Persian history

[daryush]

They were over thrown by another dynasty, the Araskidai whom we call the Parthians. I think calling them "Persians" might be a bit too much in the sense that they weren't very much like the Achaemenids...for a start they were heavily Hellenised.

Ethnicity seems to be more murky than region, and the Arsacids are especially so. They came from east of Iran -- they were of the Dahae people, more closely related to the Pashtuns than to the Persians. Then they took over Parthia (which is still far to the east of Persia proper) and adopted the Parthian language, so they're called Parthians. I'd venture that if they married Parthian nobles then after some generations they were Parthians, with a bit of outside ancestry. But I don't know how they identified themselves.

It was Darius who first goes on record saying he was a Persian. Daniel Potts has even suggested that Cyrus the Great and the Teispid kings were Elamite rather than Persian (or more Elamite than Persian).

I think I read somewhere (I think one of Touraj Daryaee's papers, but I can't remember) that the later Parthians did identify themselves with the Kayanids like the Sassanians. So making them "Iranian" (in the "Eranshahr" sense, as opposed to the broader ethno-linguistic sense)