Nomadism in Iran

Abstract

Abstract This book examines the development of nomadism in Iran over the course of three millennia. Evidence of nomadism in prehistory is examined and found insufficient to justify claims of its great antiquity. The background of the earliest nomadic groups, identified as Persian tribes by Herodotus, is examined within the context of the migration of Iranian speakers onto the Iranian plateau in the late second or early first millennium B.C. Thereafter, evidence of nomadic groups in Late Antiquity and early Islamic times is reviewed. Major nomadic incursions from the medieval period onwards changed the demographic character of Iran to the extent that, by the nineteenth century, Western visitors estimated that the nomadic sector accounted for 25–50% of Iran’s population. Fundamental social changes resulting from enforced sedentarization and schooling, as well as integration into the market economy, altered Iran’s nomadic groups in the twentieth century. The trajectory of change among Iran’s nomadic groups has been profound and anything but linear, and archaeologists who make facile assumptions about the permanence of nomadic adaptation to the Iranian landscape are ignorant both of the extra-territorial origin of many of Iran’s nomadic groups, and the vicissitudes they have undergone throughout history.

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