Alan horsemen carried an Iranian name into medieval Europe
Their ethnonym is a dialect form of Old Iranian Aryan—the same root behind Iran. From the Pontic steppe they rode into Gaul, Spain, and North Africa, taught Romans the feigned retreat, and left descendants still speaking Ossetian in the Caucasus.
Usually classed among the Sarmatians and perhaps kin to the Massagetae, the Alans are linked by modern scholars to Chinese Yancai and Roman Aorsi. In the first century they pushed west from Central Asia and dominated Sarmatian lands between the Don and the Caspian. Josephus describes a raid through Hyrcania into Media; in 135 CE another sweep into Asia Minor forced Arrian, governor of Cappadocia, to write his War Against the Alans. By the early second century they held the Lower Volga and Kuban after absorbing or dispersing Aorsi and Siraces.
After Huns shattered Gothic power on the Pontic Steppe around 375 CE, many Alans joined Germanic peoples. They crossed the Rhine in 406 with Vandals and Suebi, settled near Orléans and Valence, then entered Iberia around 409. Visigothic victory in 418 ended Iberian Alan autonomy; survivors merged with the Vandals and crossed to North Africa. Those who stayed in the Caucasus under Hunnic rule built the kingdom of Alania by the ninth century, lasting until Mongol invasions in the thirteenth. Scholars widely treat those Caucasus Alans as ancestors of today's Ossetians.
Their Eastern Iranian tongue, descended from Scytho-Sarmatian, became modern Ossetian; related names Asi, As, and Os underlie the ethnonym. Boys learned to ride early—Ammianus Marcellinus claimed an Alan man found walking insulting. Feigned retreats lured infantry off balance; missile cavalry fixed foes for shock charges. Romans and Germans borrowed the style. Mongols later enrolled them as Asud guards. Even Western given names Alan and Alain may echo settlers who arrived in the first millennium.
Source: Alans
