By late 2nd millennium, local cultures of central and northwestern Iran were apparently influenced by developments in northern Mesopotamia and Assyria, along patterns of contact that had been well established in earlier periods. Yet this contact, as it is observed at Godin III, Hasanlu VI, and Dinkha Tepe, did not cause any major dislocation of local cultural patterns. In the second half of the 2nd millennium, however, western Iran—at first perhaps gradually and then with striking suddenness—came under the influence of the gray and gray-black ware cultures that had developed earlier in the northeast. There the impact of these influences was such as to definitely suggest a major cultural dislocation and the introduction of a whole new culture—and probably a new people—into the Zagros. It was this development that marked the end of the Bronze Age in western Iran and ushered in the early protohistoric period.
Persia or Greater Iran
