so, how important were the iranians - the alans - in building what we call france, anyways?

well, we know there were substantial migrations of iranians into france, as there were substantial migrations of celts back into the plateaus. there was a two-way flow there, for a long time.

we also know that there was enough of a settled iranian presence in the areas around belgium and northern france, the origin area of the franks, that shrines were built to iranian deities, although there is a curious tendency in the literature to attribute this to trade contacts and a mass fetish for 'orientalism', despite the known migration histories. i put these two facts together and deduce that there were established iranian settlements in this region, just before the franks appear kind of out of nowhere.

the franks weren't really an ethnic confederacy. it was a german word, but it meant the free tribes of varying sorts in that particular region at the corner of the empire: celts, germans and enough iranians to take note of. but, the iranians tend to be ignored due to the fact that they did, indeed, assimilate to the new germanicized roman order, whereas the celts kind of held out.

there's a specific area of the map in france where everything is all about alan. everything ends up named alain in some abstraction, from mountains to cities to rivers to people. alain is probably recognizable to most as a french name, but it is actually iranian in origin, and a memory of the iranian tribe of alans that settled that area, before they vanished to history.

the idea i want to put forward is that they were probably important enough in the development of the frankish federation that they contributed to the cimmerian origin myth, which said that the franks came from the area around scythia, after a fancy detour through both trojan and roman lore. but, these were invented histories, invented purposefully to control the population with. the alans at least came from scythia, though. they appear to have been important enough to be necessary to include in the composite. and, due to the composite, we can indeed remember their importance in the federation.

jagmeet singh must cut his beard.