Persia and Iran
Iran has a long history, and there are many well-known historical monuments in its territory, which is a well-known historical country in the world. But what is interesting is that in both ancient Chinese history and European ancient history, this country is basically referred to as "Persia".
In fact, Iranians have never called themselves "Persia" since ancient times, and this "Persia" is exactly what foreigners call this nation and country. It was not until 1935 that the international community followed the wishes of the government and uniformly changed its name to "Iran".
One of the Aryan migration route hypotheses
The two concepts of Iran and Persia often overlap, but in general, the concept of "Iran" is larger than that of "Persia". For example, from an ethnic point of view, the international community still generally calls the main ethnic group of contemporary Iran "Persian", while those with Iranian nationality are called "Iranians". So why did the country change its name from "Persia" to "Iran"? Then we have to say that Iran and the ancient Aryan people have to be related.
Descendants of the Aryans
In the late 18th century, during the British colonization of India, a scholar, William Jones, in the process of learning the local language, accidentally discovered the similarities between Persian, Sanskrit and many European languages represented by Greek. This similarity led him to believe that Sanskrit had the same ancestor as Latin and Greek.
At the same time, European scholars also found that the Hindu classic Vedas and the Iranian Zoroastrian classicSAvets called themselves "Aryans", so Europeans at that time unified some Iranian regional languages with similar characteristics into the "Indo-Iranian language family" (later linguists expanded the "Indo-Iranian language family" to "Indo-European language family" because of the similarity between European languages and Iranian and Indian languages), and they were the descendants of the Aryans.
Sculptures made by sculptor Arnold Blake. The work reflects the ideal characteristics of the Aryan race in the eyes of the Nazi Party at the time.
▲ The cult of Mithras in ancient Greece and Rome, deeply influenced by Persia
From the end of the 3,000 BC period, the primitive inhabitants of the Eurasian steppe belt from Central Europe in the west to the Mongolian plateau in the east, due to unknown factors, have moved south, some into Europe, and the other part into West Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia. Around the 15th century BC, a group of steppe visitors gradually settled in the Iranian plateau, and they claimed to be Aryans.
▲ Long before the Aryans entered the Iranian plateau, the land was already settled by the indigenous people, the Elamites, and it was also the earliest civilization that appeared in Iran
By the 7th century BC, the original inhabitants of ancient Iran, the Elamites, were wiped out by the Warlike Assyrians of the Two Rivers Valley due to their declining national strength. After the fall of the Elamites, the Aryans who came from afar rose rapidly and became the new masters of the Iranian plateau.
As the Assyrian Empire in the Two Rivers Continued to expand, further encroaching on the territory of the small surrounding states, one of the Aryans, who became the Medes, was forced to unite and establish the early Aryan state on the Iranian plateau.
▲ Fars Province in present-day Iran
The Aryans who entered the Iranian plateau, in addition to the Medes, had a tribe that settled for a long time in the Fars region of southwestern Iran. Due to the different pronunciations of Ancient Greek and Ancient Persian, the ancient Greeks called this Aryan tribe of Fars "Persia", which is the etymology of the word "Persia" today. The Persians, who called themselves Aryans, have always used the term "Iranian Shahr" to refer to their homeland, which means "aryan homeland".
However, in the history of Iran, neither the era of Elam nor the Medes era was called Persia by the distant Greeks, and "Persia" eventually became a synonym for the Iranian state, starting from the Achaemenid dynasty of Cyrus II who unified the Iranian plateau and established the First Persian Empire.
Tomb of Cyrus the Great, but the remains no longer exist
The rise and fall of the three Persian Empires
In 559 BC, Cyrus II of the Persian tribe unified the ancient Persian tribes, and a few years later successfully overthrew the Median kingdom and was crowned "King of the Fours", successfully uniting the two aryan tribes on the Iranian plateau. As the Achaemenid dynasty expanded its territory, the Greeks gradually used the ancestral homeland of the Persian nation in Iran as a synonym for the entire country, and spread the word "Persia" to all parts of the world.
▲ The largest territory of the Achaemenid dynasty
The power and territory of the Achaemenid dynasty developed unprecedentedly during the reign of Darius I, forming the Indus Valley in the east to the Mediterranean coast of Greece in the west, becoming the first country in history to straddle the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa.
One of the motivations of Alexander the Great in leading a large army was to avenge the Persian invasion of Greece
The rulers of the Achaemenid dynasty in the heyday repeatedly sent troops to Greece in the Mediterranean world to expand their territory, and as a result, the years of wars seriously depleted the national strength of the Achaemenid dynasty.
In the mid-4th century BC, the Kingdom of Macedonia, under the leadership of the genius warrior Alexander the Great, successfully brought the Greek city-states under its rule, followed by the spectacular Alexander Expedition. The last king of the Achaemenid dynasty, faced with Alexander's elite generals and outstanding leaders, was powerless to resist and eventually died and destroyed the country. The Kingdom of Macedonia quickly fell apart after Alexander's death. At this time, the Seleucid dynasty, founded by Alexander's subordinates, inherited most of the Persian territory.
After alexander the great's death, his successors and heirs were embroiled in a series of disputes over the vast territory left by Alexander
In the middle of the 3rd century BC, in the northeastern part of the Iranian plateau, Parthian tribes with similar ethnic origins to the Persians gradually rose and replaced the Seleucid dynasty as a fierce enemy of the Expansion of the Roman Empire on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean. However, due to the perennial conquests of the Parthian Dynasty with the Roman Empire in the west and the Kushan Dynasty in the East, it also consumed a lot of national power, so by the early 3rd century AD, parthians were replaced by the Sassanid Dynasty, which considered itself the successor of the Achaemenid dynasty.
During the reign of the Sassanid Dynasty, the socio-cultural and foreign trade of the Iranian plateau was further enhanced and became a transit point for exchanges between the East Asian and Mediterranean worlds. Architecture, literature, and art all developed rapidly during the Sassanid period. The Sassanid Empire's formidable military combat prowess also became a formidable competitor of the Byzantine Empire in the East.
▲ Sassanid Persian coins. At that time, Sassanid and China maintained relatively close ties, and cultural and artistic exchanges between the two countries were more frequent, so many Sassanid coins were also unearthed in China
But when Islam rose in the Arabian Peninsula, ancient Persia began to face a period of darkness. In the mid-7th century AD, the Arabs conquered the Sassanid Dynasty and established their rule on the Iranian plateau. The original culture and art of Persia was severely destroyed by the invasion and colonization of foreign enemies.
After the Arabs came to power in Iran, the rulers vigorously pursued a policy of Islamization in Persia. However, the Persian nation, because of its characteristic spirit of resistance, did not choose the mainstream faction, Sunni, but chose the Shia, a minority with the same spirit of resistance, as its direction of conversion.
But the Arabs did not establish a solid rule on the Iranian plateau for a long time. Beginning in the 9th century, various ethnic groups on the Iranian plateau established various separatist regimes, which were not unified for a long time.
From the 13th century onwards, the Iranian plateau was ruled by the Mongols and Turkmen. After years of division and foreign invasions, it was not until the establishment of the Safavid dynasty, which claimed to be the Sassanid dynasty in the early 16th century, that Iran re-entered a period of grandeur. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the Safavid dynasty reached its peak of power during the reign of Abbas the Great, rivaling the ottoman and Mughal empires, the two great powers of the East and the West.
During the Safavid period, Iran's culture and economy prospered and developed, and Persian culture was once again revived in the Iranian plateau land
The construction of nationalism in modern Iran
However, the last rulers of the Safavid dynasty ruled the country in an insoluble manner, so they also declined rapidly by the beginning of the 18th century. At this time, the European powers had expanded and colonized all over the world, and Iran was repeatedly invaded by its neighbors, and successively cut off land, once again entering the era of weak countries with domestic and foreign difficulties.
▲ Since the beginning of the 19th century, the number one sea power, Britain, and the number one land power, Russia, have waged a series of struggles in Central Asia in order to compete for spheres of influence and break each other's single military hegemony, of which Iran is an important point of contention between the two sides. Pictured is Persia after the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907
Fortunately, after the First World War, the world political landscape was reshuffled, and a number of national independent states arose. Reza Khan of the Persian Pahlavi family succeeded in seizing power over Iran against such a favorable international backdrop and founding the Pahlavi dynasty. After Reza Khan came to power, in order to change the reality of Persian national weakness and achieve the revival of Persia, he was determined to carry out reforms in Persia.
At that time, the ideological dominance in Persia was the traditional conservative Islamic ideology, which was obviously not conducive to the secular reforms of Reza Khan. In order to reduce the resistance to reform, Reza Khan made nationalism the official ideology of the Persian state.
By promoting nationalist sentiments, Reza Khan tried to replace religious leaders with kings as symbols of the nation and state throughout Persia
For this purpose, the Persian government began to vigorously promote the rich and splendid culture and art of ancient Persia, advocating the unity of the ethnic composition and language and culture of Persia, while Islam was a foreign culture brought about by the Arab invasion.
In response, Persia held a millennium commemoration at home in 1934 for Ferdosi, the epic of the Kings in Iranian history. The Persian government also established many libraries, museums, etc., to spread the colorful history and culture of persia to the general public.
The Chronicles of kings chronicles the epic history of Persia for nearly four thousand years from the time of ancient mythology to the fall of the Persian Sassanids in the 7th century
In addition, changing the national geographical name is also a very important de-Arabization and de-Islamization measure. In the early period of World War II, as the concept of the Aryans as the ancestors of the Indo-European language nation became the consensus of the public, Nazi Germany, after Hitler came to power, began to trumpet the superiority of the Aryan race.
Diplomats at the Persian Embassy in Germany saw this, and since the Persian nation also considered itself to be of Aryan descent, the name of the Persian country should be changed back to "Iran". On December 31, 1934, the Persian government officially announced the world that since 1935, its official name in the international community is no longer "Persia", but "Iran".
▲Countries surrounding the Persian Gulf
But this does not mean that Iran has completely abandoned the concept of "Persia"; on the contrary, the mighty glory of the ancient Persian Empire is still a proud history of the Iranian people, even after the establishment of the Islamic Republic.
In 2010, the Iranian government announced that no aircraft that called the Gulf the "Persian Gulf" would land in Iran, triggering a new round of diplomatic disputes between Iran and Arab countries. However, since ancient Greek times, greeks have called that sea the "Persian Gulf", and to this day, many international institutions and organizations have followed this saying.
▲ Zoroastrian temple in Yazd. As Persian culture and art have become increasingly valued by contemporary Iranians, many Iranians are now trying to restore the official religion of ancient Persia, Zoroastrianism
Although the pahlavi rulers did not completely sweep away the stubborn feudal conservative forces, the religious forces returned decades later. As a result of contemporary Iran, the contradiction between secular and religious, modern and traditional is still very prominent.
However, through the reforms of Reza Khan, Iran initially laid the special status of Persian culture in its country, which greatly promoted the process of modernization of the Iranian state, making the Iranian people's sense of identity with Persia higher and higher today. For contemporary Iranians, the identification with the history and culture of ancient Persia has long been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and only in order to build a national community and national identity above the concept of "Persia" was chosen to choose the "Aryan" transliteration - "Iran" as the official name of the country today.
In addition, because Iran has had many painful experiences of being invaded by foreign countries and destroying art and culture by invaders many times in history, it has burst out an indomitable resistance and spirit, which has become one of the reasons why Iran dares to refuse to compromise with external powers and insist on resistance.
Author: Texas Red Wolf
edit:
Thomas (Don)