Iranian peoples

[12][13] Modern Iranian peoples include the Baloch, the Gilaks, the Kurds, the Lurs, the Mazanderanis, the Ossetians, the Pamiris, the Pashtuns, the Persians, the Tats, the Tajiks, the Talysh, the Wakhis, the Yaghnobis, and the Zazas.

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.

[31] 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.

[49] 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.

To the east, it reaches into the Minusinsk depression, with some sites as far west as the southern Ural Mountains,[54] overlapping with the area of the earlier Afanasevo culture.

[61] 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.

[64] 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.

The Greek chronicler, Herodotus (5th century BC) makes references to a nomadic people, the Scythians; he describes them as having dwelt in what is today southern European Russia and Ukraine.

Many ancient Sanskrit texts from a later period make references to such tribes they were witness of pointing them towards the southeasternmost edges of Central Asia, around the Hindukush range in northern Pakistan.

It is believed that these Scythians were conquered by their eastern cousins, the Sarmatians, who are mentioned by Strabo as the dominant tribe which controlled the southern Russian steppe in the 1st millennium AD.

These Iranian-speaking Scythians and Sarmatians dominated large parts of Eastern Europe for a millennium, and were eventually absorbed and assimilated (e.g. Slavicisation) by the Proto-Slavic population of the region.

[72][73] At their greatest reported extent, around the 1st century AD, these tribes ranged from the Vistula River to the mouth of the Danube and eastward to the Volga, bordering the shores of the Black and Caspian Seas as well as the Caucasus to the south.

[b] Their territory, which was known as Sarmatia to Greco-Roman ethnographers, corresponded to the western part of greater Scythia (mostly modern Ukraine and Southern Russia, also to a smaller extent north eastern Balkans around Moldova).

Throughout the 1st millennium AD, the large presence of the Sarmatians who once dominated Ukraine, Southern Russia, and swaths of the Carpathians, gradually started to diminish mainly due to assimilation and absorption by the Germanic Goths, especially from the areas near the Roman frontier, but only completely by the Proto-Slavic peoples.

[76] For instance, the Proto-Slavonic words for god (*bogъ), demon (*divъ), house (*xata), axe (*toporъ) and dog (*sobaka) are of Scythian origin.

[78] The Sarmatians of the east, based in the Pontic–Caspian steppe, became the Alans, who also ventured far and wide, with a branch ending up in Western Europe and then North Africa, as they accompanied the Germanic Vandals and Suebi during their migrations.

[80] Some of the Saka-Scythian tribes in Central Asia would later move further southeast and invade the Iranian Plateau, large sections of present-day Afghanistan and finally deep into present day Pakistan (see Indo-Scythians).

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.

Supported by the sultans, nobility, and spiritual leaders, Persian was promoted as a second language, intertwining with Turkish and greatly influencing Ottoman cultural traditions.

[90] 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.

[92] Inspired by European and Turkish nationalist ideologies, Reza Shah Pahlavi's regime crafted an artificial narrative of Iranian history centered on Persian ethnic unity over 2,500 years.

[92] Aryanism conveniently justified European colonial views of Indian and Persian civilizations while influencing Iranian nationalism to adopt an exclusionary identity framework.

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.

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.

[111][112] 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.

[111] 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.

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.

[citation needed] 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.

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.

They found that the most common paternal haplogroups were: Two large – scale papers by Haber (2012)[161] and Di Cristofaro (2013)[162] analyzed populations from Afghanistan, where several Iranian-speaking groups are native.