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)

[Lyceum]

Hmm that is rather...dodgy. To say the least. I think in general Touraj is, like many Iranologists of Iranian descent, as much of an Iranian as an historian and it shows sometimes with the eternal Iran crap. Don't get me wrong I don't think he's bad...although I recently read an article of his on Indo-Iranian and Greek cosmology and it was utter toilet paper linguistics wise, frankly...but..

Now they were Sassanian families who tried to claim descent from Parthian nobility incidentally but this was so transparent as to be a bit ludicrous. Cambs anc history.

Speaking of Kayanids I'm currently going back over the Zoroastrian material to brush up on my Avestan. Honestly tackling with the script (its in Gujurati script as most Zoros' write in) is annoying me a little bit.

Reading this stuff is really interesting especially...but I think more than anything I'm stuck by the massive disconnect when it comes to later stuff like the Shanameh in so many conceivable ways.