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The Earliest Persians in Southwestern Iran: The Textual Evidence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Matthew W. Waters
Matthew W. Waters*
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire
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Extract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 32 , Issue 1 , Winter 1999 , pp. 99 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1999

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Footnotes

*

An earlier draft of this paper was presented at the Second Biennial Conference on Iranian Studies, May 23, 1998, Bethesda, Maryland. Most abbreviations follow those of The Assyrian Dictionary of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago (Chicago, 1956- ).

References

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