History of Iran

Long before the name Iran entered the historical record, the high plateau between Mesopotamia and the Indus was already a hearth of urban civilization. By the seventh millennium BCE, painted-pottery villages clustered around the Zagros foothills at sites such as Tepe Sialk, Ganj Dareh and Chogha Mish. Domesticated goats, the earliest known woven textiles, and copper smelting all appear here within a few centuries of one another — a quiet revolution that would feed the cities of Sumer and Akkad downstream.

From these villages emerged the Elamite kingdom, centered on Susa in modern Khuzestan. Elamite scribes wrote in the still partly-undeciphered proto-Elamite script as early as 3100 BCE — making it, alongside Sumerian and Egyptian, one of the three independent inventions of writing. For more than two thousand years Elam fought, traded, and intermarried with the Sumerian, Akkadian, and Babylonian dynasties of the lowlands; the great ziggurat of Chogha Zanbil (c. 1250 BCE), now a UNESCO World Heritage site, remains the best-preserved ziggurat outside Mesopotamia.

To the east, the Bronze Age Jiroft culture of Kerman produced exquisitely carved chlorite vessels found as far away as the royal tombs of Ur. In the salt deserts of Sistan, the planned city of Shahr-e Sukhteh — the "Burnt City" — has yielded the world's earliest known animated sequence (a goat leaping toward a tree, painted on a pottery goblet c. 3200 BCE), the earliest artificial eyeball, and one of the earliest known backgammon-style board games.

The Iranian peoples — speakers of an Indo-European language family that includes Avestan, Old Persian, Sogdian, Bactrian and Scythian — entered the plateau in a slow migration during the second millennium BCE. By the early seventh century BCE their westernmost branch, the Medes, had organized a confederation under Deioces, with a capital at Ecbatana (modern Hamadan). In 612 BCE the Median king Cyaxares, allied with the Babylonians, sacked the Assyrian capital of Nineveh and brought down the cruelest empire of the ancient world.

South of the Medes, in the province of Pars (Persis), a junior dynasty — the Achaemenids — quietly grew. In 550 BCE the Persian prince Cyrus II, raised in the Median court, revolted against his grandfather Astyages, took Ecbatana, and inherited a state that already controlled half of the Iranian plateau. Within twenty years he had also defeated Croesus of Lydia and the Neo-Babylonian Empire — and the world had its first transcontinental polity.

"I am Cyrus, king of the world, great king, mighty king… I freed all the people of Babylon from the yoke imposed upon them. I returned the gods who had been brought to Babylon to their sacred cities."

The empire that Cyrus founded and that Darius I (r. 522–486 BCE) consolidated was the largest the world had yet seen — over 5.5 million square kilometers, governing perhaps 44 percent of the global population. Twenty satrapies, each headed by a Persian governor and audited by independent royal inspectors known as the "King's Eyes and Ears," replaced the patchwork of city-state diplomacy that had ruled the Near East for two millennia.

Darius standardized weights, coined the gold daric, and built the 2,500-kilometer Royal Road from Sardis to Susa with relay stations every 25 kilometers — the postal system Herodotus admired with the line "neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers." A canal between the Nile and the Red Sea, four monumental capitals (Pasargadae, Susa, Ecbatana and Persepolis), and the trilingual cliff inscription at Behistun — the Rosetta Stone of cuneiform — round out a single reign.

The empire's tolerance was deliberate policy. The Cyrus Cylinder, often called the world's first declaration of human rights, restored deported peoples and their gods to their homelands — the Hebrew Bible records the same edict in Ezra 1, crediting Cyrus with the rebuilding of the Jerusalem Temple. Yet this was no Pax Persica without limits: the Greco-Persian Wars (499–449 BCE), the burning of the Athenian Acropolis by Xerxes in 480 BCE, and ultimately the conquest by Alexander of Macedon in 330 BCE form the western chapters of a story that the Persian sources tell rather differently.

Alexander's empire fragmented at his death; Iran fell to his general Seleucus and his successors. Hellenistic governance lasted barely a century before the Arsacid Parthians, a nomadic Iranian people from the steppes northeast of the Caspian, took back the plateau under Arsaces I in 247 BCE. Their loose feudal confederation — derided by Roman writers as decentralized — would contain Rome at the Euphrates for nearly five centuries, longer than the Roman Empire itself ruled the western Mediterranean.

At the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE, Parthian cataphracts and horse-archers annihilated seven Roman legions under Crassus, capturing the only Roman eagles ever lost in the East. The "Parthian shot" — turning in the saddle to fire arrows backward at full gallop — entered every European language as a metaphor for the devastating final word.

In 224 CE Ardashir I, a vassal lord from Persis, defeated the last Parthian king and consciously revived the Achaemenid imperial idea. The Sasanian Empire would be the last of the great Iranian empires of antiquity and the chief rival of Rome and Byzantium for over four centuries.

Shapur I (r. 240–270 CE) twice defeated Roman armies and captured the emperor Valerian — an event commemorated in the great rock relief at Naqsh-e Rostam. Khosrow I Anushirvan ("the Just," r. 531–579 CE) reformed taxation, codified law, and gave asylum to the Greek Neoplatonist philosophers expelled by Justinian, who carried the works of Aristotle to Gundishapur. The Academy of Gundishapur — combining Greek, Indian, Persian and Syriac learning — was the world's first teaching hospital and the bridge across which classical scholarship reached the Islamic world.

The Sasanian state collapsed with shocking speed. Two decades of plague and a ruinous final war with Byzantium left the empire exhausted; in 636 CE Arab armies under the second caliph Umar broke the Sasanian field army at Qadisiyyah, and by 651 the last Sasanian king, Yazdgerd III, was killed in flight near Merv.

The Arab conquest brought Islam, but it did not erase Persia. Within two centuries Iranian administrators, secretaries (kuttāb), and viziers had become indispensable to the Abbasid caliphate in Baghdad, itself founded on the site of an old Sasanian village and modeled on Sasanian court protocol. Translators of Iranian descent rendered Pahlavi, Sanskrit, and Greek works into Arabic; the very word algorithm derives from the Khwarazmian mathematician al-Khwārizmī.

Politically, Iran reasserted itself almost immediately. The Samanids of Bukhara (819–999) revived New Persian as a literary language, patronized the poet Rudaki, and produced a generation of polymaths — among them Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā), whose Canon of Medicine would be the standard medical text in European universities until the seventeenth century. The Buyids of western Iran ruled the caliph himself from 945 to 1055, while in the east Mahmud of Ghazna commissioned Ferdowsi's 50,000-couplet Shahnameh, the national epic that single-handedly preserved a thousand-year tradition of Iranian myth and history.

The eleventh century brought a new wave of Turkic migration. The Seljuks ruled an empire from the Mediterranean to Central Asia, but their administration was almost entirely Persian: the great vizier Nizam al-Mulk's Siyāsatnāma ("Book of Government") remains a classic of statecraft, and the network of Nizāmiyya madrasas he founded shaped Sunni education for centuries. Under Seljuk patronage Omar Khayyam reformed the Persian calendar to an accuracy unmatched until the Gregorian reform 500 years later.

Then came catastrophe. Between 1219 and 1221 the armies of Genghis Khan destroyed the cities of Khorasan — Merv, Nishapur, Herat, Balkh — with such thoroughness that some never recovered. Estimates of the death toll vary from one to ten million; whole irrigation systems collapsed and were not rebuilt until the twentieth century. Yet within two generations the Ilkhanate Mongols had converted to Islam, adopted Persian as their court language, and presided over one of the great ages of Persian historiography (Rashid al-Din's Jāmi' al-Tawārīkh) and astronomy (the Maragha observatory of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi).

The fourteenth-century conqueror Timur (Tamerlane) inflicted a second wave of destruction, but his Timurid descendants in Herat and Samarkand would become some of history's most refined patrons of the book arts, miniature painting, and astronomy — the observatory of Ulugh Beg in Samarkand produced the most accurate star catalogue of the pre-telescopic era.

In 1501 the fifteen-year-old Shah Ismail I, leader of a militant Sufi order from Ardabil, took Tabriz and proclaimed Twelver Shi'ism the state religion of Iran — a decision that re-shaped the religious geography of the entire Middle East and persists to this day. His successor Tahmasp I moved the capital inland to Qazvin to escape Ottoman pressure after the 1514 defeat at Chaldiran (the first major battle in which gunpowder decided the day in the Islamic East).

Under Shah Abbas the Great (r. 1588–1629) the empire reached its zenith. He moved the capital to Isfahan and turned it into one of the great cities of the early modern world — the saying Isfahan nesf-e jahān ast, "Isfahan is half the world," dates from this era. The Naqsh-e Jahan square, the Sheikh Lotfollah mosque, the Ali Qapu palace, and the Chehel Sotoun garden pavilion are all UNESCO-listed monuments of his reign.

The Safavid collapse in 1722 was followed by the meteoric career of Nader Shah Afshar, often called the "Napoleon of Persia," who in 1739 sacked Delhi and brought home the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor diamond. After his assassination, the gentler rule of Karim Khan Zand from Shiraz (1751–1779) is remembered as a brief Indian summer of justice and cultural patronage.

The Qajar dynasty (1789–1925) presided over a long contraction. Two Russo-Persian Wars cost Iran the entire Caucasus (Treaties of Gulistan 1813 and Turkmenchay 1828); the British and Russian empires divided the country into spheres of influence in 1907; and the discovery of oil in Khuzestan in 1908 brought a foreign concessionary regime that would dominate Iranian politics for half a century. Yet the same period also produced the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911 — the first popular constitutional movement in Asia.

In 1925 a Cossack officer, Reza Khan, deposed the last Qajar and founded the Pahlavi dynasty. He built railways, secular courts, and a national university; his son Mohammad Reza Shah oversaw the 1953 nationalization crisis and Anglo-American coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, the White Revolution land reforms of the 1960s, and the spectacular but unequal oil boom of the 1970s.

The Islamic Revolution of 1979, led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, ended 2,500 years of monarchy and established the Islamic Republic — a constitutional system unique in the world that combines elected institutions with the office of Vali-ye Faqih, the Supreme Leader. The Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988) cost perhaps a million lives. Today, Iran is a country of 89 million people, a major oil and gas producer, a regional power, and the home of one of the world's youngest, most highly educated, and most rapidly urbanizing populations.