The first of these nomadic migrations occurred in the late third millennium BCE, when Indo-Aryan speaking nomads, likely members of the Sintashta Culture, migrated from their homeland between the Ural and Volga Rivers into Transoxiana, then home to the agriculturalists of the Bactria-Margiane Archaeological Complex (also sometimes referred to as the Oxus Culture). These pastoralists brought the modern horse and light chariot that revolutionized warfare across Eurasia in the Late Bronze Age.

The Indo-Aryans, from ca. 1500 BCE, crossed the Hindu Kush into the Indus valley, known in cuneiform texts as Meluuha, and defined the cultural and religious foundations of Hindu India. Centuries later, their Iranian-speaking kinsman, Medes and Persians, followed the route of the later Silk Road across Iran to settle, respectively, in northwestern Iran around Ecbatana (today Hamadan), and in southwestern Iran, Persia (today Fars). Cyrus the Great (559–530 BCE) conquered a vast Persian Empire from the Aegean to the Hindu Kush. The Great Kings of Persia depended on Iranian horse archers, the invincible light cavalry of steppe nomads since the early Iron Age (ca. 1000–700 BCE). Cyrus’ heirs extended the empire from the Nile to the Indus, founding the greatest ancient empire prior to Rome. Iran has ever since been a premier political and cultural power in the Near East. The Iranians, conscious of their imperial heritage, still view themselves as the masters of the Near East.

With the Muslim conquest of Iran, the Arab governors of Khorosan (the eastern Iranian plateau), mastered Transoxiana between 673 and 754 and so they succeeded to the task of defending the Jaxartes frontier against nomadic Turkish tribes which had rapidly spread across the Eurasian steppes since the sixth century. As the Caliphate fragmented after the death of al-Amin (809–813), emirs of Iranian or Turkish origin carved out regional states as deputies of the Sunni Abbasid Caliph of Baghdad. They depended on armies of slave soldiers (mamluks) obtained in trade with Turkish tribes on the Eurasian steppes.

From these warring Turkish tribes, the Seljuk Turks burst into the Near East in the second significant migration of steppe nomads during the eleventh century. The Seljuk Turks transformed the Islamic world. The Seljuk Sultan Tughrul Bey defeated his Ghaznavid overlord Masud, who was himself an Iranian dynast of Turkish origin, at the Battle of Dandanaqan in 1040. Tughrul Bey then overran Iran and went on to restore the authority of Abbasid Caliph in 1055.

In 1071, Sultan Alp Arslan, the nephew of Tughrul Bey, decisively defeated the Byzantine army at Manzikert and so opened Anatolia to settlement by Turkish tribes who forged there a new Muslim, Turkish heartland over the next three centuries. The newcomers also settled on the grasslands of Transoxiana and, Azerbaijan, and so brought their language and way of life into the Near East. Foremost, the Turks revived the military power of Islam, and they have ever since provided the best soldiers of Islamic regimes. The Seljuk Turks, who long adhered to their nomadic mores, proved hard masters to the urban dwellers and agriculturalists of the Near East, but they had embraced Islam en masse from the early tenth century. Hence, these nomadic newcomers were given a pass, and accepted as the defenders of Sunni Islam rather than rapacious barbarians invaders.

The future of Iran rested with a new Turkish nomadic confederation, the Kızılbaşlar (“Red Turbans”), the warriors of the Safavid Shahs who turned Iran into an imperial Shi’ite in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Safavid Shahs proved the most dangerous foe to the Ottoman sultans, who united most of Sunni Islam, for mastery of the Near East and the historic Muslim capitals. The geopolitical and religious alignments ultimately wrought by the Mongol invasions, especially the Turkish-Iranian rivalry, have endured down to this day.

Kenneth W. Harl is Professor Emeritus in the Department of History at Tulane University. His Book, Empire of the Steppes: The Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilisation, has recently been published by Bloomsbury Press.

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