Farsi

The Persians are the Iranian people of the Iranian plateau, native speakers of Persian, ancestors settling Persis around Shiraz by the ninth century BC. From there they built the Achaemenid Empire of Cyrus and Darius, then the Parthian and Sasanian empires; in the Sasanian empire Middle Persian served as the language of state and letters.

The Arab conquest of the seventh century brought Islam and Arabic, but Persian survived and revived from the ninth century under dynasties such as the Samanids, who adopted the Arabic script and patronized literature crowned by Ferdowsi's Shahnameh around 1000. Persian then became the high language of the Islamic east under successive dynasties, carried from Anatolia to India by administrators and poets.

In 1337, as the Ilkhanate disintegrated, local dynasties divided the Persian heartlands until Timur's campaigns reunited them by conquest. The Safavids restored an Iranian empire in 1501, made Persian its administrative language and welded the plateau to Twelver Shiism, a framework inherited by later dynasties.