The Proto-Indo-Iranian peoples (or Indo-Iranian peoples, or Indo-Iranic peoples),Chen, Sanping. "SOME REMARKS ON THE CHINESE" BULGAR"." Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae (1998): 69–83.Motti, Victor Vahidi. "Richard Slaughter: The master interpreter of alternative planetary futures." Futures 132 (2021): 102796.Dwyer, Arienne M. "The texture of tongues: Languages and power in China." Nationalism and ethnoregional identities in China. Routledge, 2013. 68–85. also known as Ā́rya or Aryans from their self-designation, were a group of speakers of Proto-Indo-European languages who brought the offshoot Proto-Indo-Iranian languages to parts of Eurasia in waves from the first part of the 2nd millennium BC onwards. The original location of Indo-Iranians were thought to be north of modern-day Afghanistan, east of the Caspian Sea, in the area that is now Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. They eventually branched out into the Iranian peoples who migrated south and west, while the Indo-Aryan peoples migrated south and east."Indo-Iranian languages". Encyclopedia Britannica, 2 Apr. 2025, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Indo-Iranian-languages. Accessed 19 March 2026.
Nomenclature The term Aryan has long been used to denote the Indo-Iranians, because Ā́rya was the self-designation of the ancient speakers of the Indo-Iranian languages, specifically the Iranian and the Indo-Aryan peoples, collectively known as the Indo-Iranians.The "Aryan" Language, Gherardo Gnoli, Instituto Italiano per l'Africa e l'Oriente, Roma, 2002.. Schmitt, "Aryans" in Encyclopedia Iranica: Excerpt:"The name "Aryan" (OInd. ā́rya-, Ir. *arya- [with short a-], in Old Pers. ariya-, Av. airiia-, etc.) is the self-designation of the peoples of Ancient India and Ancient Iran who spoke Aryan languages, in contrast to the "non-Aryan" peoples of those "Aryan" countries (cf. OInd. an-ā́rya-, Av. an-airiia-, etc.), and lives on in ethnic names like Alan (Lat. Alani, NPers. īrān, Oss. Ir and Iron.". Also accessed online: in May 2010 Despite this, some scholars use the term Indo-Iranian to refer to this group, though the term "Aryan" remains widely used by most scholars, such as Josef Wiesehofer,Wiesehofer, Joseph: Ancient Persia. New York: 1996. I.B. Tauris. Recommends the use by scholars of the term Aryan to describe the Eastern, not the Western, branch of the Indo-European peoples (see "Aryan" in index) Will Durant,Durant, Will: Our Oriental Heritage. New York: 1954. Simon and Schuster. According to Will Durant on Page 286: "the name Aryan first appears in the [name] Harri, one of the tribes of the Mitanni. In general it was the self-given appellation of the tribes living near or coming from the [southern] shores of the Caspian sea. The term is properly applied today chiefly to the Mitannians, Hittites, Medes, Persians, and Vedic Hindus, i.e., only to the eastern branch of the Indo-European peoples, whose western branch populated Europe." and Jaakko Häkkinen. Population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, in his 1994 book The History and Geography of Human Genes, also uses the term Aryan to describe the Indo-Iranians.
History
Origin The Proto-Indo-Iranians are commonly identified with the descendants of the Indo-Europeans known as the Sintashta culture and the subsequent Andronovo culture within the broader Andronovo horizon, and their homeland with an area of the Eurasian steppe that borders the Ural River on the west, the Tian Shan on the east (where the Indo-Iranians took over the area occupied by the earlier Afanasevo culture), and Transoxiana and the Hindu Kush on the south.
Based on its use by Indo-Aryans in Mitanni and Vedic India, its prior absence in the Near East and Harappan India, and its 19th–20th century BC attestation at the Andronovo site of Sintashta, Kuzmina (1994) argues that the chariot corroborates the identification of Andronovo as Indo-Iranian. dated a chariot burial at Krivoye Lake to about 2000 BC, and a Bactria-Margiana burial that also contains a foal has recently been found, indicating further links with the steppes.; Kuzmina (1994), Klejn (1974), and Brentjes (1981), as cited in
Historical linguists broadly estimate that a continuum of Indo-Iranian languages probably began to diverge by 2000 BC, preceding both the Vedic and Iranian cultures which emerged later. The earliest recorded forms of these languages, Vedic Sanskrit and Gathic Avestan, are remarkably similar, descended from the common Proto-Indo-Iranian language. The origin and earliest relationship between the Nuristani languages and that of the Iranian and Indo-Aryan groups is not completely clear.
Expansion
First wave – Indo-Aryans
Two-wave models of Indo-Iranian expansion have been proposed by Burrow (1973) and . The Indo-Iranians and their expansion are strongly associated with the Proto-Indo-European invention of the chariot. It is assumed that this expansion spread from the Proto-Indo-European homeland north of the Caspian Sea south to the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Iranian plateau, and the Indian subcontinent.
The Mitanni of Anatolia
The Mitanni, a people known in eastern Anatolia from about 1500 BC, were of possibly of mixed origins: An indigenous non Indo-European Hurrian-speaking majority was supposedly dominated by a non-Anatolian, Indo-Aryan elite. There is linguistic evidence for such a superstrate, in the form of: a horse training manual written by a Mitanni man named Kikkuli, which was translated into the Hittite language the names of Mitanni rulers and; the names of gods invoked by these rulers in treaties. In particular, Kikkuli's text includes words such as aika "one" (i.e. a cognate of the Indo-Aryan eka), tera "three" (tri), panza "five" (pancha), satta "seven", (sapta), na "nine" (nava), and vartana "turn around", in the context of a horse race (Indo-Aryan vartana). In a treaty between the Hittites and the Mitanni, the Ashvin deities Mitra, Varuna, Indra, and Nasatya are invoked. These loanwords tend to connect the Mitanni superstrate to Indo-Aryan rather than Iranian languages – i.e. the early Iranian word for "one" was aiva.
Indian subcontinent – Vedic culture The standard model for the entry of the Indo-European languages into the Indian subcontinent is that this first wave went over the Hindu Kush, either into the headwaters of the Indus and later the Ganges. The earliest stratum of Vedic Sanskrit, preserved only in the Rigveda, is assigned to roughly 1500 BC.Rigveda – Britannica Online Encyclopedia From the Indus, the Indo-Aryan languages spread from , over the northern and central parts of the subcontinent, sparing the extreme south. The Indo-Aryans in these areas established several powerful kingdoms and principalities in the region, from south eastern Afghanistan to the doorstep of Bengal. The most powerful of these kingdoms were the post-Rigvedic Kuru (in Kurukshetra and the Delhi area) and their allies the Pañcālas further east, as well as Gandhara and later on, about the time of the Buddha, the kingdom of Kosala and the quickly expanding realm of Magadha. The latter lasted until the 4th century BC, when it was conquered by Chandragupta Maurya and formed the center of the Maurya Empire.
In eastern Afghanistan and some western regions of Pakistan, Indo-Aryan languages were eventually replaced by Eastern Iranian languages. Most Indo-Aryan languages, however, were and still are prominent in the rest of the Indian subcontinent. Today, Indo-Aryan languages are spoken in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Fiji, Suriname and the Maldives.
Second wave – Iranians (Iranic peoples)
The second wave is interpreted as the Iranian wave.
The first Iranians to reach the Black Sea 'may' have been the Cimmerians in the 8th century BC, although their linguistic affiliation to Iranians is uncertain. They were followed by the Scythians, who are considered a western branch of the Central Asian Sakas. Sarmatian tribes, of whom the best known are the Roxolani (Rhoxolani), Iazyges (Jazyges) and the Alani (Alans), followed the Scythians westwards into Europe in the late centuries BC and the 1st and 2nd centuries AD (The Age of Migrations). The populous Sarmatian tribe of the Massagetae, dwelling near the Caspian Sea, were known to the early rulers of Persia in the Achaemenid Period. At their greatest reported extent, around 1st century AD, the Sarmatian tribes ranged from the Vistula River to the mouth of the Danube and eastward to the Volga, bordering the shores of the Black and Caspian seas as well as the Caucasus to the south. In the east, the Saka occupied several areas in Xinjiang, from Khotan to Tumshuq.
The Medians, Persians and Parthians begin to appear on the Iranian plateau from , and the Achaemenids replaced the language isolate speaking Elamites rule over the region from 559 BC, although the Iranic peoples were largely subject to the Semitic speaking Assyrian Empire until the 6th century BC. Around the first millennium AD, Iranian groups began to settle on the eastern edge of the Iranian plateau, on the mountainous frontier of northwestern and western Indian subcontinent, displacing the earlier Indo-Aryans from the area.
In Eastern Europe, the Iranians were eventually decisively assimilated (e.g. Slavicisation) and absorbed by the Proto-Slavic population of the region, while in Central Asia, the Turkic languages marginalized the Iranian languages as a result of the Turkic expansion of the early centuries AD. Extant major Iranian languages are Persian, Pashto, Kurdish, and Balochi besides numerous smaller ones. Ossetian, primarily spoken in North Ossetia and South Ossetia, is a direct descendant of Alanic, and by that the only surviving Sarmatian language of the once wide-ranging East Iranian dialect continuum that stretched from Eastern Europe to the eastern parts of Central Asia.
Archaeology Archaeological cultures associated with Indo-Iranian expansion include: Europe Poltavka culture (2500–2100 BC) Abashevo culture (2300–1850 BC) Srubna culture (1850–1450 BC) Central Asia Sintashta-Petrovka-Arkaim (2050–1750 BC) Andronovo horizon (2000–1450 BC) Alakul (2100–1400 BC) Fedorovo (1400–1200 BC) Alekseyevka (1200–1000 BC) Bactria-Margiana Archaeological Complex (2200–1700 BC) Yaz culture (1500–1100 BC) Indian subcontinent Ochre Coloured Pottery culture (2000–1500 BC) Cemetery H culture (1900–1300 BC) Swat culture (1400–800 BC) Painted Gray Ware culture (1200–600 BC) Iranian Plateau Early West Iranian Grey Ware (1500–1000 BC) Late West Iranian Buff Ware (900–700 BC) suggests the following identifications: Date rangeArchaeological cultureIdentification suggested by Parpola2800–2000 BC late Catacomb and Poltavka cultureslate PIE to Proto–Indo-Iranian2000–1800 BCSrubna and Abashevo culturesProto-Iranian2000–1800 BCPetrovka-SintashtaProto–Indo-Aryan1900–1700 BCBMAC"Proto-Dasa" Indo-Aryans establishing themselves in the existing BMAC settlements, defeated by "Proto-Rigvedic" Indo-Aryans around 17001900–1400 BCCemetery HIndian Dasa1800–1000 BCAlakul-FedorovoIndo-Aryan, including "Proto–Sauma-Aryan" practicing the Soma cult1700–1400 BCearly Swat cultureProto-Rigvedic1700–1500 BClate BMAC"Proto–Sauma-Dasa", assimilation of Proto-Dasa and Proto–Sauma-Aryan1500–1000 BCEarly West Iranian Grey WareMitanni-Aryan (offshoot of "Proto–Sauma-Dasa")1400–800 BClate Swat culture and Punjab, Painted Grey Warelate Rigvedic1400–1100 BCYaz II-III, SeistanProto-Avestan1100–1000 BCGurgan Buff Ware, Late West Iranian Buff WareProto-Persian, Proto-Median1000–400 BCIron Age cultures of XinjiangProto-Saka
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