Daniel Potts has written a book that will find a place on the shelf of any library dealing with the history, archaeology and anthropology of Iran and its neighbours. It is not, however, a light read. The author is an archaeologist who has spent most of his illustrious career working in Iran, and specifically in Elam. Hence the genesis and purpose of this book, which is to debunk the widely held notion that later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century concepts of tribal nomadism in Iran constitute an important, even crucial, ethnographic model for an understanding of prehistory between the Chalcolithic period (fourth millennium bce) and the so-called “Iranian Migration” once thought by many to have taken place at the cusp of the Iron Age. The chronological span is enormous, stretching over some eight millennia from the Neolithic period to the present time. Prehistoric evidence is exclusively archaeological. In the pre-Achaemenid Iron Age contemporaneous textual evidence from Assyria, as well as later hearsay written down by Herodotus on Aegean shores, provide a broader picture than archaeology alone, the material culture shedding little light on what used to be called the Iranian Migration, or on such nomadic peoples as Cimmerians and Scythians. The next seven chapters, amounting to about three-quarters of the text, comprise a detailed historical synthesis that makes almost no reference to archaeological or ethnographic data. A final, tenth, chapter provides a brief summary of the conclusions given at the end of each chapter. An appendix, “The position of nomadism on the social evolutionary ladder” is concerned with Western ideas from the ancient world to the modern. A bibliography, running to 86 out of 558 pages, repeats the full references given in footnotes the first time each work is cited; thus the footnotes and bibliography together approach half of the total number of words. The index is very largely restricted to proper names. Illustrations are limited to twenty-one interesting photographs from the early twentieth century. There being only three maps of archaeological sites, an atlas is an essential companion to this book.

Chapter 1, “Nomadism and archaeological evidence”, makes clear that this book is concerned with “pastoral nomadism”. Detailed evaluation of archaeological evidence convincingly refutes the existence of nomadic pastoral tribes in Iran before the first millennium bce. The second chapter, “The coming of the Iranians”, contends that the first nomadic Iranians were Persian rather than Median, and that the lasting impact on Iran of largely nomadic Scythians and Cimmerians from the north was perhaps slight. Here some pages are devoted to the important topic of horses and horse-breeding. Readers interested in how North American archaeologists developed and then abandoned concepts of an Iranian migration should see chapter 2 of Michael Danti's Hasanlu V (Pennsylvania, 2013). Chapter 3 discusses references to nomads in Herodotus and other sources, concluding that Iranian-speaking nomads were present across the Iranian plateau in the second half of the first millennium. The next chapter documents the arrival of other peoples and the beginning of a process that was to dilute the predominance of “Iranians”. According to Potts’ convincing thesis, full-scale pastoral nomadism as observed by western travellers from the nineteenth century onwards only arose within Iran a little before the middle of the first millennium bce. Taken together chapters 4 to 9 constitute a history of nomadic tribes in Iran and its immediate neighbours. Certain trends come through the historical complexity and inevitable mass of overwhelming detail. One such trend is the Turkification of Iran with the coming of the Oghuz, and the subsequent Mongol invasion, as well as the arrival of very much smaller numbers of Arabs. Another is the extent to which rulers moved nomadic groups over huge distances in attempts to control them. Of interest to many in and beyond academia will be the demonstration in chapters 4 and 5 that “kurds” was a word originally used to denote groups of nomads, and was devoid of ethnic connotations. The term “Kurd” may not have taken on its modern ethno-linguistic and political sense until as late as the sixteenth century ce. This is in opposition to a widely held view that modern-day Kurds are direct descendants of the Medes, and that the Kurdish language is descended from Median.

There is little in these historical chapters for archaeologists, other than the broad point that medieval and post-medieval history of Iranian nomads does not provide any sort of model for the occupational history of Iran before the first millennium bce. Some will be disappointed that, despite the author's credentials, there is no discussion of how this tribal history might be reflected in ways that could be accessed by archaeologists. Chapter 6, “Mongols and Timurids”, contains a fascinating discussion of the carrying capacity of land for grazing, and of demography. Implicit reference to towns and villages is found throughout the volume but, reflecting a lacuna in the sources, there is little about proportions of settled agriculturalists and nomads. To some extent these nomads were always dependent on towns for manufactured goods although, as related in chapter 8, participation in the market economy increased significantly in the nineteenth century when, under the Qajars, taxes came to be demanded in cash rather than in kind. Only in the later Qajar period were there contemporaneous estimates of the population of Iran, and of the proportion of nomads to settled villagers and urban dwellers, but these vary widely. At the same time, in the second half of the nineteenth century, there are accounts of cholera epidemics, plague and famine that devastated both settled and nomadic populations. There were surely other times in prehistory and history when disease and natural disaster had far-reaching consequences that it is not now possible to assess.

A vast timeframe is countered by a concentration on pastoral nomads as well as by a geographical scope focusing on Iran. This scholarly synthetic study, although penned by an archaeologist, will be appreciated and widely used by historians, anthropologists and political scientists.