The first space marines were persians

Yes, Ahriman is was born in what is basically modern day Iran. Also he had a twin named Ohrmuzd who died of mutation that afflicted the early thousand sons legion.

Also in Zoroastrian (Persia pre-Islam) lore Ahriman and Ohrmuzd are the respective twins of darkness and light.

A little on the nose there, GW...

thisPlus the Emperor WAS Turkish, so yeah, it is a little sad to see there be no call back to those roots at all. The Emperor does have his Egyptian looking golden armor but that's about it.

Anatolian I thought - the Turks weren't in Anatolia until Manzikert in IIRC 1068.

>No persian primarch/legion.

i was going to say they didn't need a persian primarch coz they had enough military failures and idiot zealots already, then i realised that was lorgar summed up in two lines.

I can't tell if people who say the emperor is Turkish are trolling or just plain ignorant. Turks didn't have a substantial presence in Anatolia until 1,000 ad and the Emperor was born in like 8,000 bc which is Stone Age type stuff. Anatolia would've been inhabited by people completely unrelated to Turks at that period of time.

There's way more to three thousand years of Persia than the morons who've been running things for less than forty.

With the whole men of gold / men of stone thing, no ethnicities remain from our era, let alone antiquity. Everyone except the eternals are from the genemod successor species.

And then there's the whole "demographics is destiny" thing. A population can be replaced very quickly in historical terms just via slight differences in birth rates. The original human inhabitants of Europe died out, for example, with their only genetic legacy surviving in the mitochondrial DNA of the neanderthals that some of them interbred with. Then tens of thousands of years later another wave of humans came out of Africa and replaced the neanderthals, with only a little DNA surviving from interbreeding. Otzi the ice man (10k years ago) had very few close relatives still living today; subsequent waves of migration largely replaced his people. Rome was so cosmopolitan and there was such an influx of new people from the provinces and such a high death rate that it's unlikely a typical Roman pleb was "Roman" in a genetic sense. Most 19th century pre-Darwin political philosophers (and a few later guys like Spengler) took this for granted and used "race" to describe cultural orientation and affiliation rather than genetics.

So the land survives, and the culture can be passed on for a while, but the genetic legacy is a crap shoot and unlikely to remain no matter where you're talking about over even a few centuries. In 40k, even the land didn't survive, so any continuity of culture is just coincidence or Chaos.

so are ultramarines greek or roman?

I'm not an expert but the Greeks didn't do the whole empire shebang

Roman, what's your point?

I assume his point is that just like the Ultramarines take influence from both the Romans and the Greeks, the Tsons take influence from the Persians and Egyptians

>With the whole men of gold / men of stone thing, no ethnicities remain from our era, let alone antiquity.
Except the Emperor's ethnicity beneath the illusion and biomancy and glamour, because he's literally that old.

Olly Persson and possibly Alivia as well.

I think they're more an amalgamation of Mayan/ Egyptian

It's hard to say you're incorrect however TSons are explicitly stated to have been created from an Iranian empire that supported the Emps. Ahriman and his brother Ohrmuzd are also named after persian gods I believe.