Emergence of Iranian Identity and Evolution of the Concept of State in Iran

It is widely believed that a combination of ancient Greco-Roman and Persian civilizations is a major contributor to what culturally constitutes ‘West”. Later in the Sassanid period, the inter-linked notions of state, territory, and boundary developed substantially, coming quite close to their contemporary forms. On the other hand, considering that 'justice' was the corner stone of ancient Persian political philosophy, the idea that the ancient Persian spatial arrangement might have contributed to the evolution of the concept of democracy in the West may not be too difficult to contemplate. The term Iran has constituted the official name of the country or state known by that name at least since the emergence of the Achaemenid federative state in the 6th century BCE. The West came to know this country as Persia through the Greeks of the city-states, which in the 6th century BCE, were not as yet familiar with the concept of state–cum–country. They named Iran Persia in accordance with their on-going tradition of naming places after the name of the dynasties or the ethnicities ruling them, in much the same way that Iranians – and through them, the entire Muslim world - named Greece Yunan in their historiography of that entity, simply because in antiquity, the Iranians first came into contact with the Ionian ethnicity of Greece. Thus, it is obvious why the Greeks named Iran Persia, which originally was and still is but a province in southern Iran where the ancient Achaemenid and Sassanid dynasties had emerged. The term Persia, however, became more solidly founded in Western culture when it entered biblical texts and became somewhat sanctified. Nevertheless, the term Iran maintained its place in Western cultural thinking in more obscure forms such as a feminine name; i.e. Iran in the Persian language; Irene in Latin, Germanic, Armenian, and other Western languages, while its prefix ‘ir’ representing the mysticism of the land of Aryans, is to be seen in country names like Ireland, which comes from Éire of Proto-Celtic origin, reflecting its Proto-Indo-European roots. In today’s common and official usage of the variation, it is worth noting that while the language and literature, art and culture are all Persian, the civilization and the name of the country are attributed to the term Iran.