Barthold’s Iran

The author draws our attention to the fact that the geographical conception of Iran does not coincide either with the idea of the territory occupied by the Iranian peoples as an ethnographical unit or with the domain of influence of the Iranian culture or yet with the spread of Persian the Iranian literary language. [...] The expeditions sent to study the remnants of the Budhist sculptures in Chinese Turkistan by the Germans and also by the British under Sir Aurel Stein resulted in establishing the facts of the existence in Central Asia during the period from the first to the tenth century A. D. of different Iranian languages. [...] The term : the land of the Arians was obviously understood not in the ethnographical but solely in the political sense of the word that was the name of the country united under the power of the Arsacids —a dynasty which rebelled against the Greek coquerors. [...] The Aryans in the sense of the Ir do-Euroceans of Asia "were divided into two branches the Indian and the Iranian the name "Iranians" in the linguistic sense of the word Has applied independently of the political frontiers to all the naticns united under that heading on the ground of their linguistic affinifes. [...] When at the end of the Tgth century the idea of collecting materials relative to the domain of Iranian philology languages literature and history of the Iranians first arose3 the linguistic part of this work comprised idioms from the most Eastern of the Pamir Dialects the Sarikoli to Western Kurdish dialects in the Eastern part of the Asia Minor Peninsula.