245. Iranian Peoples and Cultures
By the seventh century B.C., the Iranians were civilized and strong enough to participate in the overthrow of Semitic Assyria, whose principal inheritors they became. From then on for over twelve hundred years, with only a century of interruption due to Alexander and his successors, a succession of Iranian powers dominated not only the plateau but Babylonia and Mesopotamia: Medes, Achæmenian Persians, Parthians, Sassanian Persians. A strong national consciousness was evolved and reinforced by a national religion—Zoroastrianism, Magism, Fire-worship, the Avestan faith, are some of its names. This Iranian religion endured nearly three thousand years, and still survives among a shrunken number of followers, notably the emigrant Parsis—that is, “Persians”—of India; and its basic ideas of the eternal conflict of good and evil, truth and lie, and of a single supreme deity of righteousness, have influenced many other cults, including Christianity. The long contact between Iran and the Tigris-Euphrates valley and their frequent political unity since 600 B.C. reacted favorably to the intensification of culture in the highlands; with the result that when the Arabs and later the Turks broke from their marginal homes into the old civilized parts of western Asia, they absorbed heavily from the long established cultures of Iran. Much of Arab and Turkish civilization is really Persian, and goes back ultimately to Semitic Babylonian and Sumerian origins.
Soon after the Iranians pushed southward out of the steppe on to the plateau east of the Caspian, other Indo-Europeans drove southward west of the Caspian and Black Sea; the Armenians into the seats which they have held ever since, the Kardouchoi into the Kurd country, tribes allied to the Balkan Thracians and the Phrygians into Asia Minor. The centuries before and after 1000 B.C. were the period of these movements, all of which failed to penetrate as deeply into the heart of the west Asiatic cultural center as had the Semitic inflows. Nor was the Indo-Europeanization of all the newly occupied territories as permanent as the corresponding Semitization. Asia Minor, which is now prevailingly Turkish, is the one area of consequence that in the historic period has been de-Indo-Europeanized in speech (§ [50]).