Iran or Persia: What’s in a Name?

Bust of Aeschlylus

The paragraphs below dip tentatively into complex linguistic waters. Here is a much fuller explanation of the word Iran. The quick summary is that the official name of the country is the Islamic Republic of Iran–but the words Persia and Persian are widely used, at least in signage and other writing aimed at non-Iranians.

The country the West knows as Iran was called Persia for thousands of years, despite the fact the word Persia was not what the peoples of the region called themselves. Its origin goes back to the ancient Greeks, who knew the people of this region as ΠΕΡΣΑΙ [Persai]. In fact, the Greek dramatist Aeschylus wrote a prize-winning play of that name, which is unusual in more than one respect: it is the only surviving Greek play that is set in a non-Greek area–in this case the city of Susa, capital of the Persian Empire in the 5th century BCE. It is also the only surviving Greek tragedy based on history rather than mythology. Surprisingly, given the fact that the Persians were both feared and hated by the Greeks, it portrays its Persian characters somewhat sympathetically.

The Romans picked up the word from the Greeks as Persia, and so it passed into the various Romance languages in variations of that name.

Then there are the words Fars and Pars. Fars (the source of Farsi, the indigenous name of the language of Iran, usually known as Persian elsewhere) is itself an Arabic version of the Old Persian place name Parsa, which is probably the source of the name that came into classical Greek as Persai. Pars is also the name of the province in Iran whose capital is Shiraz. On the last day of our trip we even visited a grocery store there called Parsland.

So, what about the word Iran? It has been the official name of the country only since 1935, when Reza Shah Pahlavi (the father of the notorious Shah who was overthrown in 1979) announced that henceforth the country would be known as Iran and not Persia. Here is a brief explanation from an article by Ehsan Yarshater which was published in the journal Iranian Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1 (1989), pp. 62-65.

The suggestion for the change is said to have come from the Iranian ambassador to Germany, who came under the influence of the Nazis. At the time Germany was in the grip of racial fever and cultivated good relations with nations of “Aryan” blood. It is said that some German friends of the ambassador persuaded him that, as with the advent of Reza Shah, Persia had turned a new leaf in its history and had freed itself from the pernicious influences of Britain and Russia, whose interventions in Persian affairs had practically crippled the country under the Qajars, it was only fitting that the country be called by its own name, “Iran.” This would not only signal a new beginning and bring home to the world the new era in Iranian history, but would also signify the Aryan race of its population, as “Iran” is a cognate of “Aryan” and derived from it.

The history of the word Iran goes back millennia, however. Here is the etymological part of the Oxford English Dictionary entry for Aryan:

Aryan < Sanskrit ārya, in the later language ‘noble, of good family,’ but apparently in earlier use a national name ‘comprising the worshippers of the gods of the Brahmans’ (Max Müller); compare Avestan airya ‘venerable,’ also a national name, and Old Persian (Achaemenian) ariya national name (applied to himself by Darius Hystaspes); whence probably Greek Ἀρεία , Ἀρία , Latin Arīa , Aria , and Ariāna , the eastern part of ancient Persia, and Pehlevi and modern Persian Irân ‘Persia.’ As a translation of Latin Ariānus ‘of Aria or Ariana,’ Arian has long been in English use: Aryan is of recent introduction in Comparative Philology, and is also by many written Arian , on the ground that āria was the original word, as shown by the Vedic language, ārya being only the later Sanskrit form; the spelling Aryan has the advantage of distinguishing the word from Arian adj.1 and n.1 in Church History

 

 

Sources for this essay (beyond those linked in it):