People
Tolomeni
Dilem oder Deilem (Miller)
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The Tolomeni are a garbled rendering of the Daylamites, a people of the Caspian region whose homeland, Deilem, lay south of the Elburz mountains in Iran. Unusually for a people, their name is written in black. The Greek historian Polybius already knew them in the second century BC, which points to a late Hellenistic source for the entry. They were a powerful people who raided as far as northern Mesopotamia, and much later their descendants founded the Buyid dynasty, rulers of Iraq and western Iran. They are not the Elymais of southwestern Persia, a name easily confused with theirs.