Talysh, Tats and other peoples

No list of Iran’s peoples is ever complete. Beyond the larger communities with their own entries live dozens of smaller ones, some confined to a handful of villages, some spread across borders. Many speak Iranian languages that have survived for centuries in the shelter of mountains; others came from far away and made Iran home. What follows is a brief introduction to some of them.

Talysh and Tats

The Talysh live in the forested mountains on the south-western shore of the Caspian, in western Gilan and Ardabil around Talesh, Masal and Astara, and across the border in the Lankaran region of the Republic of Azerbaijan. They speak Talyshi, a north-western Iranian language, and are known for rice and tea farming, upland herding, and a rich tradition of song. In Iran the name Tat, or Tati, refers to speakers of several north-western Iranian dialects in villages around Takestan, Zanjan and Harzand, often seen as relatives of the old language of Azerbaijan before it became Turkic. Confusingly, the Tats of the Caucasus speak a different language, a south-western Iranian tongue close to Persian; Judeo-Tat is the language of the Mountain Jews of Dagestan and Azerbaijan.

Across the borders

The Ossetians of North Ossetia in Russia and of South Ossetia speak Ossetic, an Eastern Iranian language descended from that of the Alans and, through them, the Scythians and Sarmatians of the steppe. Most are Orthodox Christians, some keep a revived native faith, and their Nart epics are among the great oral traditions of the Caucasus. The Pashtuns of Afghanistan and Pakistan speak Pashto, also an Eastern Iranian language, live by the code of Pashtunwali, and honour poets such as Khushal Khan Khattak and Rahman Baba. Both are nations in their own right, and kin to Iran through language rather than politics.

Communities made in Iran

In Fereydunshahr and the villages of Fereydan, west of Isfahan, live Georgians whose ancestors were brought from Kakheti by Shah Abbas I in the early seventeenth century. They are Shia Muslims, yet many still speak an old form of Georgian. On the south coast, in Hormozgan, Bushehr and Sistan and Baluchestan, live Afro-Iranians, descendants of East Africans brought by the Indian Ocean slave trade. Their music and the healing ceremony of zār (zar), with its drums and possessing winds, have become part of the culture of the whole coast. Other peoples deserve their own pages in time: the Shahsevan of the Moghan plain, the Turkic Afshar and Khalaj, the Laks, the Semnani speakers, the Brahui of Balochistan, the Pamiri peoples and the Yaghnobi of Tajikistan, whose language descends from Sogdian.

Some of Iran’s oldest communities are defined above all by faith: Zoroastrians in Yazd, Kerman and Tehran, Jews in Isfahan, Shiraz and Tehran, Mandaeans along the Karun in Khuzestan, Yarsan in Kurdish country and Bahá’ís across the country. Their stories are told in the Faiths section. What binds them, and all the peoples on these pages, is not one language or one faith, but a long life lived together on the same land, and a share in the same Iranian world.