The Book

Scythian tribes, along with Cimmerians, Sarmatians and Alans populated the steppes north of the Black
Sea. The Scythian and Sarmatian tribes were spread across Great Hungarian Plain, South-Eastern
Ukraine, Russias Siberian, Southern, Volga,[59] Uralic regions and the Balkans,[60][61][62] while other
Scythian tribes, such as the Saka, spread as far east as Xinjiang, China.

Western and Eastern Iranians

The division into an "Eastern" and a "Western" group by the early 1st millennium is visible
in Avestan vs. Old Persian, the two oldest known Iranian languages. The Old Avestan texts known as
the Gathas are believed to have been composed by Zoroaster, the founder of Zoroastrianism, with
the Yaz culture (c. 1500 BC – 1100 BC) as a candidate for the development of Eastern Iranian
culture.[ citation needed ]

Western Iranian peoples

Distribution of Iranic peoples during the Iron Age.
Achaemenid Empire at its greatest extent under the rule of Darius I (522 BC to 486 BC)

Persepolis: Persian guards

During the 1st centuries of the 1st millennium BC, the ancient Persians established themselves in the
western portion of the Iranian Plateau and appear to have interacted considerably with the Elamites
and Babylonians, while the Medes also entered in contact with the Assyrians.[63] Remnants of
the Median language and Old Persian show their common Proto-Iranian roots, emphasized in Strabo and
Herodotus' description of their languages as very similar to the languages spoken by the Bactrians
and Sogdians in the east.[29][64] Following the establishment of the Achaemenid Empire, the Persian
language (referred to as " Farsi " in Persian after being changed from Parsi ) spread from Pars or Fars
Province (Persia) to various regions of the Empire, with the modern dialects of Iran, Afghanistan (also
known as Dari) and Central-Asia (known as Tajiki) descending from Old Persian.

At first, the Western Iranian peoples in the Near East were dominated by the various Assyrian empires.
An alliance of the Medes with the Persians, and rebelling Babylonians, Scythians, Chaldeans,