Iranian peoples

Name

The term Iran derives directly from Middle Persian Ērān (𐭠𐭩𐭥𐭠𐭭‎) and Parthian Aryān (𐭀𐭓𐭉𐭀𐭍‎). The Middle Iranian terms ērān and aryān are oblique plural forms of gentilic ēr- (in Middle Persian) and ary- (in Parthian), both deriving from Old Persian ariya- (𐎠𐎼𐎡𐎹), Avestan airiia- (𐬀𐬌𐬭𐬌𐬌𐬀) 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 (1957): ara- "to fit" ("fitting", "proper").Old Iranian arya- being descended from Proto-Indo-European *ar-yo-, meaning "(skillfully) assembler".

Georges Dumézil (1958): ar- "to share" (as a union).

Harold Walter Bailey (1959): ar- "to beget" ("born", "nurturing").

Émil Benveniste (1969): ar- "to fit" ("companionable").

Unlike the Sanskrit ārya- (Aryan), 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.

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 (or Behistun; Old Persian: Bagastana) describes itself to have been composed in Arya [language or script]. 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.

Iranian vs. Iranic

Some scholars such as John Perry prefer the term Iranic as the name for the linguistic family of this category (many of which are spoken outside Iran), 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

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 [the Indo-Aryans] to the extremities of Central Eurasia". One group were the Indo-Aryans who founded the Mitanni kingdom in northern Syria; (c. 1500 – c. 1300 BC) 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.

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. (2015) also found close autosomal genetic relationship between peoples of Corded Ware culture and Sintashta culture.

Scythians and Persians

From the late 2nd millennium BC to early 1st millennium BC the Iranians had expanded from the Eurasian Steppe, and Iranian peoples such as Medes, Persians, Parthians and Bactrians populated the Iranian Plateau.

Scythian tribes, along with Cimmerians, Sarmatians and Alans populated the steppes north of the Black Sea. The Scythian and Sarmatian tribes were spread across Great Hungarian Plain, South-Eastern Ukraine, Russias Siberian, Southern, Volga, Uralic regions and the Balkans, while other Scythian tribes, such as the Saka, spread as far east as Xinjiang, China.

Western and Eastern Iranians

The division into an "Eastern" and a "Western" group by the early 1st millennium is visible in Avestan vs. Old Persian, the two oldest known Iranian languages. The Old Avestan texts known as the Gathas are believed to have been composed by Zoroaster, the founder of Zoroastrianism, with the Yaz culture (c. 1500 BC – 1100 BC) as a candidate for the development of Eastern Iranian culture.

During the 1st centuries of the 1st millennium BC, the ancient Persians established themselves in the western portion of the Iranian Plateau and appear to have interacted considerably with the Elamites and Babylonians, while the Medes also entered in contact with the Assyrians. Remnants of the Median language and Old Persian show their common Proto-Iranian roots, emphasized in Strabo and Herodotus' description of their languages as very similar to the languages spoken by the Bactrians and Sogdians in the east. Following the establishment of the Achaemenid Empire, the Persian language (referred to as "Farsi" in Persian after being changed from Parsi) spread from Pars or Fars province (Persia) to various regions of the Empire, with the modern dialects of Iran, Afghanistan (also known as Dari) and Central-Asia (known as Tajiki) descending from Old Persian.

At first, the Western Iranian peoples in the Near East were dominated by the various Assyrian empires. An alliance of the Medes with the Persians, and rebelling Babylonians, Scythians, Chaldeans, and Cimmerians, helped the Medes to capture Nineveh in 612 BC, which resulted in the eventual collapse of the Neo-Assyrian Empire by 605 BC. The Medes were subsequently able to establish their Median kingdom (with Ecbatana as their royal centre) beyond their original homeland and had eventually a territory stretching roughly from northeastern Iran to the Halys River in Anatolia. After the fall of the Assyrian Empire, between 616 BC and 605 BC, a unified Median state was formed, which, together with Babylonia, Lydia, and Egypt, became one of the four major powers of the ancient Near East

Later on, in 550 BC, Cyrus the Great, would overthrow the leading Median rule, and conquer Kingdom of Lydia and the Babylonian Empire after which he established the Achaemenid Empire (or the First Persian Empire), while his successors would dramatically extend its borders. At its greatest extent, the Achaemenid Empire would encompass swaths of territory across three continents, namely Europe, Africa and Asia, stretching from the Balkans and Eastern Europe proper in the west, to the Indus Valley in the east. The largest empire of ancient history, with their base in Persis (although the main capital was located in Babylon) the Achaemenids would rule much of the known ancient world for centuries. This First Persian Empire was equally notable for its successful model of a centralised, bureaucratic administration (through satraps under a king) and a government working to the profit of its subjects, for building infrastructure such as a postal system and road systems and the use of an official language across its territories and a large professional army and civil services (inspiring similar systems in later empires), and for emancipation of slaves including the Jewish exiles in Babylon, and is noted in Western history as the antagonist of the Greek city states during the Greco-Persian Wars. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, was built in the empire as well.

Later developments

The main migration of Turkic peoples occurred between the 6th and 10th centuries, when they spread across most of Central Asia. The Turkic peoples slowly replaced and assimilated the previous Iranian-speaking locals, turning the population of Central Asia from being largely Iranian into being primarily of East Asian descent.

Starting with the reign of Omar in 634 AD, Muslim Arabs began a conquest of the Iranian Plateau. The Arabs conquered the Sassanid Empire of the Persians and seized much of the Byzantine Empire populated by the Kurds and others. Ultimately, the various Iranian peoples, including the Persians, Pashtuns, Kurds and Balochis, converted to Islam, while the Alans converted to Christianity, thus laying the foundation for the fact that the modern-day Ossetians are Christian. The Iranian peoples would later split along sectarian lines as the Persians adopted the Shi'a sect. As ancient tribes and identities changed, so did the Iranian peoples, many of whom assimilated foreign cultures and peoples.

Later, during the 2nd millennium AD, the Iranian peoples would play a prominent role during the age of Islamic expansion and empire. Saladin, a noted adversary of the Crusaders, was an ethnic Kurd, while various empires centered in Iran (including the Safavids) re-established a modern dialect of Persian as the official language spoken throughout much of what is today Iran and the Caucasus. Iranian influence was also an principal factor in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Turks integrated Persian into their court, governance, and daily life. Supported by the sultans, nobility, and spiritual leaders, Persian was promoted as a second language, intertwining with Turkish and greatly influencing Ottoman cultural traditions. However, a heavy Turko-Persian basis in Anatolia was set already by the predecessors of the Ottomans, namely the Sultanate of Rum and Anatolian Beyliks amongst others) as well to the court of the Mughal Empire. All of the major Iranian peoples reasserted their use of Iranian languages following the decline of Arab rule, but would not begin to form modern national identities until the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Persian nationalism

With the rise of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1925, Persian nationalism became a central instrument of state power, framed by the motto of "one nation, one language, one country." Modern Iranian national identity was closely tied to the Persian language, which was promoted as the primary marker of unity. State policies and practices reflected systematic repression of non-Persian peoples, including Kurds, Arabs, Lurs, Qashqai, and Bakhtiari. Under Reza Shah's rule, the Imperial state of Iran emphasized cultural and linguistic homogenization, promoting the Persian language as a symbol of national unity while restricting the public use of minority languages. State policies disproportionately benefited Persian-dominated regions, contributing to the political and economic marginalization of ethnic minorities. Reza Shah's successor, Mohammea Reza Pahlavi, allowed limited use of minority languages within tightly regulated settings, while Persian remained dominant. As non-Persian languages were confined to private spheres without legal protection, the usual result was language loss. Persian elites continued marginalizing them as "regional dialects." Zoroastrian symbols were often promoted by the state to connect Iran to its ancient pre-Islamic past. Nationalist thought expanded from anti-Arab sentiment to broader hostility toward non-Persian identities. Persianism and Shia Islam emerged as the ideological foundations of Iranian nationalism, shaping what scholars describe as a "Persian psycho-nationalist habitus." Thinkers such as Jalal Al-e-Ahmad and Taqi Arani, who advanced racialized theories of language and nationhood, further institutionalized the idea of Persian as the unifying and authentic essence of the Iranian nation-state.

Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Islamic Republic shifted Iranian identity from the secular Persian nationalism of the Pahlavi era to Shia Islamism. At the same time, elements of Persian-centric nationalism persisted within state discourse and governance, alongside efforts to promote a more uniform Iranian nationalism reflective of all the diverse ethnicities in Iran. In contrast to the Pahlavi monarchy's emphasis on ethnic and linguistic homogenization, the Islamic Republic's exclusionary practices have been more strongly articulated along sectarian and religious lines, particularly through discrimination against Sunni Muslims and non-Muslim communities.

This nationalistic approach extended as far as to the Gulf Arab states where the Iranian migrants lived; as such, anything that happened in Iran that was annoying to these countries, the pressure was immediately put on Iranians living in Bahrain, in Kuwait, or the rest of the Gulf in general. Author Mehran Kokherdi [Author of "History of South Fars"] states that the term Persians is used to refer to all groups with original Parsi roots, including the inhabitants of villages scattered across Persia who still speak their ancient Parsi language. However, the term has also come to describe the populations of major cities (e.g. Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan) more broadly, who consist of a blend of various ethnic groups, all unified by their use of Modern Persian—a language that incorporates elements from Arabic, Turkish, French, Russian, Mongolian, and Parsi. Based on their shared language, the people of Iran generally identify them as Persians. This leads many scholars to believe that the term "Iranian" is more encompassing and inclusive of these various ethnic groups (Iranic people, and ethnic groups in Iran).

Demographics

There are an estimated 150 to 200 million native speakers of Iranian languages, the six major groups of Persians, Lurs, Kurds, Tajiks, Baloch, and Pashtuns accounting for about 90% of this number. Currently, most of these Iranian peoples live in Iran, Afghanistan, the Caucasus (mainly Ossetia, other parts of Georgia, Dagestan, and Azerbaijan), Iraqi Kurdistan and Kurdish majority populated areas of Turkey, Iran and Syria, Tajikistan, Pakistan and Uzbekistan. There are also Iranian peoples living in Eastern Arabia such as northern Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait.

Due to recent migrations, there are also large communities of speakers of Iranian languages in Europe and the Americas.

Culture

Iranian culture is today considered to be centered in what is called the Iranian Plateau, and has its origins tracing back to the Andronovo culture of the late Bronze Age, which is associated with other cultures of the Eurasian Steppe. It was, however, later developed distinguishably from its earlier generations in the Steppe, where a large number of Iranian-speaking peoples (i.e., the Scythians) continued to participate, resulting in a differentiation that is displayed in Iranian mythology as the contrast between Iran and Turan.

Like other Indo-Europeans, the early Iranians practiced ritual sacrifice, had a social hierarchy consisting of warriors, clerics, and farmers, and recounted their deeds through poetic hymns and sagas. Various common traits can be discerned among the Iranian peoples. For instance, the social event of Nowruz is an ancient Iranian festival that is still celebrated by nearly all of the Iranian peoples. However, due to their different environmental adaptations through migration, the Iranian peoples embrace some degrees of diversity in dialect, social system, and other aspects of culture.

With numerous artistic, scientific, architectural, and philosophical achievements and numerous kingdoms and empires that bridged much of the civilized world in antiquity, the Iranian peoples were often in close contact with people from various western and eastern parts of the world.

Religion

The early Iranian peoples practiced the ancient Iranian religion, which, like that of other Indo-European peoples, embraced various male and female deities. Fire was regarded as an important and highly sacred element, and also a deity. In ancient Iran, fire was kept with great care in fire temples. Various annual festivals that were mainly related to agriculture and herding were celebrated, the most important of which was the New Year (Nowruz), which is still widely celebrated. Zoroastrianism, a form of the ancient Iranian religion that is still practiced by some communities, was later developed and spread to nearly all of the Iranian peoples living in the Iranian Plateau. Other religions that had their origins in the Iranian world were Mithraism, Manichaeism, and Mazdakism, among others. The various religions of the Iranian peoples are believed by some scholars to have been significant early philosophical influences on Christianity and Judaism.

Nowadays, most Iranian people follow Islam (Sunnism, followed by Shi'ism), with minorities following Christianity, Judaism, Mandaeism, Iranian religions and various levels of irreligion.

Cultural assimilation

Iranian languages were and, to a lesser extent, still are spoken in a wide area comprising regions around the Black Sea, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Russia and the northwest of China. This population was linguistically assimilated by smaller but dominant Turkic-speaking groups, while the sedentary population eventually adopted the Persian language, which began to spread within the region since the time of the Sasanian Empire. The language-shift from Middle Iranian to Turkic and New Persian was predominantly the result of an "elite dominance" process. Moreover, various Turkic-speaking ethnic groups of the Iranian Plateau are often conversant also in an Iranian language and embrace Iranian culture to the extent that the term Turko-Iranian would be applied. A number of Iranian peoples were also intermixed with the Slavs, and many were subjected to Slavicisation.

The following either partially descend from or are sometimes regarded as descendants of the Iranian peoples.

Turkic-speakers:

Azerbaijanis: In spite of being native speakers of a Turkic language (Azerbaijani Turkic), they are believed to be primarily descended from the earlier Iranian-speakers of the region. They are possibly related to the ancient Iranian tribe of the Medes, aside from the rise of the subsequent Persian and Turkic elements (changing of the native Iranian language) within their area of settlement, which, prior to the spread of Turkic, was Iranian-speaking. Thus, due to their historical, genetic and cultural ties to the Iranians, the Azerbaijanis are often associated with the Iranian peoples. Genetic studies observed that they are also genetically related to the Iranian peoples.

Turkmens: Genetic studies show that the Turkmens are characterized by the presence of local Iranian mtDNA lineages, similar to the eastern Iranian populations, but modest female Mongoloid mtDNA components were observed in Turkmen populations with the frequencies of about 20%.

Uzbeks: The unique grammatical and phonetical features of the Uzbek language, as well as elements within the modern Uzbek culture, reflect the older Iranian roots of the Uzbek people. According to recent genetic genealogy testing from a University of Oxford study, the genetic admixture of the Uzbeks clusters somewhere between the Iranian peoples and the Mongols. Prior to the Russian conquest of Central Asia, the local ancestors of the Turkic-speaking Uzbeks and the Persian-speaking Tajiks, both living in Central Asia, were referred to as Sarts, while Uzbek and Turk were the names given to the nomadic and semi-nomadic populations of the area. Still, as of today, modern Uzbeks and Tajiks are known to their Turkic neighbors, the Kazakhs and the Kyrgyz, as Sarts. Some Uzbek scholars also favor the Iranian origin theory. However, another study, conducted in 2009, claims that Uzbeks and Central Asian Turkic peoples cluster genetically and are far from Iranian groups.

Genetics

Recent population genomic studies found that the genetic structure of Iranian peoples formed already about 5,000 years ago and show high continuity since then, suggesting that they were largely unaffected by migration events from outside groups. Genetically speaking, Iranian peoples generally cluster closely with European and other Middle Eastern peoples. Analyzed samples of Iranian Persians, Kurds, Azeris, Lurs, Mazanderanis, Gilaks and Arabs cluster tightly together, forming a single cluster known as the CIC (Central Iranian cluster). Compared with worldwide populations, Iranians (CIC) cluster in the center of the wider West-Eurasian cluster, close to Europeans, Middle Easterners, and South-Central Asians. Iranian Arabs and Azeris genetically overlap with Iranian peoples. The genetic substructure of Iranians is low and homogeneous, compared with other "1000G" populations. Europeans, and certain South Asians (specifically the Parsi minority) showed the highest affinity with Iranians, while Sub-Saharan Africans and East Asians showed the highest differentiation with Iranians.

The BMAC population largely derived from preceding local Copper Age peoples who were in turn related to Neolithic farmers from the Iranian plateau and to a lesser extent early Anatolian farmers, as well as West Siberian hunter-gatherers. The samples extracted from the BMAC sites did not have derived any part of their ancestry from the Yamnaya people, who are associated with Proto-Indo-Europeans, although some peripheral samples did already carry significant Yamnaya-like Western Steppe Herders ancestry, inline with the southwards expansion of Western Steppe Herders from the Sintashta and Andronovo cultures towards Southern Central Asia at c. 2100 BCE.

The Yaz I culture of Margiana, Bactria and Sogdia was characterised by a combination of BMAC and Andronovo ancestries. Likewise, a 2022 study also shows that the ancestry of modern Tajiks and Yaghnobis largely formed during the early Iron Age by a mixture between these two groups.

Paternal haplogroups

Regueiro et al (2006) and Grugni et al (2012) have performed large-scale sampling of Y chromosome haplogroups of different ethnic groups within Iran. They found that the most common paternal haplogroups were:

J1-M267; commonly found among Semitic-speaking people, was rarely over 10% in Iranian groups.

J2-M172: is the most common Hg in Iran (~23%); almost exclusively represented by J2a-M410 subclade (93%), the other major sub-clade being J2b-M12. Apart from Iranians, J2 is common in northern Arabs, Mediterranean and Balkan peoples (Croats, Serbs, Greeks, Bosniaks, Albanians, Italians, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Turks), in the Caucasus (Armenians, Georgians, Chechens, Ingush, northeastern Turkey, north/northwestern Iran, Kurds, Persians); whilst its frequency drops suddenly beyond Afghanistan, Pakistan and northern India. In Europe, J2a is more common in southern Greece and southern Italy; whilst J2b (J2-M12) is more common in Thessaly, Macedonia and central – northern Italy. Thus J2a and its subgroups within it have a wide distribution from Italy to India, whilst J2b is mostly confined to the Balkans and Italy, being rare even in Turkey. Whilst closely linked with Anatolia and the Levant; and putative agricultural expansions, the distribution of the various sub-clades of J2 likely represents a number of migrational histories which require further elucidation.

R1a-M198: is common in Iran, more so in the east and south rather than the west and north; suggesting a migration toward the south to India then a secondary westward spread across Iran. Whilst the Grongi and Regueiro studies did not define exactly which sub-clades Iranian R1a haplogrouops belong to, private genealogy tests suggest that they virtually all belong to "Eurasian" R1a-Z93. Indeed, population studies of neighbouring Indian groups found that they all were in R1a-Z93. This implies that R1a in Iran did not descend from "European" R1a, or vice versa. Rather, both groups are collateral, brother branches which descend from a parental group hypothesized to have initially lived somewhere between central Asia and Eastern Europe.

R1b – M269: is widespread from Ireland to Iran, and is common in highland West Asian populations such as Armenians, Turks and Iranians – with an average frequency of 8.5%. Iranian R1b belongs to the L-23 subclade, which is an older than the derivative subclade (R1b-M412) which is most common in western Europe.