The Northeast Iranians

This book argues that the core of the Arthurian and Holy Grail legends derives originally from a region known in antiquity as Scythia, that is, the western portion of the great "sea of grass" that stretches from the Altai Mountains to the Hungarian Plain (see map 1). We must therefore take a closer look at several of the ethnic groups that originated in this vast steppe region. Almost all of them spoke languages belonging to what linguists call the Northeast Iranian branch of the Indo-Iranian substock of the Indo-European language family; ¹ most scholars now think that the linguistic differences among these several groups were minimal and that they not only shared a closely related set of dialects but also a common culture. ²