Iran

The Sanskrit ārya, the Indo-Aryan cognate of the Iranian ariya, the self-designation the Indo-Aryans carried into the subcontinent. In the Rigveda the ārya are the people of the hymns, set against the dāsa they displaced; in later usage ārya means “noble, honorable,” and the land of the Indo-Aryans is Āryāvarta, “the Aryan domain.” It is the same word, from the same Indo-Iranian root, that names Iran.

Ārya is included here as the Indian limb of the shared Aryan name, the cognate that shows how far the self-designation reached. The undivided Indo-Iranians called themselves by this word; when they split into the Iranian and Indo-Aryan branches, each carried it, the Iranians into ariya, Ērān, and at last Iran, the Indo-Aryans into ārya and Āryāvarta. The name of the country of Iran and the ārya of the Vedas are, in the end, one word, the two halves of the old Aryan world each keeping, as its name for itself, what they had once shared.

The Avestan Airyana Vaēǰah, “the Aryan expanse,” the mythical homeland of the Iranian peoples and the first of the sixteen lands Ahura Mazda creates in the opening of the Vidēvdād. It is the cradle of the Aryan world in the Zoroastrian imagination, the land of the river Vaŋuhī Dāityā and the scene of the earliest sacred history, a place half-remembered and half-mythologized, located by the tradition somewhere in the Central Asian or northeastern Iranian world.

Airyana Vaēǰah is the oldest expression of Iran as a homeland of the Aryans rather than a single kingdom. The element airya, cognate with Old Persian ariya and Sanskrit ārya, is the same root that runs through the whole family, and the Avestan phrase names the imagined source from which the Iranian peoples spread. The Sasanian Ērān, “the realm of the Aryans,” is in a sense the historical fulfillment of this mythical Airyana Vaēǰah, the idea of a common Aryan land passing from the sacred geography of the Avesta into the name of a real empire.

The Old Persian ariya, “Aryan,” the ethnic self-designation that Darius sets beside his provincial one. On his tomb at Naqsh-e Rustam he styles himself “a Persian, son of a Persian, an Aryan of Aryan lineage,” ariya ariyaciça, placing the broad name ariya, shared by all the Iranian peoples, alongside the narrow pārsa of his own province. The word means at once “Aryan,” the name of the people, and “noble,” its sense within the language.

ariya is the seed of the whole idea of Iran. Distinct from Pārsa, the southwestern homeland that gave the Greeks “Persia,” ariya names not a place but a people and their shared identity, the Aryans of the Iranian world. From it descends the Middle Persian Ērān and the modern name of the country, and to it corresponds, across the Indo-Iranian divide, the Indian ārya. Darius’s careful doubling, Persian by province and Aryan by lineage, is the first written statement of the distinction this page turns on: Iran the people against Persia the land.

The Greek name Arianḗ, the term by which the geographers, Eratosthenes above all, designated the eastern Iranian lands, the great region between the Indus, the Hindu Kush, and the deserts of central Iran. It rendered the native Iranian Aryāna, “the Aryan land,” and so preserved, in Greek geography, the same Aryan self-name that stands behind ariya and Ērān; through Latin Ariana it passed into the Western tradition.

Arianḗ is the outside world’s witness to the Iranian idea of Iran. The Greeks, who called the empire and its heartland Persís after the province of Pārsa, nonetheless knew the broader, ethnic name too, and used Arianḗ for the eastern Iranian world the Persian kings ruled. The two Greek names, Persís and Arianḗ, thus answer to the two native ones, Pārsa the province and Aryāna the Aryan land, the same distinction this page draws preserved even in the geography of outsiders who mostly knew the country by its western corner.

The Latin name Ariana, taken from the Greek Arianḗ; Pliny uses it for the vast eastern region of the Iranian world, from the Indus marches west across the desert to Parthia and Carmania. The Latin geographers inherited Eratosthenes’s scheme whole, and Ariana stood in their maps as the name of the great eastern Iranian expanse.

The Latin form carried the Aryan name into Western learning as a geographical term, distinct from Persia, the province-name that became the ordinary word for the empire. Ariana is thus the western echo of Aryāna and Ērān, the Aryan land preserved in Roman geography, the same root that the country’s own people would, as Ērān and then Iran, eventually choose over Pārsa as the name of their whole world. The Romans kept both names, Persia for the realm and Ariana for the eastern Aryan lands, without quite seeing that the two were, at root, the country naming itself two different ways.

The Middle Persian Ērān, the Sasanian name of the empire and the direct ancestor of the modern Iran. From the third century the Sasanian kings called their realm Ērānšahr, “the dominion of the Aryans,” and styled themselves king of Ērān and, for their wider claims, of Anērān, “non-Iran,” the lands outside the Aryan world. Ērān is the genitive plural aryānām, “of the Aryans,” frozen into a proper name: the country named, once and for all, for its people.

Ērān is the moment the ancient ethnic adjective became a state. Where Darius had used ariya as one of two designations beside pārsa, the Sasanians made Ērān the name of the empire itself, giving political form to the old idea of a single Aryan realm that the Avesta had imagined as Airyana Vaēǰah. This Middle Persian Ērān, not the provincial Pārsa that became the Western “Persia,” is the name the modern country chose for itself; the distinction this page draws, Iran the people against Persia the province, is the distinction the Sasanians made permanent.

The Arabic geographers’ name for the Iranian land, taken directly from Middle Persian Ērānšahr, the Sasanian state-name. Writers of the ninth and tenth centuries, Ibn Khurradādhbih, al-Yaʿqūbī, and al-Masʿūdī among them, organized their descriptions of the world on the Iranian kishvar scheme of seven climes and began with Īrānshahr as the central one; Yāqūt’s thirteenth-century Muʿjam al-Buldān still carries the name as a headword, glossing it as the whole country of the Persians.

What is remarkable is who kept the name alive. The Sasanian state fell to the Arab conquests in the mid seventh century, yet its official self-designation survived for another six centuries inside the geographic literature of the conquerors, not as an antiquarian curiosity but as a working term for the region’s place in the ordered world. On this page, Ērān names the idea from within and Ariane reports it from without; Īrānshahr is the rarer thing, an endonym adopted whole by the empire that ended the state that coined it, and the bridge over which the old name walked into the modern one.

The New Persian form of the name, Īrān, continuing Middle Persian Ērān directly into the language’s classical stage. The Shāhnāma is built on it: Ferdowsi’s whole epic is structured as the war of Īrān and Tūrān, and through fifty thousand couplets the name stands for the land, the people, and the moral order at once, at a time when no state of that name existed on any map.

That is the entry’s peculiar work: it carried the name across the centuries when Iran was an idea without a government. Between the fall of the Sasanians and the modern state, Īrān lived in poetry and geography rather than on coins, preserved by Ferdowsi’s readers the way a language preserves anything it cannot bear to lose. The page runs from the Avestan homeland-name to this form without a break, and this is the link that reaches the present: when a twentieth-century state needed a name for itself, it took the one the poets had kept, and Īrān went back on the map after twelve centuries in books.