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let us commence our investigation with the croats. The science of linguistics provides several connections with iran. Thus, the croats of croatia call themselves "hrvati" and their country "hrvatska", whence the croatian domain name on the internet is .hr. The name "hrvati" is derived from the avestan province "harahvaiti" (greek: "arachosia"). The scientific philological argument for the identification of the croats with the haravatis is given in (sakac 1955, pp. 33-36; sakac 1949, 1937) as dvornik notes, "p.s.sakac thinks that he discovered the name 'croats' in darius' inscriptions from the sixth century b.c. There an old persian province and people are mentioned, called harahvaitai, harahvatis, horohoati..." (dvornik 1956, p.26) further, the roman leader ammanius marcellinus mentioned that two cities arose in ancient persia called habroatis and chroates. In this regard, prof. Mandic writes,"the croats of the don, then had to come in ancient times from iran. On a stone inscription of the king darius (522-486 b.c.) the nation of the haruavat-is appears among the 23 subject nations. The persian sacred books of the avesti (vendidad) call that nation the harahvaiti. The provinces settled by that nation encompassed in those times the southern half of modern south afghanistan, the whole of baluchistan and the eastern part of modern iran. In that ancient province ought we to look for the paleo-fatherland of the modern croats." (mandic 1970, chapter 1)
now, we turn to the connection with the serbs. Several historians maintain that the serbian ruling caste shared the same origin as the croats. Prof. Malcolm recently wrote a book "bosnia" (malcolm 1996), in which he clearly elucidates the iranic origin of both serbs and croats. For instance, prof. Salzman notes while reviewing malcolm's first chapter:"the croats and serbs (who were either slavic tribes with iranian ruling castes or iranian tribes with slavic subjects) arrived in the balkans in the 620s, a land already occupied by the slavs." (salzman 1999)the view of prof. Malcolm is thus that the croats and serbs were originally iranic speakers who adopted a slavic language (malcolm 1996). Examples of a conquering immigrant group adopting the language of its surrounding subjects abound in history. For example, the scandinavian normans adopted the romance french language in normandy, while their ruling kinsmen in england adopted anglo-saxon; the germanic franks, merovingians and carolingians adopted the romance french language; the nordic visigoths adopted the romance spanish language; the germanic lombards adopted the romance italian language, and the tungus manchu adopted the chinese language of their subjects. Likewise, the jats were originally speakers of scythian or east iranic languages, who subsequently adopted an indo-aryan language. Hence, that the iranic croats and serbs should adopt a slavic language would not be unusual in any way.
http://www.iranchamber.com/history/a...serbs_jats.php[
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