The Lurs, Lors or Luris (Persian: لر) are an Iranian people living in western and southern Iran. The four Luri branches are the Bakhtiari, Mamasani, Kohgiluyeh and Lur proper, who are principally linked by the Luri language.

Lorestan province is named after the Lurs, but not all Lurs live in Lorestan, nor are all the inhabitants of Lorestan ethnic Lurs. Many Lurs live in other provinces of Iran including Fars, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad, Khuzestan, Hamadan, Isfahan, Tehran southern Ilam province, and Genaveh county in Bushehr province.^{[citation needed]}

There are several disputes over the origin of the Lurs, but they are believed to be of Elamite and Kassite origin.

The first sighting of the word Lur is in the writings of some historians and geographers of the 10th century and later in the form of اللر‎, اللور‎, and لور‎ (Lur). Hamdallah Mustawfi in Tarikh-i guzida (1330 AD) referred to the settlement of Luri tribes in Levant and then their mass migration towards the current Luri-inhabited areas. There are several hypotheses that discuss the origin of the name Lur or Lor, prominent amongst them is its attribution to a person called Lur or Lohraseb and some believe that the name refers to the area of first settlement of this ethnic group. The word Ler or Lir (literally forest or forest mountain) is a probable source for this word.

Lurs are a mixture of Iranian tribes, originating from Central Asia and the pre-Iranic tribes of western Iran, such as the Kassites (whose homeland appears to have been in what is now Lorestan) and Gutians. In accordance with geographical and archaeological matching, some historians argue that the Elamites were the Proto-Lurs, whose language became Iranian only in the Middle Ages. The distinctive characteristics of the Lur dialects imply that they were Iranized by Persis rather than Media.

The history of the Lurs is closely linked with the dynasties that ruled in Khuzestan, Shiraz, Isfahan, Hamadan and in the Zagros Mountains. The Buyid dynasty is known to have produced coins at Izeh. In 935, they marched their forces through Lorestan. The Karkheh River was later controlled by the Hasanwayhid dynasty, who used Sarmadj as their capital. In c. 1009, they conquered Shapur-Khwast (Khorramabad). In 1042, the Seljuk Empire besieged Shapur-Khwast, then ruled by the Kakuyid dynasty. Between 1152 and 1174/75, Lorestan and some of Khuzestan was controlled by a Turkic lord named Husam al-Din Shuhla. The tribal structure of the Lurs, whose development culminated with the arrival of the Atabegs, was unaffected by any outside attempts to conquer Lorestan or seize portions of its land. When Hulagu led the invasion of Iran in 1253, Möngke had specifically ordered him to "remove the Lur and Kurd, who consistently cause us difficulties along our routes and stand against us."

The new Iranian monarch Reza Shah (r. 1925–1941) brought the Bakhtiari lands into the normal system of Iranian government, which included forcibly making semi-nomadic tribesmen settle. The semi-nomadic way of life that many Bakhtiaris and Lurs were familiar with, however, returned as a result of Reza Shah's toppling in 1941 and the period of less effective rule during the early years of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's reign. In 1986, at the time of the publication of Vladimir Minorsky's entry on the Lurs in the 2nd edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam, a sizeable portion of the Lurs and Bakhtiaris were still living that way of life.

The first people who ruled areas of Luristan were Elamites. The extent of the influence of the Elamites has been to the present Mamassani area. They were indigenous peoples of Iran, but there is no proper knowledge of how communities are formed and the beginning of their history. They were able to establish a state before the arrival of Aryan ethnic groups in parts of western Iran. The Elam government included Khuzestan, modern Luristan, Poshtkuh (Ilam province and some western Iraqi areas), Bakhtiari mountains and Southern Luri settlement. Babylonians called the land of Elamites Elam or Elamto, meaning "the mountain" and perhaps "the land of sunrise". Elamite is generally accepted to be a language isolate and thus unrelated to the much later-arriving Persian and Iranic languages. In relation to geographical and archaeological matching, historians argue that the Elamites to be the Proto-Lurs, whose language became Iranian only in the Middle Ages.