of Boghaz Keüi tell us many "Aryan" names of persons and gods of the middle of the second millennium B.C. — that is, the Vedic Age of Chivalry. It is Palestine and Syria that furnish these names. Nevertheless, Eduard Meyer observes[1] that they are Indian and not Persian, and the same holds good for the numerals that have now been discovered.[2] There is not a unit of Persians, or of any other "people" in the sense of our historical writers. They were Indian heroes, who rode westward and with their precious weapon the war-horse and their own ardent energy made themselves felt as a power far and wide in the ageing Babylonian Empire.
About 600 there appears in the middle of this world Persis, a little district with a politically united population of peasant barbarians. Herodotus says that of its tribes only three were of genuine Persian nationality. Had the language of these knights of old lived on in the hills, and is "Persians" really a land-name that passed to a people? The Medes, who were very similar, bear only the name of a land where an upper warrior-stratum had learned through great political successes to feel itself as a unit. In the Assyrian archives of Sargon and his successors (about 700) are found, along with the non-Aryan place-names, numerous "Aryan" names of persons, all leading figures, but Tiglath-Pileser IV (745-727) calls the people black-haired.[3] It can only have been later that the "Persian people" of Cyrus and Darius was formed, out of men of varied provenance, but forged to a strong inner unity of lived experience. But when, scarce two centuries later, the Macedonians put an end to their lordship — was it that the Persians in this form were no longer in existence? (Was there still a Lombard people at all in Italy in A.D. 900?) It is certain that the very wide diffusion of the empire-language of Persia, and the distribution of the few thousands of adult males from Persia over the immense system of military and administrative business, must long ago have led to the dissolution of the Persian nation and set up in its place, as carriers of the Persian name in upper-class conscious of itself as a political unit, of whose members very few could have claimed descent from the invaders from Persia.[4] There is, indeed, not even a country that can be considered as the theatre of Persian history. The events of the period from Darius to Alexander took place partly in northern Mesopotamia (that is, in the midst of an Aramaic-speaking population), partly lower down in old Sinear, anywhere but in Persis, where the handsome buildings begun by Xerxes were never carried out. The Parthians of the succeeding Achæmenid period were a Mongol tribe which had adopted a Persian dialect and in the midst of this people sought to embody the Persian national feeling in themselves.
