This list of ancient Iranian peoples includes the names of Indo-European peoples speaking Iranian languages or otherwise considered Iranian ethnically or linguistically in sources from the late 1st millennium BC to the early 2nd millennium AD.
Ancient and modern Iranian peoples mostly descend from the Proto-Indo-Iranians, common ancestors respectively of the Proto-Iranians and Proto-Indo-Aryans, this people possibly was the same of the Sintashta-Petrovka culture. Proto-Iranians separated from the Proto-Indo-Aryans early in the 2nd-millennium BCE. These peoples probably called themselves by the name "Aryans", which was the basis for several ethnonyms of Iranian and Indo-Aryan peoples or for the entire group of peoples which shares kin and similar cultures.[1]
Iranian peoples first appear in Assyrian records in the 9th century BCE. In Classical Antiquity, they were found primarily in Scythia (in Central Asia, Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Northern Caucasus) and Persia (in Western Asia). They divided into "Western" and "Eastern" branches from an early period, roughly corresponding to the territories of Persia and Scythia, respectively. By the 1st millennium BCE, Medes, Persians, Bactrians and Parthians populated the Iranian plateau, while others such as the Scythians, Sarmatians, Cimmerians and Alans populated the steppes north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, as far as the Great Hungarian Plain in the west. The Saka tribes remained mainly in the far-east, eventually spreading as far east as the Ordos Desert.[2]
Ancient Iranian peoples spoke languages that were the ancestors of modern Iranian languages, these languages form a sub-branch of the Indo-Iranian sub-family, which is a branch of the family of the wider Indo-European languages.[3]
Ancient Iranian peoples lived in many regions and, at about 200 BC, they had as farthest geographical points dwelt by them: to the west the Great Hungarian Plain (Alföld), east of the Danube river (where they formed an enclave of Iranian peoples), Ponto-Caspian steppe in today's southern Ukraine, Russia and far western Kazakhstan, and to the east the Altay Mountains western and northwestern foothills and slopes and also western Gansu, Ordos Desert, and western Inner Mongolia, in northwestern China(Xinjiang), to the north southern West Siberia and southern Ural Mountains (Riphean Mountains?) and to the south the northern coasts of the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Sea.:[4][5]: 348 "From the first millennium b.c., we have abundant historical, archaeological and linguistic sources for the location of the territory inhabited by the Iranian peoples. In this period the territory of the northern Iranians, they being equestrian nomads, extended over the whole zone of the steppes and the wooded steppes and even the semi-deserts from the Great Hungarian Plain to the Ordos region in northern China."</ref> The geographical area dwelt by ancient Iranian peoples was therefore vast (at the end of the 1st Millennium BC they dwelt in an area of several million square kilometers or miles thus roughly corresponding to half or slightly less than half of the geographical area that all Indo-European peoples dwelt in Eurasia).[6]
During Late Antiquity, in a process that lasted until Middle Age, the Iranian populations of Scythia and Sarmatia, in the western (Ponto-Caspian) and central (Kazakh) Eurasian Steppe and most of Central Asia (that once formed a large geographic area dwelt by Iranian peoples), started to be conquered by other non-Iranian peoples and began to be marginalized, assimilated or expelled mainly as result of the Turkic peoples conquests and migrations that resulted in the Turkification of the remaining Iranian ethnic groups in Central Asia and the western Eurasian steppe. Germanic, Slavic and later Mongolian conquests and migrations also contributed to the decline of the Iranian peoples in these regions. By the 10th century, the Eastern Iranian languages were no longer spoken in many of the territories they were once spoken, with the exception of Pashto in Central Asia, Ossetic in the Northern Caucasus and Pamiri languages in Badakhshan. Most of Central Asia and the western Eurasian steppe was almost completely Turkified. However, in most of the southern regions, corresponding to the Iranian Plateau and mountains, more densely populated, Iranian peoples continued to be most of the population and remained so until modern times.[7]
Various Persian empires flourished throughout Antiquity, however, they fell to the Islamic conquest in the 7th century, although other Persian empires formed again later.
There are different or conflicting views among scholars regarding the ethnic and linguistic kinship of the peoples known by the Han Chinese as Wusun and Yuezhi and also other less known peoples (a minority of scholars argue that they were Tocharians, based, among other things, on the similarity of names like "Kushan" and the native name of "Kucha" (Kuśi) and the native name "Kuśi" and Chinese name "Gushi" or the name "Arsi" and "Asii",[62] however most scholars argue that they were possibly Northeastern Iranian peoples)[63][64]
... the K'ang-chii who were perhaps the Sogdians of Iranian stock...
There is no consensus concerning the Hephthalite language, though most scholars seem to think that it was Iranian.
CHIONITES... a tribe of probable Iranian origin that was prominent in Bactria and Transoxania in late antiquity.
The origin of the Cimmerians is obscure. Linguistically they are usually regarded as Thracian or as Iranian, or at least to have had an Iranian ruling class.
...it seems likely, the Wu-sun were an Indo-European, perhaps Iranian people...
... in the second half of the 2nd century bce the Xiongnu, at the height of their power, had expelled from their homeland in western Gansu (China) a people probably of Iranian stock, known to the Chinese as the Yuezhi and called Tokharians in Greek sources.
At the end of the 3rd century, there began in Chinese Turkistan a long migration of the Yuezhi, an Iranian people who invaded Bactria about 130 bc, putting an end to the Greco-Bactrian kingdom there. (In the 1st century bc they created the Kushān dynasty, whose rule extended from Afghanistan to the Ganges River and from Russian Turkistan to the estuary of the Indus.)
Their royal tribes and kings (shan-yii) bore Iranian names and all the Hsiung-nu words noted by the Chinese can be explained from an Iranian language of Saka type. It is therefore clear that the majority of Hsiung-nu tribes spoke an Eastern Iranian language.