The value of tribal lists as documents is qualified by their nature and inherent interest as social constructions (see Chapter Fourteen), which leads, among other variations, to considerable differences in length. For example, among official lists I collected in the 1960s, one given by a senior official responsible for the Ministry of Agriculture's relations with the Shahsevan amounted to forty-eight tribes; another, by the Moghan Office of Tribes, numbers forty; while the Meshkin gendarmerie's 1963 list numbered twenty-one. Only a few discrepancies in length and content were due to differences of jurisdiction.

In the sources, tribes are sometimes ordered according to size and importance, sometimes according to territorial propinquity or common origins. There is no obviously preferable order, so in the list, and the accompanying table (Figure 12), I have listed the tribes alphabetically (as did the recent Census, though according to the Persian alphabet), within four categories:

1. The tribes of Meshkin

2. The tribes of Ardabil

3. Tribes that have settled/disappeared since about 1900

4. Tribes that have emerged since about 1900.

With transliteration of tribal names, I have attempted a compromise between the usually Persianized literary versions and a phonetic version of how they are pronounced by Shahsevan themselves.