What is Iran?

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What is Iran?
One must not think and speak of Persian/Iranian civilization as something restricted to the political boundaries of the Iranian nation state.
Culturally and historically, Iran-- or as the Sassanian Persians referred to it 'Eran Shahr'(the Aryan Realm)
is more a culture than it is a geographically restricted political entity. Like those other major civilizations of the ancient and classical world, Greece and Rome; Iranian/Persian influence stretches across large parts of the globe—both geographically and temporally. Aryanem Vaeja has encompassed and touched vast geographic regions. And it has both left its’ signature and, in turn, been influenced by the disparate cultures and regions with which it’s come into contact.
Indo-Iranian Nexus
The proto-Indo-Europeans (PIE), ancestors not only of Iranians but of all of today’s Indo-Europeans, likely lived somewhere north of the Black Sea in what is now Ukraine and Russia.
The migrations of the Indo-Iranian/Indo-Aryan branches of these tribes into the Iranian plateau and Northern India gave birth, to the twin civilizations of classic India and Iran.
On one side of this Indo-Iranian Nexus, which according to Joseph Campbell, defines the Occidental and Oriental spheres, was the Indo-Aryan linguistic realm of Sanskrit and Hidushtan—as well as it’s later Iranian influenced Mahayana Buddhist incarnation.
On the other side of the nexus was the progressive ethical dualism of Iranian Zoroastrianism, which manifested politically as histories first global empire--Achaemenian Iran.
The Achaemenians and Aryan influence on Judaism
In the Iranian plateau the Iranian Medes and Persians settled into lands that had for millennia been the home of Middle Eastern empires from the Sumerians to the Semitic Babylonians and Assyrians.
And when the Median tribes, cousins of the Persians, overran these ancient nations they created the first  Indo-European Empire the Middle East had seen.
When the Persians and Medes united under Cyrus the Great they formed the first true world empire. One based on cosmopolitan humanistic, decentralized rule where kings and kingdoms and their peoples were allowed –for the first time--to keep their own languages, religions and customs. In exchange for participating in the benefits of what has been called the Pax Persica.
Hebrews
Under the Iranian empire founded by the Achaemenids (Hakhamaneshis), the Hebrews were liberated from the so called Babylonian Captivity and afforded protection by Cyrus the Great of Persia. And the later Iranian Kings of Kings rebuilt the Second Temple of the Jewish people.
Just as profound, the ancient Semitic religion of Judea and the Hebrews (Habirus) was fundamentally transformed with the Indo-European concepts of an afterlife, individual conscience and responsibility, ethical dualism, paradise, and a ‘Day of Judgement,’all Zoroastrian notions which entered the Talmud under Persian influence during the time when Judea and Israel were Satrapies (provinces) of Iran’s Achaemenian Empire. The Zoroastrian Indo-European concepts were imported into this initially Middle Eastern religion of the Hebrews and subsequently migrated into the later so called ‘Abrahamic’ religions of Christianity and Islam.
Iranian (Aryan) influence on Hellenic Greece
Zoroastrian thought also influenced pre-Socratic Greece. Helping transform the cyclical Homeric world view of a ever degenerating cycles into a progressive Promethean one, influenced by Zoroastrian conceptions of progress.
And from an amoral one without any discernible sense of personal conscience to an ethical world view influenced by Zoroastrianism.
The entire first generation of Greek Philosophy and science occurred while under Persian colonization. And figures such as Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Aeschylus, Herodotus and Xenophon were all heavily influenced by and great admirers of Persian and Zoroastrian culture.
And the Iranian colonization of Ionian Greece, as well as the subsequent Achaemenian invasions of Europe became the defining episode in the history of the Hellenistic world and hence, European Civilization.
Mitra, Mani and Christianity
A few centuries later, the occidental world was split between the Parthian and Sassanian dynasties of Iran on the one hand, and Rome and Byzantium of the other.
Iranian Mitraism and Persian Manichaism poured into and transformed the religious and philosophical consciousness of Republican and Imperial Rome. These ideas helped shape the new syncretic universal institution we now know as the Catholic Church.
Saint Peter’s Basilica is built on the site of an earlier Perso-Roman Mithraic temple (Mithraim). The date of Christmas (winter solstice) is a Mithraic holy day--still celebrated in Iran today as the night of Yalda/Chelleh. Countless Christian rituals and traditions are entirely Mithraic in origin. And even Saint Augustine, a Father of the Catholic Church, was a devotee of the Persian philosopher and prophet Mani, for much of his adult life.
Islam--the Persianized Version
The so called ‘Islamic’ golden age which created ‘scientific method,’ Algebra, Trigonometry, Optics and Chemistry was largely the work of Persian/Iranian free thinkers, rationalists and libertine scientists who were either only nominally Muslim or openly hostile to Islam.
And when this brilliant Golden Age was extinguished under the savage holocaust visited upon it by the Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes, some of its discoveries and knowledge passed on through Byzantium, the Crusaders, as well as through Muslim Spain and Sicily. This knowledge had the profound effect of catalyzing the Italian and European Renaissance in the 15th century. It should be remembered that Persian Philosophers and scientists such as Abu Ali Sina (Avicenna) and Zakaria Razi (Rhazes) were used as basic texts in the major European Universities such as Montpellier for over 600 years.
The now global literature of the Thousand and One Nights (mistakenly labeled the ‘Arabian Nights’) were mostly pre-Islamic Indo-Iranian stories collected during Persia’s Sassanian dynasty.
The unmistakably original and instantly recognizable silhouette of Islamic architecture that has beutified large portions of our globe; from the Taj Mahal in India to the Alhambra in Spain, is near entirely Persian/Iranian. Islamic architecture, in fact, is a Persian evolution, much of it in Islamic Iran itself, of the earlier Iranian developments made by the Parthian and Sassanian dynasties who had developed the monumental dome, arch and vault to an unprecedented level.
The very theology of Islam was transformed by the Persians. From Salman the Parsi at the birth of Islam, to the Mazdakite influenced Persian Sufism and Ismaili Shiiite movements of Hassan al Sabbah, Iranians shaped and transformed the puritanical, authoritarian, exoteric Sunni Islam of the Bedouin Arab into a humane, esoteric, philosophical, mystical religion of love that culminated in the humanism of such Persian poets and philosophers and free thinkers as Farabi, Saadi, Rumi and Hafez.
Persianate
Persian culture in Moghul India, Ottoman Empire and Central Asia
From the 14th through the 18th century
Persian culture, literature, language and aesthetics were not only dominant in the Safavid Persian empire  but Persian was the literary, courtly, administrative language the Moghul India in the East, the ottoman Empire in the West and the Sultanates of Central Asia.
Persian was spoken as the Lingua Franca--or Lingua Persica-- from Delhi to Istanbul and from Baghdad to Samarghand.
Parsis
This is not to mention the earlier Parsi Zoroastrian community that has lived in India-since their emigration from Iran, following the Arab invasion of Sassanian Persia and the enormously instrumental role that Persian community has played in the economy of India but also in securing India’s independence from Britain.
Iranic Europe
Even Medieval European culture, from castles and knights in armor to Gothic architecture, chivalry and the Troubadour movement, as well as the stories of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, so central to the identity of such nations as Britain and France—were significantly influenced by the mythology, folklore and history of the Northern Iranic tribes known as the Sarmatians (Sarmats) and Alans (Arans/Aryans) who settled much of Central and Eastern and Western Europe in the centuries before and after Christ.
The Persian national epic Shah Nameh (Chronicle of Kings), the south Caucasian Nart Saga and the Arthurian legends of the Grail, so central to Western European identity, all share elements of the folklore and traditions off these mounted North Iranian Scythian/Sarmation/Alan pastoral confederacies who roamed the Eurasian Steppe from the borders of western China in the East to Britain, France and Catalonia (Goth-Alania) in the European West.
The signature of Eran Shahr through the Ages
From the shamanistic Indo-European religions of Zurvan, Mitra (Mehr) to the ethical monotheism of Zoroaster to the syncretic universalizing religions of Mani and Baháʼu'lláh (Bahaism), the various branches of theetno linguisticall  Iranic and culturally  Persionate realm are an ever present, if often invisible, forgotten, or suppressed, ‘empire of the mind' heart and spirit.
The Persian Version is a podcast devoted to discovering, discussing, disseminating and sharing evidence and elements of this inexhaustible, historic and still living, evolving Iranic legacy and heritage.
--A. Darius Kamali

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