thumb|300px|[[Aras (river)|Aras and Kura river map]]
thumb|300px|right|Arran is located to the west of the [[Caspian Sea.]]
Arrān (Middle Persian form; New Persian: ) is an Iranian toponym which in ancient times referred to the country of Caucasian Albania, which was originally located north of the Kura River but later expanded to territories south of the river as well.
The Caucasian Albanian kingdom, which emerged in the 1st century BC,
Today, the term Aran is mainly used in Azerbaijan to indicate territories consisting of Mil and Mughan plains (mostly, Beylagan, Imishli, Kurdamir, Saatly, Sabirabad provinces of the Republic of Azerbaijan). It has also been used by Iranian historian Enayatollah Reza to refer to the country of Azerbaijan, freeing the name "Azerbaijan" to refer to a region within Iran.
Name
thumb|An old map that shows the name of Iran in the area of Aran.
A(r)rān was the Middle Persian name of the region known to Greek and Roman authors as Albani(a) It is probable that the Greco-Roman name and the Armenian term Ałuank or Aghvank () both derive from an Iranian name for the region. In Parthian the region was known as Ardān, which suggests an unattested earlier form *aldwān that could have yielded *alban- / *alwan- and Middle Persian A(r)rān. The Middle Persian name was adopted into Arabic as al-Rān, However, in post-Islamic times the geographic notion of Arran shrank to the territory between the Kura and Aras rivers.
Medieval Islamic geographers gave descriptions of Arran in general, and of its towns, including Barda, Beylagan, and Ganja.
History
Pre-Islamic
thumb|Caucasian Albania in the 5th and 6th centuries AD
In ancient times, Arran was the Iranian name for Caucasian Albania, a country which was originally located north of the Kura and expanded across the river at the expense of Armenia after 387 AD.
A branch of the Parthian Arsacid dynasty came to power in Albania in either the 1st or the 4th century, The kings of Albania were subject to Sasanian Iran from the 3rd century AD. Within the larger Iranian sphere of influence, Albania was particularly influenced by neighboring Armenia; it was converted to Christianity through Armenian missionary activity between the early 4th and early 5th centuries. This was followed by the primacy of Sahl Smbatean (Sahl ibn Sunbat), the lord of Shakki, who revolted against caliphal rule and defeated Arab armies on more than one occasion. After Sahl handed over the Iranian rebel Babak Khorramdin, the Abbasids reportedly exempted him from paying tribute and presented him with gifts; per Charles Dowsett, this was effectively an official investiture of Sahl as ruler of Arran. Sahl's son and successor Atrnerseh married the daughter of the last Mihranid prince, and he and his descendants strove to recover the old Albanian lands formally inherited through this marriage. In all, six different noble houses claimed at point or another the title of "king of Albania", which implied overlordship over the Christian population on both sides of the Kura. Arabic sources also tell of the presence of both Arabic and Persian in Albania/Arran, although Armenian was the more widespread language. One of the most famous Persian poets, Nizami Ganjavi, was born in Ganja in the 12th century. North of the Kura, part of the Persian-speaking Muslim population ethnically consolidated in the state of the Shirvanshahs; their descendants are the modern Tat people.
Isolated groups of Turkic peoples had appeared in the South Caucasus repeatedly from the start of the 7th century, but it was only in the 11th and 12th centuries that large-scale settlement began. The Turkification of Arran began under the Seljuks and continued after the Mongol conquests. North of the Kura, in historical Albania proper, the Udi people maintained their Christian faith and speak a Lezgic language which is either directly descended from or closely related to the Caucasian Albanian language. In historian Aleksan Hakobyan's view, the emergence of the Udis as an group can be traced to the "ethnic consolidation of the Christian part of the Albanian tribal population" in the Kingdom of Hereti in approximately the late 9th century.
See also
- South Caucasus
- Transcaucasia
- Azerbaijan Democratic Republic
- Azerbaijan SSR
- Iranian Azerbaijan
- Iranian plateau