The ancient Central Eurasian steppes stretched from Manchuria in the east to the Alfold Plain in Hungary and Romania in the west. Steppe pastoral nomads subsisted largely on the dairy products of their animals, such as cheese, yogurt, and cheese curds, supplemented with meat from their animals as well as from hunting. Covering the Pontic and Caspian steppes, Scythia stretched roughly from the Dniester River to the Amu Darya River and perhaps even to the Altai Mountains. The Sarmatians interacted with the Scythians frequently as the Sarmatians nomadized between the Don and Volga rivers, although by the sixth century some had crossed the Don River and found pastures near the Sea of Azov and may have been subject to Scythian dominion. The Xiongnu merged with other disparate pastoral nomads and formed a new confederation known as the Huns, although this may have been what the Xiongnu called themselves.

Iranian society occupies a unique situation within the Middle East. The country fulfils the criteria of a recognizable human unit with a culture that has been distinctive for many centuries. Iran has a pronounced physiography. Human settlement in Iran is concentrated on the interior piedmont slopes of the north and west, and it extends through the outer Alburz piedmont to include the southern Caspian coastlands. Climatically, it is fundamentally part of the general Middle Eastern regime, as Iran has wider extremes than are experienced in many other countries of that region. Besides the settled communities there are important groups of nomads and semi-nomads in Iran. In recent times cupidity aroused by Iran's richness in petroleum made this richness a political liability rather than an asset. If we seek to define Iran's function as a state and as a human grouping in terms of a personality, then the country can be said to generate, to receive and transmogrify, and to re-transmit.