Lorestan province (also written Luristan, Lurestan, or Loristan, استان لرستان) is one of the 31 provinces of Iran. It is in the western part of the country in the Zagros Mountains and covers an area of 28,392 km2. Its capital is the city of Khorramabad. At the time of the National Census in 2006, the province had a population of 1,689,650 in 382,805 households. The following census in 2011 counted 1,754,243 in 462,260 households. In 2014 it was placed in Region 4. At the most recent census in 2016, the population of Lorestan province had risen to 1,760,649 inhabitants in 509,025 households.
The name Lorestan means "land of the Lurs."
The ancient history of Lorestan is closely intertwined with the rest of the Ancient Near East. In the 3rd and 4th millennium BC, migrant tribes settled down in the mountainous area of the Zagros Mountains. The Kassites, an ancient people who spoke neither an Indo-European nor a Semitic language, originated in Lorestān. They would control Babylonia after the fall of the Old Babylonian Empire ca. 1531 BC and until ca. 1155 BC.
Parts of Luristan were invaded and settled by the Iranian Medes in the 2nd millennium BC. The Medes absorbed the indigenous inhabitants of the region, primarily the Kassites as well as the Gutians, by the time the area was conquered by the Persians in the 1st millennium BC. In February 2017, archeological discoveries related to the Achaemenid era were made in Lorestan for the first time.
Small Luristan bronze artworks, usually dated about 1000 to 650 BC, reached the outside world from the late 1920s and are found in museums all over the world, where they are valued for their vigorous style, with many representations of animals. But actually, the beginning of this bronze-making tradition goes back to the mid–3rd millennium BC.