'əm Vaējah which approximately means "expanse of the Iranians". The homeland varied in its geographic range, the area around Herat and even the entire expanse of the Iranian Plateau.
The Old Persian and Avestan evidence is confirmed by the Greek sources. Herodotus, in his Histories, remarks about the Iranian Medes that "Medes were called anciently by all people Arians". In Armenian sources, the Parthians, Medes and Persians are collectively referred to as Iranians. Eudemus of Rhodes refers to "the Magi and all those of Iranian lineage". Diodorus Siculus considers Zoroaster as one of the Arianoi.
Strabo, in his Geographica, mentions of the Medes, Persians, Bactrians and Sogdians of the Iranian Plateau and Transoxiana of antiquity:
The Bactrian inscription of Kanishka at Rabatak, which was discovered in 1993 in an unexcavated site in the Afghan province of Baghlan, clearly refers to this Eastern Iranian language as Arya.
All this evidence shows that the name Arya was a collective definition, denoting peoples who were aware of belonging to the one ethnic stock, speaking a common language, and having a religious tradition that centered on the cult of Ohrmazd.
The academic usage of the term Iranian is distinct from the state of Iran and its various citizens, in the same way that the term Germanic peoples is distinct from Germans. Some inhabitants of Iran are not necessarily ethnic Iranians by virtue of not being speakers of Iranian languages.

Iranian vs. Iranic

Some scholars such as John Perry prefer the term Iranic as the name for the linguistic family of this category, while Iranian for anything about the country Iran. He uses the same analogue as in differentiating German from Germanic or differentiating Turkish and Turkic. German scholar Martin Kümmel also argues for the same distinction of Iranian from Iranic.

History and settlement

Indo-European roots

Proto-Indo-Iranians

The Proto-Indo-Iranians are commonly identified with the Sintashta culture and the subsequent Andronovo culture within the broader Andronovo horizon, and their homeland with an area of the Eurasian steppe that borders the Ural River on the west and the Tian Shan on the east.
The Indo-Iranian migrations took place in two waves. The first wave consisted of the Indo-Aryan migration through the Bactria-Margiana Culture, also called "Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex", into the Levant, founding the Mitanni kingdom; and a migration south-eastward of the Vedic people, over the Hindu Kush into northern India. The Indo-Aryans split off around 1800–1600 BC from the Iranians, whereafter they were defeated and split into two groups by the Iranians, who dominated the Central Eurasian steppe zone and "chased to the extremities of Central Eurasia". One group were the Indo-Aryans who founded the Mitanni kingdom in northern Syria; the other group were the Vedic people. Christopher I. Beckwith suggests that the Wusun, an Indo-European Caucasian people of Inner Asia in antiquity, were also of Indo-Aryan origin.
The second wave is interpreted as the Iranian wave, and took place in the third stage of the Indo-European migrations from 800 BC onwards.

Sintashta–Petrovka culture

The Sintashta culture, also known as the Sintashta–Petrovka culture or Sintashta–Arkaim culture, is a Bronze Age archaeological culture of the northern Eurasian steppe on the borders of Eastern Europe and Central Asia, dated to the period 2100–1800 BC. It is probably the archaeological manifestation of the Indo-Iranian language group.
The Sintashta culture emerged from the interaction of two antecedent cultures. Its immediate predecessor in the Ural-Tobol steppe was the Poltavka culture, an offshoot of the cattle-herding Yamnaya horizon that moved east into the region between 2800 and 2600 BC. Several Sintashta towns were built over older Poltavka settlements or close to Poltavka cemeteries, and Poltavka motifs are common on Sintashta pottery. Sintashta material culture also shows the influence of the late Abashevo culture, a collection of Corded Ware settlements in the forest steppe zone north of the Sintashta region that were also predominantly pastoralist. Allentoft et al. also found close autosomal genetic relationship between peoples of Corded Ware culture and Sintashta culture.
The earliest known chariots have been found in Sintashta burials, and the culture is considered a strong candidate for the origin of the technology, which spread throughout the Old World and played an important role in ancient warfare. Sintashta settlements are also remarkable for the intensity of copper mining and bronze metallurgy carried out there, which is unusual for a steppe culture.
Because of the difficulty of identifying the remains of Sintashta sites beneath those of later settlements, the culture was only recently distinguished from the Andronovo culture. It is now recognised as a separate entity forming part of the 'Andronovo horizon'.