southern part of the land today, as it must have been in ancient times, is pronouncedly piebald in an ethnic sense.
The paucity of archeological and anthropological data has given rise to innumerable speculations concerning the people who dwelt in Iran at the dawn of written history. Some of these are based on philology alone—a dangerous and often misleading guide. Others are derived from cultural features and frequently disregard the effects of borrowing by peoples on the outer fringes of a cultural area, or the changes resulting when new immigrants adopt the cultural advances of indigenous populations. The best we can hope is to avoid the more obvious pitfalls while we state what appear to be the ascertainable facts.
Physical anthropologists are certain that Mesopotamia was the eastern borderline for Semitic types of individuals and that the Semites, whom we know as the brown Mediterranean peoples who invaded Mesopotamia from Arabia, did not inhabit Iran at an early date. When, therefore, the author of the tenth chapter of Genesis calls Elam a son of Shem, that is, a Semite, he is speaking not in anthropological but in geographical and cultural terms. Nor did Nordic peoples speaking an Indo-Iranian language dwell in Iran in early times; the earliest evidence indicating their entry is dated to the beginning of the second millennium b.c. and is based on the mention of Indo-Iranian deities among Kassite gods.
