Where the Breed Actually Came From
The Persian cat did not originate in Persia the way the history books like to suggest. The longhair cats that arrived in Europe in the 1600s, brought by Italian nobleman Pietro della Valle from what is now Iran, were bred so aggressively with local European cats over the next two centuries that the modern Persian shares relatively little genetic material with those original imports. A 2007 study published in Genomics by researchers at UC Davis traced domestic cat populations across the world and found that Western pedigree breeds, including Persians, cluster genetically closer to Western European cats than to Middle Eastern ones. The name stuck. The origin story became marketing.
