Caspians

thumb|332x332px|Ethnic map of the Caucasus in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. The Caspians (, Kaspyn; , Káspioi; Aramaic: ܟܣܦܝ, kspy; , Kaspk’; , Caspiani) were a people of antiquity who dwelt along the southwestern shores of the Caspian Sea, in the region known as Caspiane. Caspian is the English version of the Greek ethnonym Kaspioi, mentioned twice by Herodotus among the Achaemenid satrapies of Darius the Great and applied by Strabo. The name is not attested in Old Iranian. According to Vasily Struve, the 'Caspians' was the name given to those Saka-Massagetae tribes that were located along the sea coast.

The Caspians have generally been regarded as a pre-Indo-European people. They have been identified by Ernst Herzfeld with the Kassites, who spoke a language not identified with any other known language group and whose origins have long been the subject of debate. Onomastic evidence bearing on this point has been discovered in Aramaic papyri from Egypt published by P. Grelot, in which several of the Caspian names that are mentioned—and identified under the gentilic כספי kaspai—are, in part, etymologically Iranian. The Caspians of the Egyptian papyri are therefore generally considered as either an Iranian people or strongly under Iranian cultural influence.