Name of Iran

This terminology prevailed until 1935, when, during an international gathering for Nowruz, the Iranian king Reza Shah Pahlavi officially requested that foreign delegates begin using the endonym "Iran" in formal correspondence.

[9][10][11][12] It reappears in the Achaemenid period where the Elamite version of the Behistun Inscription twice mentions Ahura Mazda as nap harriyanam "the god of the Iranians".

In an inscription of Ardashir's son and immediate successor, Shapur I "apparently includes in Ērān regions such as Armenia and the Caucasus which were not inhabited predominantly by Iranians".

[15] In Kartir's inscriptions (written thirty years after Shapur's), the high priest includes the same regions (together with Georgia, Albania, Syria and the Pontus) in his list of provinces of the antonymic Anērān.

[16] The Greeks (who had previously tended to use names related to "Median") began to use adjectives such as Pérsēs (Πέρσης), Persikḗ (Περσική) or Persís (Περσίς) in the fifth century BC to refer to Cyrus the Great's empire (a word understood to mean "country").

[17] Such words were taken from the Old Persian Pārsa – the name of the people from whom Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid dynasty emerged and over whom he first ruled (before he inherited or conquered other Iranian Kingdoms).

Another scheme of the seven regions of the world is reported by Abu Rayhan Biruni, who similarly arranges known nations into six connectedcircles surrounding the central Ērānšahr.

His Majesty's Minister in Tehran has been instructed to accede to this request.The decree of Reza Shah Pahlavi affecting nomenclature duly took effect on 21 March 1935.

In the summer of 1959, following concerns that the native name had, as Mohammad Ali Foroughi[22] put it, "turned a known into an unknown", a committee was formed, led by noted scholar Ehsan Yarshater, to consider the issue again.

[24] In the 1980s, Professor Ehsan Yarshater (editor of the Encyclopædia Iranica) started to publish articles on this matter (in both English and Persian) in Rahavard Quarterly, Pars Monthly, Iranian Studies, etc.

There are many Iranians in the West who prefer Persia and Persian as the English names for the country and nationality, similar to the usage of La Perse/persan in French.

[25] According to Hooman Majd, the popularity of the term Persia among the Iranian diaspora stems from the fact that "'Persia' connotes a glorious past they would like to be identified with, while 'Iran' since 1979 revolution... says nothing to the world but Islamic fundamentalism.

"[3] Since 1 April 1979, the official name of the Iranian state is Jomhuri-ye Eslâmi-ye Irân (Persian: جمهوری اسلامی ایران), which is generally translated as the Islamic Republic of Iran in English.