مردم فارس | |
---|---|
![]() Distribution of Persians and Persian-speaking peoples in and around Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan | |
Total population | |
60+ million[1] | |
Regions with significant populations | |
![]() | 40,700,000–51,940,000[note 1][2][3][4] |
Languages | |
Persian, other Iranian languages | |
Religion | |
Majority: Shia Islam (Twelver) Minority: Sunni Islam, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Baháʼí Faith, and others[5] | |
Related ethnic groups | |
Tajiks, Hazaras, Lurs, Aimaqs, Tats, and other Iranian peoples |
Persians (/ˈpɜːrʒənz/ PUR-zhənz),[note 2] or the Persian people (Persian: مردم فارس Mardom-e Fārs), are an Iranian ethnic group from West Asia.[4] They are indigenous to the Iranian plateau and comprise the majority of the population of Iran.[6] Alongside having a common cultural system, they are native speakers of the Persian language[7][8][9] and of the Western Iranian languages that are closely related to it.[10] In the Western world, "Persian" was largely understood as a demonym for all Iranians rather than as an ethnonym for the Persian people, but this understanding shifted in the 20th century.
The Persians were originally an ancient Iranian people who had migrated to Persis (also called "Persia proper" and corresponding with Iran's Fars Province) by the 9th century BCE.[11][12] They came from an earlier group called the Proto-Iranians, who likely split from the Indo-Iranians around 1800 BCE from either Afghanistan or Central Asia.[13][14] Together with their compatriots, they established and ruled some of the world's most powerful empires,[15][12] which are well-recognized for their massive cultural, political, and social influence in the ancient Near East and beyond.[16][17][18] The Persian people have contributed greatly to art and science,[19][20][21] and Persian literature is one of the world's most prominent literary traditions both inside and outside of Iran.[22] The regional prestige of their civilization was the basis for the development of many noteworthy Persianate societies, especially among the Turkic peoples, throughout Central Asia and South Asia.
In contemporary terminology, Persian-speaking people from Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan are known as Tajiks, with the former two countries having mutually intelligible Persian varieties known as Dari and Tajiki, respectively; whereas those from the Caucasus (primarily in the Republic of Azerbaijan and in Dagestan, Russia), albeit heavily assimilated, are known as Tats.[23][24] Historically, however, the terms Tajik and Tat were used synonymously and interchangeably with Persian.[23] Many influential Persian figures hailed from outside of Iran's modern borders—to the northeast in Afghanistan and Central Asia, and, to a lesser extent, to the northwest in the Caucasus proper.[25][26]
The Factbook puts 'Persian and Persian dialects' at 58 percent, but 51 percent of the population as ethnic Persians, while the Library of Congress states that Persian 'is spoken as a mother tongue by at least 65 percent of the population and as a second language by a large proportion of the remaining 35 percent. The 'Persian' mentioned in the latter report must thus also include Gilaki and Mazi. However, Gilaki and Mazi are actually from a different branch of the Iranian language subfamily than Persian, and could be as such be seen not as dialects, but as distinct languages. Suffice it here to say that while some scholars see categories such as Gilakis and Mazandaranis as referring to separate ethnic groups due to their linguistic traits, others count them as 'Persians' on exactly the same basis.
(...) an ethnic Persian; adheres to cultural systems connected with other ethnic Persians (...)
The largest group of people in present-day Iran are Persians (*q.v.) who speak dialects of the language called Fārsi in Persian, since it was primarily the tongue of the people of Fārs."
Conversely, the Nehāvand sub-province of Hamadān is home to ethnic Persians who speak NLori as a mother tongue. (...) The same is true of areas to the southwest, south, and east of the Lori language area (...): while the varieties spoken there show more structural similarity to Lori than to Persian, speakers identify themselves as ethnically Persian.
The name of Fārs is undoubtedly attested in Assyrian sources since the third millennium B.C.E. under the form Parahše. Originally, it was the "land of horses" of the Sumerians (Herzfeld, pp. 181–82, 184–86). The name was adopted by Iranian tribes which established themselves there in the 9th century B.C.E. in the west and southwest of Urmia lake. The Parsua (Pārsa) are mentioned there for the first time in 843 B.C.E., during the reign of Salmanassar III, and then, after they migrated to the southeast (Boehmer, pp. 193–97), the name was transferred, between 690 and 640, to a region previously called Anšan (q.v.) in Elamite sources (Herzfeld, pp. 169–71, 178–79, 186). From that moment the name acquired the connotation of an ethnic region, the land of the Persians, and the Persians soon thereafter founded the vast Achaemenid empire. A never-ending confusion thus set in between a narrow, limited, geographical usage of the term—Persia in the sense of the land where the aforesaid Persian tribes had shaped the core of their power—and a broader, more general usage of the term to designate the much larger area affected by the political and cultural radiance of the Achaemenids. The confusion between the two senses of the word was continuous, fueled by the Greeks who used the name Persai to designate the entire empire.
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In 550 B.C. Cyrus (called "the Great" by the Greeks) overthrew the Median empire under Astyages and brought the Persians into domination over the Iranian peoples; he achieved combined rule over all Iran as the first real monarch of the Achaemenid dynasty. Within a few years he founded a multinational empire without precedent—a first world-empire of historical importance, since it embraced all previous civilized states of the ancient Near East. (...) The Persian empire was a multinational state under the leadership of the Persians; among these peoples the Medes, Iranian sister nation of the Persians, held a special position.
Repaying its debt, Sasanian art exported its forms and motives eastward into India, Turkestan, and China, westward into Syria, Asia Minor, Constantinople, the Balkans, Egypt, and Spain.
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Persian presence
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Persian literature
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By mid-Safavid times the usage tājik for 'Persian(s) of Iran' may be considered a literary affectation, an expression of the traditional rivalry between Men of the Sword and Men of the Pen. Pietro della Valle, writing from Isfahan in 1617, cites only Pārsi and ʿAjami as autonyms for the indigenous Persians, and Tāt and raʿiat 'peasant(ry), subject(s)' as pejorative heteronyms used by the Qezelbāš (Qizilbāš) Torkmān elite. Perhaps by about 1400, reference to actual Tajiks was directed mostly at Persian-speakers in Afghanistan and Central Asia; (...)
Tat was known to have been used at different times to designate Crimean Goths, Greeks and sedentary peoples generally, but its primary reference came to be the Persians within the Turkic domains. (...) Tat is nowadays specialized to refer to special groups with Iranian languages in the west of the Caspian Sea.
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