Iran or Persia?

Iran and Persia refer to the same country. The difference is one of perspective, not geography. Iranians themselves have called their homeland Iran — from the Old Iranian Aryānām, "[land] of the Aryans" — for at least two thousand years. The name Persia, by contrast, is an outsider's word: it comes to us through Greek (Persís) and Latin (Persia) from Pars, a single southern province that happened to be the cradle of the dynasty Western historians met first.

For most of recorded history both names co-existed peacefully. The decisive moment came on 21 March 1935, the day of Nowruz (the Iranian New Year), when the Iranian foreign ministry sent a circular to every embassy in Tehran asking that, in official diplomatic correspondence, the country be referred to by the name its own inhabitants had always used: Irān.

"Henceforth in official correspondence the designation "Iran" should be used in place of "Persia", as this is the name by which the country has always been known to its inhabitants."

The southern Iranian province known today as Fars (Arabic for the older Pars) is the homeland of the Persian tribe that produced Cyrus the Great in the sixth century BCE. When the Greeks first wrote about the empire Cyrus built — Herodotus, Aeschylus, Xenophon — they took the name of that single province and applied it to the whole. Persís in Greek became Persia in Latin, Perse in Old French, Persia in English: a part standing in for the whole, the way "Holland" once stood in for the entire Netherlands.

Through every subsequent dynasty — Parthian, Sasanian, Safavid, Qajar — European chanceries, travellers, and orientalists continued to write of "Persia". It was the language of treaties, of Marco Polo, of the seventeenth-century Italian merchant Pietro della Valle, of nineteenth-century British and Russian diplomats carving the country into spheres of influence. The name was so embedded in Western imagination that by 1900 it carried with it an entire register of associations: poetry, carpets, miniatures, ancient ruins.

The country's own name is far older than its provincial nickname. The Avestan term airyānąm ("of the Aryans") and the Old Persian ariya- appear in inscriptions of Darius I at Naqsh-e Rostam, c. 490 BCE, where the king describes himself as "a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan, of Aryan stock." By the Sasanian period, the Middle Persian compound Ērān-šahr — "Empire of the Iranians" — was the official self-designation of the state, stamped on coins, carved on rock reliefs, and recorded in the Letter of Tansar.

The word never disappeared from Iranian usage. Ferdowsi's tenth-century Shahnameh, the national epic, opens with the creation of the world and immediately situates its heroes in Irān-zamīn, "the land of Iran". Saadi, Hafez, and every Iranian schoolchild since have referred to the country by this name. Only in the West did the older Greek convention persist.

The note of 21 March 1935 did not invent the name Iran; it simply asked the rest of the world to use the name Iranians already used. Reza Shah Pahlavi, who had founded the new dynasty a decade earlier in 1925, was building a modern nation-state on European lines: a national bank, a national university, a Trans-Iranian Railway, the abolition of capitulations. Settling the country's name in foreign chanceries was a small but symbolically powerful part of that programme.

The decision was suggested by the Iranian envoy in Berlin, who pointed out that German racial scholarship of the period — for reasons of its own — was beginning to use Iran as a marker of Indo-European kinship. The shah accepted the recommendation, and on Nowruz of 1314 in the Iranian calendar (1935 CE) the circular went out from Tehran. Within weeks, the League of Nations, the British Foreign Office, the United States State Department, and the major news agencies had switched their official usage.

The change was not universally welcomed. The orientalist Sir Ellis Minns and the historian Sir Denison Ross publicly worried that "Iran" carried no resonance for English readers, who associated nothing with the word and everything with "Persia". In 1959, Reza Shah's son Mohammad Reza Shah issued a clarifying announcement: both names could be used interchangeably in international contexts. That remains the position to this day.

In short: the same country, but two registers. Iran is the political name, Persian the cultural adjective. A modern Iranian citizen speaks Persian, eats Persian cuisine, and reads Persian poetry — all while living in the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The Old Iranian word arya- from which "Iran" derives has nothing to do with the racial ideologies of twentieth-century Europe. It was the self-designation of the Indo-Iranian speaking peoples who entered the plateau in the second millennium BCE and meant, originally, "noble" or simply "one of us". The Indian branch of the same family used the cognate ārya- in the Rig Veda. The misappropriation of the term in the late nineteenth century by European pseudo-scientific racism is a story belonging entirely to Europe, not to Iran.