Guran (tribe)

[1][2][3] One of their main historical centers is Dartang, a region whose capital is at Rijab, at the western end of the gorge where the Alwand River enters into the Zohab plain.

[4]: 80  However, the Guranii may have been a different group than today's Guran, since the proposed original name *Gāubārakān seems unlikely to have already changed to the modern form Gūrān at that point.

[4]: 86  For example, the 7th-century king of Tabaristan, Gil Gavbara, had a similarly derived name, and Hamdallah Mustawfi also mentioned a plain called Gavbari near the Kur estuary, where the medieval town of Mahmudabad was built.

[4]: 86  Minorsky hypothesized that the ancestors of the Guran may have migrated to the Zagros region under the Sasanians, who may have encouraged this as a way of securing the ties between Iran and Mesopotamia.

[4]: 87 An early reference to the Guran may be in the works of the late 9th-century geographer Ibn Khurradadhbih, who mentioned "the revenue of Hulwan together with the Jābār.qa and the Kurds".

[4]: 82 A later description of these events, by the anonymous author of the 12th-century Mujmal al-tavārīkh, consistently uses the modern name Gūrānān instead of Jūraqān and also adds that the Guran had been the closest to Badr of all his allied tribes before turning against him and killing him.

[4]: 82–3  Minorsky noted the Mujmal's detail that the Guran killed Badr with javelins, a weapon historically associated with the Daylamites of the Caspian region.

[4]: 82  For example, in 1026, the Kakuyid emir Ala al-Dawla Muhammad grouped the Guran together with Saburkhwast (present-day Khorramabad) under a single governor.

[4]: 83  He referred to them as "powerful and bellicose" and composed of "soldiers and peasants", and listed two places they lived: Rāwst, led by an amir named Muhammad, and Dartang.