1In 1970 Èdvin A. Grantovskij (1932–1995) published a great monograph about the “Early history of the Iranian tribes of Western Asia” and the spread of the Iranian-speaking tribes over Western Iran, as it can be recovered in particular from the Assyrian cuneiform inscriptions of the 9th and 8th centuries BCE. Of special importance for those studies was (and always will be) the onomastic material, i.e. the great deal of personal names, toponyms and other geographical names so far as they are of Iranian origin. And that onomastic evidence was examined by Grantovskij in great detail, so that the book with its thorough as well as critical analyses became indispensable to Old Iranian onomastics, even if some fellow-researchers tended towards the objection expressed by I. M. D’jakonov, that “Grantovsky’s etymological solutions are sometimes too optimistic”. Still today the book with its full review of the former secondary literature is an essential tool for every historian, linguist or onomastician working in this field. But owing to an economically bad planning of the publishing house the book had been printed in a badly arranged form and, even worse, had not been provided with indexes, so that its usability was impeded considerably.

2Thus the present new edition is quite welcome, because it is actually revised and enlarged in several aspects. Misprints and other oversights have been corrected and notes informing about the latest research (esp. in The Prosopography of the Neo-Assyrian Empire and in R. Zadok’s ethno-linguistic survey [Jerusalem 2002]) have been added by S. V. Kullanda, whereas G. Ju. Kolganov prepared the long-awaited detailed indexes (pp. 462–504). We owe both of them a great debt of gratitude.