Peoples & Lands (6)
A catalogue view: every article filed as people. For the encyclopaedia arranged by subject, see the themes.
- PeopleThe Elamites
The Elamites were the ancient people of south-western Iran, holders of the lowland plain of Khuzistan around Susa and of the highland valleys of Fārs, whose civilisation was already some two thousand years old when Cyrus rose. Within the Achaemenid story they are the heartland's other people: the…
- PeopleThe Ionians
The Ionians were the Greeks of western Asia Minor, the twelve cities of the central Aegean seaboard from Miletus in the south to Phocaea in the north, with Samos and Chios offshore (the islands’ effective subjection came later, and its date is disputed), who spent the better part of two centuries…
- PeopleThe Magi
The Magi (Old Persian magu-) were the priestly class of the western Iranians, the one body of religious specialists named across the Median, Achaemenid, Parthian and Sasanian ages. Herodotus counts them among the six Median tribes and names them the officiants without whom no Persian could…
- PeopleThe Medes
The Medes (Old Persian Māda, Greek Mêdoi, Assyrian and Babylonian Mādāya) were the Iranian people of the north-western Zagros, settled about the plain of Ecbatana (modern Hamadān), who by the Greek account raised the first great Iranian kingdom: a line of four kings, Deioces, Phraortes, Cyaxares…
- PeopleThe Persians
The Persians (Old Persian Pārsa) were the ruling people of the Achaemenid Empire: the Iranian-speaking ethnos of the Fārs highland from which the dynasty sprang, whose aristocracy dominated imperial command and the great satrapies from the Indus to the Aegean, and whose name the subject world used…
- PeopleThe Saka (Scythians)
The Saka (Old Persian Sakā), the horse-riding nomad peoples of the Eurasian steppe, were the empire's whole northern and eastern horizon: fought at the frontier, enrolled in the royal armies, carved on the monuments, and never wholly ruled. The name itself is the first problem. "Saka" was the…