About 5,200 years ago, around 3,200 BC, on the east bank of the Tigris River in the southwest of present-day Iran, the Elamites, known for their warlike wars, established their earliest state.
The Elam civilization is the source of Iranian civilization
From 2700 BC to 600 BC, Elam went through three periods: Ancient Elamite, Middle Elamite and New Elamite. In the late Ancient Elam period, around 2000 BC, a group of Indo-European Aryans from Central Asia moved south to the Iranian plateau and merged with the local indigenous people to form the majority of today's Iranians. In the 7th century BC, they defeated the surrounding tribes and founded the Medes, the first unified state in Iranian history. At the same time, the Assyrian Empire, at its peak, completely annexed Elam.
Sharply shrinking Elam and gradually powerful Medes
After conquering the Persian tribes of southern Iran, the Medes began to challenge the declining Neo-Assyrian Empire and eventually unify all of Iran.
In 550 BC, Cyrus the Great, a Persian tribal leader from the southwestern Iranian plateau, overthrew the rule of the Median kingdom and established the first Persian Empire. During the reign of Darius I, the Persian Empire reached its peak, spanning three continents, Europe, Asia and Africa, becoming the first real empire in world history. This is also the highlight of Iranians.
The Persian Empire spanning three continents
Defeated in the world-famous Greco-Persian War in 492 BC, the Persian Empire rapidly declined.
In 334 BC, Alexander the Great, a great genius who had been born for a thousand years, began to invade the east, and the declining Persian Empire soon became part of the vast territory of this emerging empire. The Dormition Empire, which originated in the Parthian region of northeastern Iran in the late Hellenistic period, gradually won a rivalry with Alexander's successor, the Kingdom of Seleucid.
The Rest Empire rules all of Iran
In 226 AD, Ardashir I, a subject of the Rest Empire, overthrew the Empire and killed the king, establishing the Sassanid Dynasty. Because after the First Persian Empire, the Sassanid Dynasty once again unified the entire territory of Persia, it is also known as the Second Persian Empire. During the many rivalries between the Sassanid dynasty and the Roman Empire, the capital fell several times. In 651, the Persian Empire was destroyed by the rising Arab Empire, and the last emperor of the Sassanid dynasty fled to the Tang Empire for refuge.
The culture of the Persians developed tremendously during the reign of the Arab Empire. With the gradual decline of the Arab Empire, the Iranian plateau has a warring states situation, you sing and I appear.
In 874 AD, the ancient Persian Samanid family ended the dispute and founded the Samanid Dynasty, after several generations of kings to rule the Samanid Dynasty, under its strong influence, many Turkic nomadic tribes in Central Asia have entered the Iranian plateau to settle down, thus opening the process of Islamization of the Turkic peoples of Central Asia.
From the 10th to the 13th century, following the Samanid dynasty, the Ghaznavid dynasty and the Seljuk Empire established by the Turks, as well as the Khorezm, which had always roamed the Iranian plateau, appeared on the top of the pyramids that ruled the Iranian plateau.
Between 1219 and 1260, Genghis Khan and his descendants conquered Khorezm several times and established the Ilkhanate. After that, the Mongols gradually adopted Islam and appointed Persians as administrators.
Seljuk and Khorezm ruled Iran
With the gradual decline of the Ilkhanate, Persia once again fell into the division of local feudal dynasties. Timur, the Turkic emperor of the Western Chagatai Khanate, conquered all of Persia from 1380 to 1393 after conquering Central Asia, then invaded Iraq and conquered India. After Timur's death in 1405, his empire quickly collapsed.
The short-lived reign of the Timurid dynasty in Persia led to the strengthening of two Turkmen-founded dynasties originating in eastern Turkey, Azerbaijan and northwestern Persia: the Black Sheep Dynasty and the Aries Dynasty. During the Aries dynasty, the Safah, a predominantly Turkmen and Azerbaijanis, was active in northwestern Persia. They overthrew the rule of the Aries dynasty in 1502, establishing the Safavid Empire, the first dynasty in Iranian history to have Shia Islam as its state religion. The Safavid Empire and the Ottoman Empire fought for regional supremacy for a long time. At the end of the 17th century, the Safavid Empire was in decline. In 1722, the Afghans of the Girzai tribe, under the leadership of Mahmud, captured Isfah Khan, the capital of the Safavid Empire.
In 1736, Nadir, a Turkic tribal leader from the Persian region of Horacan, led an army to expel the Afghans from Persia and established the Afshal dynasty stretching from Afghanistan in the east and northern India, Baghdad in the west, the Caspian Sea in the north, and the Persian Gulf in the south. The divided Afshar dynasty 60 years later was destroyed by the Qajar dynasty, founded by the Turks. For the first time, the Qajar dynasty made Tehran its capital.
In the 19th century, this ancient civilization with a history of thousands of years experienced the same misfortunes as China. First Russia annexed Georgia under its rule, and then Britain forced Iran to recognize the independence of Afghanistan. Later, France, Austria, the United States, and others forced Iran to conclude unequal treaties. In the second half of the 19th century, although Iran was still nominally an "independent" country, it was in fact semi-feudal and semi-colonial. The glory of the Persian Empire in the past is in stark contrast to the humiliation of being bullied today, and the history of pursuing the revival of a powerful country in humiliation and awakening is an experience very similar to China!
The uprisings of the Iranian people under internal and external troubles have sprung up one after another. In February 1921, the military officer Reza Khan Pahlavi seized power in a coup d'état, established the Pahlavi dynasty, and changed the name of the country to Iran in 1935. During the Pahlavi administration, the United States vigorously supported the Pahlavi dynasty in order to obtain Iran's oil resources and maintain its interests in the Middle East. U.S. support made Iran a military power in the Persian Gulf region.