Iranians, Turanians, and the Art of the Raid

King Fereydun had three sons: Tur, Salm, and Iraj. When Iraj, the youngest and his father’s favorite, was granted the choice portion of the kingdom, his elder brothers rose up and murdered him. From this original sin and the blood feud it birthed sprang the epic confrontation between Iran and Turan—between the Iranian descendants of Iraj and the progeny of Tur. In the Iranian imagination, Turan represents a chaotic, barbaric darkness set against a civilized, enlightened order. Their conflict transcends mere territorial disputes; it grapples with good and evil, purity and impurity, and the crushing weight of an arbitrary fate. This struggle serves as a central axis of the *Shahnameh* (“The Book of Kings”), the tenth-century epic by the poet Ferdowsi, rooted in the deep well of pre-Islamic Iranian mythology.

The murder of Iraj, illustration from the Shahnameh. Source: http://etcweb.princeton.edu/shahnama/view-thumb.epl?page_id=173, 322, 223, 599.

Historically speaking, “Iran” is not confined to the borders of the modern Islamic Republic. It is a vast cultural expanse stretching from the edges of Anatolia and Azerbaijan in the west, across the Iranian Plateau, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, all the way to the Tarim Basin and the Taklamakan Desert—the region known today as Xinjiang in western China.

These lands are defined as Iranian by their ethnic and linguistic map prior to the Turkic migrations of the tenth century. The Sogdians once managed wealthy merchant cities in what are now Samarkand and Bukhara; the Khotanese lived in the Tarim Basin, composing Buddhist commentaries in their Iranian tongue; and the people of Afghanistan and Tajikistan still largely speak Persian dialects like Dari and Tajik, or other Iranian languages such as Pashto.

And Turan? Turan is the steppe.

The steppe is a place where crops fail and no man plows the earth. It is a sea of grass rolling from northeast China through Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and southern Russia, reaching as far as the Hungarian plains. This is the home of the pastoral nomad. Nomadic pastoralism is a specialized economy that likely branched off from early agriculture, dependent on the horse as a primary means of transport. It exploited an ecological niche previously closed to human life. This way of life is defined by maintaining herds year-round in open pasture, requiring the entire population to migrate seasonally within defined territories.

Turan. Source: lazy-lizard-tales.blogspot.com

Yet this economy is never truly self-sufficient. There are goods the nomad simply cannot produce. He is compelled to obtain them from the settled farmer through trade, extortion, or the raid. To my mind, there is something almost respectable in how the Bedouin diaspora in the Negev—setting aside the political and sociological complexities for a moment—occasionally indulges in the traditional nomadic hobby of extracting material gains from the settled population, in this case, the residents of Beersheba.

Historically, the settled man lived in terror of the nomad, and with good reason. A master of the horse and the powerful composite bow, the nomad was militarily superior to the farmer in every absolute sense.

A typical Turanian (horse not pictured).

In this light, the clash between Turan and Iran echoes an ancient socio-economic friction between settled and nomadic Iranians. Later, as Turkic peoples—Seljuks, Uzbeks, Uyghurs, and Tatars—moved into Central Asia, the term “Turanian” was applied to them. This identification of Turan with the Turkic tribes who occupied the nomadic niche likely began in Ferdowsi’s own time. He composed his masterpiece under the rule of Mahmud of Ghazni, a Turkic military slave who seized power in what is now Afghanistan. Mahmud established a precedent that would become a historical pattern: the rule of Turkic nomads over the settled populations of Iran and the Middle East.