Iranian/Iranic people thread (pre-Islam)

Tajik here. I actually have a question, but I know a little so ask me if you have something you want to know.

Same question as this thread What's the difference between Tajik and Persian? One user said it was like that of Bavarian and Prussian, however there is no overall term such as "German." I've found some sources that disagree, and some that agree.

What I do know is that Tajik is a more contemporary/post soviet term, and I know that racially I am the same as Persians hailing from Iran (apparently the only actual Persians, though as said some disagree.)

This is all very confusing so if somebody could provide a proper, easy to understand explanation I would be very greatful.

Would "Iranic" or "Indo-Iranic" be the "Germany" I was talking about? Help me find the term

Most likely wrong

But Mithraism was very developed in Northern Gauls especially around the Limes Germanicus and Chilperic(a frankish king) was buried with the head of a golden bull which is a symbol of Mithraism so there is a possiblity

Certain Arab explorers tend to refer to pagans as Zoroastrian, most notably the Vikings and Russian Slavs.

So anyone have a idea why just the Azeri people went from Iranian to Turkish LARPers in Persia? Because evidence from different Arab/Persian historians suggest they still spoke their own Iranian language way into the Islamic era, which later gradually changed with the Timurid/Safavid era.

Was the Turkification that heavily concentrated in their region compared to the rest of Iran?

At least bait better if you are going to shit post in my thread.

Tajiks are basically Persians who colonized out into places in Central Asia. Think of them as being closer in equivalent to the British (Persians) with British-American colonists (Americans).

Their language was Turkified due to Turkic dynasties having a stronger cultural grasp on parts of Anatolia and Iranian lands where Azeri populations were most dense. The whole thinking they are Turkish ethnically/culturally is mainly due to Ottoman and especially Russian propaganda.

But they are Iranian you fucking retard. They are racially Iranic.

Zoroastrian is a catch all term that Arabs used for pagans

>Azeris are racially T*rkic
I cant wait for this fucking meme to die already

When did this colonization occur? Thank you, interesting stuff

No idea, but the Samanids are generally attested as the earliest fore-bearers of Tajik-Persians.

Too bad that one Azeri that discovered their ancient Azari language was killed by the Iranian government for "anti-islamic" reasons. I doubt it would do much difference but it might have persuaded atleast a bunch of them to not buy into Baku/Istanbul propaganda.

Last question. Would it be incorrect to refer to myself as Persian in 2017? Not like anyone would know if I was we wuzzing or not (everyone assumes you're Arab over here) but I'd still like to know for truth's sake.

Not really, seems pretty common sense to me. Tajiks like Persians in Iran share the same culture, language, history, and ethnicity. You are as Persian as Persians in Iran.

>Racially a language

Nice meme

Yes it would be incorrect. Modern Tajiks are mixed with non-Persians

"Turkic" is also a meme, friend. If you want to discuss it further, go make your own Turkic thread.

Thanks
If you're talking about those mongoloid-mixed ones, that's a different type of tajik which I forgot the name. Racially I am the same as any Iranian.
------
Just FYI my dad has provided me with a first-hand account of his escape to Paris two weeks before the 40th army invaded Afghanistan in '79. Life under communism as part of the 1% sucked he said. Ask if you want to know more

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamiris found it

The Abrahamic religions are literally the only Western religions that didn't use oral tradition. All of the European pagan faiths were oral tradition, they just had their stories recorded indirectly though the works of playwrights and philosophers of the time. There was no Greek or Roman bible, and our modern understanding of their religious beliefs is about as accurate as trying to understand Judaism by watching a movie about Moses.

I've recently been very interested in trying to learn more about Iran's history and people. I didn't really realize how diverse a nation it actually is. The Parthians are my personal favorite because I find the blend of Persian and Hellenistic cultures appealing.

You are the same ethnicity as the Persians of Iran, but normies don't usually understand that so the term Tajik has come to mean someone from Tajikistan/Afghanistan and are seen as a separate ethnicity.

The Parthians (or more accurately the Parnis of Parthia) were interesting but the whole following of Greek culture is what made their reign so volatile and why they latter abandon it to return to emulating the Medes and Achaemenids before them.

Definitely interesting either way..

>hurr durr
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_peoples

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkic_peoples

I was reading about the Anabasis (Xenophon's march out of Persia) and I noticed there doesn't seem to be much information on casualties on the part of non-Greeks. I get that the only real text we have of the event is Xenophon's account, but I'd expect there to be some estimates. Does anyone have some insight or a link that addresses this?

Here, I'll speed this thread up to it's inevitable direction.

WE WUZ MASTER RACE N SHIT
WE INVENTED CIVILIZATION FROM CHINA TO INDIA TO YURUP N SHIET
WHY WE STAYED AS BARBARIANS N SHIET I DUNNO N SHIET

B-but zoroastrians were monotheistic. Why they do that?

tfw Persian girls will never do porn

Literally no reason to shit up my thread by doing this crap.

I know that feel.

PERSIA BTFO BY OTTOMAN
get rekt faggots

Well, I was hearing the Civ 5 leader Darius a few days ago. It's based on the Imperial dialect, and as a speaker (it's not Persian), most of it is the same as current speech. I just thought you might be interested.

Bump

WE WUZ WHITE N SHEEEEEIT

This turkic>iranians.
Een when the ruling safavids were turkic too.

The ruling Ottoman Dynasty were Balkan/Greek converts, only 3 out of 36 Ottoman Sultans had a Turkish mother.

So in that case Greeks > T*rks

Nobody claims that, Abdullah.

Zoroastrianism is monotheistic and was founded by the prophet Zoroaster between the 10th and 5th century BCE. So you're really just talking out your ass.

Safavids weren't a Turkish. The dynasty was a mixture of Pontic Greek, Armenian, Persian, Kurdish, and Iranian Azeris descended from an attested Persian-Kurdish Sufist ancestor.

WE

>Safavids were turkic
No they weren't, Memet.

>tfw Iran isnt white anymore
>tfw Arabs came in and took all the fair persian women
>tfw turks took sloppy seconds and finished the job
>tfw Iran is now brown as fuck

I don't want this feel

Everything you are saying and the articles in your image are both factually untrue.

So by that logic Gilan should be filled with blonde and blue eyed aryans, considering neither the Arabs, Turks or Mongols could conquer their region cause of the Daylamite Warlords kicking their shit every time they tried.

And the fact that Vikings from Rus would annualy raid their coastal villages along the Caspian sea and add even more "whiteness" to their women.

>Everything you are saying and the articles in your image are both factually untrue.

that really disproved my argument

>Iran isn't white anymore
Define whiteness objectively.
>Arabs came in
Arabs had never had any meaningful impact on Iranian populations as genetics have shown modern Iranians do not diverge from their ancestors at all from the Iron Age. A few hundred thousand Arabs didn't put a dent in a gene pool of tens of millions of Iranians at the time of the fall of the Sassanid Empire.
>turks took sloppy seconds
Also untrue. In fact it was the opposite considering modern Turks in the Near East are genetically and ethnically to Greeks, Armenians, and Iranians or Anatolian people then their own ancestors due to sedentary populations assimilating them.

You are a liar and a shitposter.

If you want to see how an ancient Iranian looked like, look at modern day Parsis of India. They escaped the Muslim conquest and they only marry within their own kind.

Modern day Parsis are literally hugely admixed with Indians, they are more mixed then any other Iranian ethnic group save maybe the Kurds. I don't knock on them but most Persians in Iran are a LOT less mixed then they are. And the reason for this is because the deal the Parsees/Parsis made in India was that they can only intermarry with themselves or Indians and can't force in-laws who aren't Zoroastrians to convert.

Oh. My mistake then.

Basically if you want to see what ancient Iranians look like, go to Tajikistan or Iran. Parsis are cool but even religiously if Iran was ever to stop being Muslim they are more likely to switch to Christianity which is the fastest growing religion in Iran after Islam.

What about Zoroastrianism?

PERSIANS WERE WHITE AND ARYAN SHUT UP

Zoroastrianism can't compare to Christian converts in Iran and its too ceremonial and alienated from modern Iranians sadly.

>muh persia was white
forumbiodiversity.com/showthread.php/46829-Iron-Age-Iranians-are-close-to-modern-day-Iranians-and-Neolithic-Iranians-were-close-Sardinians
science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2016/07/13/science.aaf7943.full

>We sequenced Early Neolithic genomes from the Zagros region of Iran (eastern Fertile Crescent), where some of the earliest evidence for farming is found, and identify a previously uncharacterized population that is neither ancestral to the first European farmers nor has contributed significantly to the ancestry of modern Europeans.

Funny enough, those "blonde haired, light eyed" nomadic Iranians did shit compared to those "shitskinned Persians.

Meant

*sigh*
Zoroastrism is the original and Abrahamic religions are the copies. Fucking normies.

I like how people always make this claim that Arabs and Turks "diluted" Iranian genetics even though it never happened. Either way though, Iranians today are the same people as they were thousands of years ago. There is literally no "WE WUZ SHAHS n SHIET" ism with Iranians.

The Phoenicians gave the alphabet to Greece and Europe, WHERE ARE THEIR GREAT HISTORIES? WHERE ARE THEIR GREAT STORIES?

Some people are different, and didn't value putting their secrets onto a medium that the whole world could read. The Sumerians mainly wrote about accounting and maths.

This is why:

CARTHAGO DELENDA EST

Just checked his link about the rig veda and it's true

5 O'er Sire and Mother they have roared in unison bright with the verse of praise, burning up riteless men,Blowing away with supernatural might from earth and from the heavens the swarthy skin which Indra hates.
sacred-texts.com/hin/rigveda/rv09073.htm

>WE WUZ PERSIAN ARYANS NIGGA, DEM FEW THOUSAND INVADING AY-RABS CHANGED THE GENETICS OF MILLIONS OF US BLONDE HAIR BLUE EYED PERSIANS INTO SAND NIGGERS NIGGA
Literally how?

I was never talking about the Rig Veda. Context in my post was rebutting that shitposter's claim about Iranian genetics and race being altered by Arabs and Turks, which has never happened.

Tajik IIRC basically referred to the city-dwelling people of central asia who generally spoke a more Iranian language with Turkish bits, compared to the nomads who surrounded them who spoke a more Turkish language with Iranian bits. I don't believe that the groups were that ethnically distinct from one another.

I think a good comparison would be that Tajiks in Tajikistan are like the Scottish settlers in the Americas, while Persians are the English.

If you want to consider yourself as essentially Persian I don't think that's terribly off-base. Especially if you're from Afghanistan and not Tajikistan proper, given that Afghanistan spent a lot more time as a part of the same state as Persia than did what is now Tajikistan.

What? No i'm not you fucking retard. Can you even read? Arab muslims used the term Zoroastrian to refer to pagans. Youre so fucking stupid it hurts, this has to be the worst post I've seen in some time.

Do you not know what pagan means?

you are autistic

The painting beneath the Pashtun is fucking Etruscan.

That being said I never agree with the notion of all of an ethnic group looking uniform and monolithic with blue eyes and blonde hair, or all dark eyed and dark haired. Unless you are dealing with a people with a great degree of genetic isolation they have dealt with migrations and intermingling with pre-migratory populaces the world over. In Europe it was pre-Indo-Euroops, in Iran the same deal.

Not even the relatively isolated Danes and Scandinavians are all uniformly 100% blonde and blue eyed so why would the Iranians who came into a plateau that other peoples had dwelt in beforehand?

There isn't really anything more Turkish about Tajik-Persians then Iranian-Persians.

Alevi Zaza here

Alevism is the best religion for Iranian people; it blends shamanism, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.

It was conceived by the interaction of Sufi mystics with irano-turkics of central Asia and developed over time through the Iranian plateau into Anatolia

>what is the Shahnameh

>the fastest growing religion in Iran after Islam
nigga why the fuck does islam need to grow. iran is already 98% muslim

>it takes a Muslim poet with an Arabic name to compile pre-Islamic Iranian myth, legend, and folk culture in an alien script 500 years after the fall of any autonomous Persia

wew

Persians have always used alien scripts, like. Old Persian Cuneiform (Achaemenid era) was derived from Cuneiform script which was created by the Sumerians. And Middle Persian Pahlavi script (Sassanid era) was derived from Aramaic.

What do many Persian chauvinists and ignorant Westerners need to understand is that Iranian history culture is deeply tied with that of its neighbors, especially those in the West of Iranians in Mesopotamia and the Levant.

Also Iranians have been Muslim longer than they have been Zoroastrian. This "Islam is un-Iranian" meme needs to end, from both Eurocentric Westerners and Westeen-struck Iranians.

Iran adopted, developed and expanded Islam the same way the Romans did for Christianity. The Middle East was doing great before the Mongol hordes entered and genocided Iran's population by 90%, setting back Iranian civilization for centuries. They are more to blame for the backwardness of the region than Islam as religions are only as backwards as their followers as can be seen by the evolution of Christian societies in Europe versus those in Africa.

>Old Persian Cuneiform (Achaemenid era)
I thought that Aramaic was already becoming the lingua franca of the near east during the neo-assyrian empire

technically the arabic firdaus is from the old persian word for paradise, so its debatable whether or not its an 'arabic' name

>Ferdowsi
>Muslim

It did, that guy is an idiot. Old Persian written language was heavily influenced by Elamite and Imperial Aramic due to the influence of the Neo-Babylonians and Neo-Assyarian Empires had on Elam and the Medes as well as themselves being vassals to them in the past.

Stop shitposting in my thread.

...

>Ferdowsi
>"Muslim"
>"Iranians have been Muslim longer than they have been Zoroastrian."
Here's the (You).

>OP makes thread to talk about Pre-Islamic Iranian cultures, people, and history
>Shitposter immediately posts some low tier low-bow bait while posting like a /v/irgin /pol/ack refugee
High level discourse on /hist/ indeed.

Literally nothing in my post could be considered shitposting or bait. I'm just hitting the guy who considers pre-Islamic Iran as some kind of different culture and civilization compared to Islamic Iran with some hard facts. I did it also in this post where I explained the direct Semitic origins of all of our three historical alphabets.

As a non-believer trying to look at Iranian history from an unbiased lens, it's baffling how much unwarranted anti-Islamic sentiment exists among others with the same interest. Iran flourished during the Zoroastrian era and Iran flourished during the Islamic era. It wasn't until the arrival of the Mongols with the genocidal destruction of the Iranian lands and people that Iranians truly fell behind on everything. And it wasn't until the Pahlavi era that the nation took on a new direction of redemption.

As for your question OP, I like the Achaemenids, Sassanids, Safavids and Samanids for different reasons.

Achaemenids: unified the Iranian peoples and established Iran as the first world superpower, spreading the advanced methods of Persian administration across the known world, connecting the major ancient civilizations, their unique ideas and cultures

Sassanids: looking up to the Achaemenids, the Sassanids expanded the Empire again, this time with an Orthodox Zoroastrian zeal, inheriting the Perso-Roman wars which would last for centuries, BTFO the Roman Emperor

Samanids: first independent Iranian empire post-Islamization, Ferdowsi, Avicenna, Rudaki; "Here, in this region, the language is Persian, and the kings of this realm are Persian kings."

Safavids: combining Persian administrators with Turkic figures, the Safavids brought back the concept of Iran as a large empire in the region, reviving Iranian imperial pride and holding off the Ottomans. Instead of Orthodox Zoroastrianism like the Sassanids, this dynasty used Shiaism to unite the country to battle the Sunni Ottomans

There is no reason to call someone an idiot in this discussion. Imperial Aramaic was the most prevalent language of administering the Achaemenid Empire, but that's not what we were talking about. For writing the Old Persian language along with Neo-Babylonian and Neo-Elamite, cuneiform was still the alphabet of choice during the Achaemenid era.

>pre-Islamic only
What for?

This thread is specifically for Pre-Islamic Iranians, what about that is beyond your head that you can't understand? Also what does even "non-believer" remotely have to do with anything in this thread?

And why are you stating debunked claims like "Mongol genocide of Iranians" which are loaded with hyperbole? Or claiming Ferdowsi is a Muslim?

Because the OP wants too? What's hard to understand about that?

1. OP wanted to discuss various Iranian states, with a focus on pre-Islamic ones. That doesn't mean we can't discuss Islamic states too alongside pre-Islamic states. And it's not like the subject is being changed to China or something for you to sperg out so much over it.

2. Bringing up "non-believer" because in typical cases not dismissing Iran's Islamic era leads to ignorant Westerners/westernstruck Iranians trying to discredit people by calling them Muslim

3. >According to the works of the Iranian historian Rashid al-Din (1247–1318), the Mongols killed more than 700,000 people in Merv and more than a million in Nishapur. The total population of Persia may have dropped from 2,500,000 to 250,000 as a result of mass extermination and famine. Population exchanges did also in some cases occur but depends as of when.

4. I never claimed Ferdowsi is a Muslim though, that was the bait post from that random user.

My favorite were the Achaemenids because they single handedly carved a distinct Persian nation out of the haphazard soup of tribes and nations whilst also raising the greatest empire the world had ever seen in a matter of decades.

Ferdowsi was a Muslim.

I quote him

>"The Reign of Umar came ove Iran and the Pulpit replaced he Throne"

When portraying the Muslim victory he praised their bravery and down to earthness while also portraying the defeat having been brought on by Rostam following astrology rather than strategy

>I don't agree with historical fact
>wahhh stop shitposting

>Also Iranians have been Muslim longer than they have been Zoroastrian. This "Islam is un-Iranian" meme needs to end

Is there an Iranian version of pic related?

I am the OP and I said I only wanted a thread on pre-Islamic Iranians. What about this is going over your little brain?

>According to the works of the Iranian historian Rashid al-Din
>the Mongols killed more than 700,000 people in Merv
Okay
>and more than a million in Nishapur
Okay
>The total population of Persia may have dropped from 2,500,000 to 250,000 as a result of mass extermination and famine
There is literally no attested or historical proof Persia's population in the mid-13th century prior to the Mongol invasion was ever that low. So not buying it, its historical hyperbole.

>Ferdowsi was a Muslim.
>historically on record denouncing Islam over his entire life and possessing pro-Zoroastrian beliefs in all his works
>"Muslim"
Next you'll say Rumi was a Turk.