The Earliest Persians in Southwestern Iran: The Textual Evidence

Abstract

The Persians are Obscure in the Archaeological Record, and the routes and dates of their migration into Iran are uncertain. When the Persians appear in the textual record, it is in the context of their interaction with the regional powers of Elam and Assyria. Examination of the relevant sources highlights two areas of Persian settlement in the first half of the first millennium B.C.E.: the central Zagros Mountains region and modern Fars, the latter the core of the first Persian Empire (Old Persian Parsa and Greek Persis). Since there are no extant Persian inscriptions dating before the mid-sixth century, this analysis relies upon Assyrian and Elamite sources.The Persians may have begun their arrival in southwestern Iran as early as the mid-second millennium. During the Middle Elamite period (c. 1600-1000 B.C.E.), Fars and its primary city Anshan (modern Malyan) were part of the kingdom of Elam. Sometime around 1000 B.C.E., Anshan was abandoned. Large-scale settlement cannot be traced in Fars after that until the Achaemenid period, over four hundred years later.

Achaemenid Religion

“…The Iranians, of whom the Medes and Persians were individual tribes, originated in Central Asia in the second millennium BCE. By the first millennium, several tribes had migrated south into the area of modern Afghanistan, as well as onto the western edges of the Iranian Plateau, where we find references in ninth-century and eighth-century Assyrian annals to Persians (Parsuwash/Parsumash) and Medes (Waters 1999, Zadok 2001; on the migrations, see also Lecoq 1997, pp. 34-37, Witzel 2013.…”

“…This became the largest empire in the Ancient Near East, stretching from the Indus valley to Libya, from Ethiopia to north of the Black Sea and to Central Asia, and including Anatolia and the Greek coastal colonies, but was conquered by Alexander in 330 BCE.The Iranians, of whom the Medes and Persians were individual tribes, originated in Central Asia in the second millennium BCE. By the first millennium, several tribes had migrated south into the area of modern Afghanistan, as well as onto the western edges of the Iranian Plateau, where we find references in ninth-century and eighth-century Assyrian annals to Persians (Parsuwash/Parsumash) and Medes (Waters 1999, Zadok 2001; on the migrations, see also Lecoq 1997, pp. 34-37, Witzel 2013.Zoroastrianism developed among the earliest Iranians, who called themselves Aryans, and we owe to them the individual texts that are now collectively referred to as the Avesta, of which the older part was probably composed during the second half of the second millennium BCE and the later part during the centuries preceding the Achaemenid empire, then transmitted orally for over a millennium before they were written down about the time of the Arab conquest in the seventh century CE (Kellens 1998).…”

Cyrus the Great as a “King of the City of Anshan”

“…For presentations of the relevant textual evidence (and contrasting conclusions), see e.g. de Miroschedji 1985, 271-278;Waters 1999. 39. See n. 14.…”