Iran's 5,000 Years of Recorded History

by Richard H. Curtiss

The written history of Iran begins some 5,000 years ago, but the archeological record begins long before that. Obsidian flakes found under alluvial deposits from the last glacial epoch show that humans traversed Iran's great central plateaus in the Paleolithic period. More flint implements show hunters again were present at the end of the last glacial period some 10,000 years ago.

By 4,000 B.C. small villages existed in the valleys where the mountains met the plains, and the designs on clay pots show plant and animal motifs indicating the inhabitants were at least partly settled agriculturalists. Layers of ashes and abrupt changes of pottery styles indicate that the earliest inhabitants were conquered and perhaps absorbed from time to time by waves of invaders.

Written records of the inhabitants of present day Iran begin with their neighbors to the west in the Mesopotamian plains. These were the Sumerians, who created the world's first cities and invented cuneiform writing, followed by the Semitic Akkadians and Amorites who eventually dominated the area of present-day Iraq and created Babylonian and Assyrian civilizations.

The Mesopotamian people of all of these early civilizations were in contact with the Elamites, whose principal city was Susa in present-day Khuzestan. The Elamites had adopted their own system of cuneiform writing by 3,000 B.C., and at various times over the next 2,000 years they both conquered the ancient Sumerian city of Ur and the later Amorite capital of Babylon, and were conquered themselves by invaders from Mesopotamia. The earliest settled inhabitants of present-day Iran developed an agriculture based on qanats, stone-covered tunnels that conducted precious water from the mountain ranges well out into fertile but otherwise waterless plains. They also had unique cultural practices, many aspects of which were preserved much later in the Avesta, the sacred scripture of the Zoroastrian religion, which developed in Persia and still is practiced by tiny minorities in Iran and by Iranian emigrants to India, the Parsees.

The Persians and the Medes

Nomads speaking Indo-European languages began moving into Iran from Central Asia between 1,500 and 1,000 B.C. They belonged to three major groups. The Scythians established themselves in the northern Zagros mountains and remained semi-nomadic raiders of other tribes and settled villages. The other two major Indo-European groups, the Persians and the Medes, entered continuously recorded history in 836 when the Assyrian ruler Shalmaneser III received tribute from kings of "Parsua," west of Lake Urumia, near the present Turkish border, and reached the lands of the "Mada" southeast of the lake. The annals of a subsequent Assyrian ruler recorded the two peoples south of modern Kermanshah in 820 and a later invading Assyrian king received tribute from Median chiefs near Mount Demavend in 737 B.C.

These two groups of primarily pastoral Iranians were spreading throughout present-day Iran, settling into the valleys, producing some agricultural products, and occasionally paying tribute to the neighboring Assyrian empire when it was at its height and ruled the Middle East from present-day Iran to Egypt.

By the seventh century B.C. the Medes had settled over a huge area ranging from modern Tabriz in the north and Isfahan in the south, with the Median capital at Ecbatana, present-day Hamadan. Cyaxares, son of Phraortes, founder of Median power, was one of the kings who conquered Ninevah in about 612 B.C., breaking the Assyrian hegemony.

During the same period the Persians had established themselves south of Lake Urmia, on the northern border of the Elamites and in the area of modern Shiraz, a region to which they gave the name Parsa, encompassing present-day Fars province. Their seventh century leader was Hakamanish, called Achaemenes by the Greeks.

The Achaemenid Empire, 550-330 B.C.

A descendent of Achaemenes, Cyrus II, consolidated Persia and Medea and led the combined forces of the Medes and Persians westward into Asia Minor where in 546 B.C. he defeated Croesus, the fabulously wealthy king of Lydia, and secured control of Asia Minor's Aegean coast, Armenia, and the Levant. Returning to the east he took Parthia (to the northeast of Parsa), Chorasmis and Bactria. Then he captured Babylon in 539, releasing the Jews who had been held captive there, many of whom stayed on under his protection rather than returning to Jerusalem.

Cyrus II made Ecbatana, seat of the Median Kingdom, his capital, retained the Persian capital of Susa, and built a new residence for himself at Pasargadae, whose evocative ruins still stand 80 miles northeast of Shiraz. He linked the area ranging from the borders of modern Afghanistan and Pakistan west to the Aegean coast of Anatolia with a system of provincial governors, imperial inspectors ("the eyes and ears of the king") and a royal mail service conducted by horse-mounted couriers and post stations.

By not imposing the religious practices of the Persians on the conquered areas, but instead allowing subject peoples to worship their own gods and preserve their own customs so long as they did not attempt to subvert Persian rule, Cyrus II set patterns pursued by most subsequent Middle Eastern empires right up to that of the Ottoman Turks, which ended 2,500 years later in 1918.

After the death of Cyrus his unstable son, Cambyses II, did away with Smerdis, another son of Cyrus, and conquered Egypt. But then he committed suicide during a revolt led by a priest. After a period of instability a collateral member of the Achaemenid family, Darius I, took power and consolidated the empire established by Cyrus II. It was he who built the spectacular royal residence at Persepolis near Shiraz, the ruins of which also still stand. In the east, Darius I extended the Persian Empire's borders further into the areas of modern Afghanistan and Pakistan, but when he sought to extend his conquests to the city states of Greece, his army was defeated on the plain of Marathon.

His son, Xerxes, was defeated again by the Greeks in the great naval battle of Salamis. During the rule of the Achaemenians, paved roads were built for horse-drawn traffic from the Mediterranean to India, rest houses and stables called caravansaries were built at 20-mile intervals along trading routes, and a canal was built linking the Red Sea to the Nile.

Alexander and the Selucids

In 334 B.C. Alexander the Great and his Macedonian army of 40,000 men crossed into Asia Minor and defeated the Persian army at Issus, near modern Adana, in southern Turkey. Then, after conquering the Levant and Egypt, Alexander's soldiers penetrated into Persia itself where, by 331, they had brought an end to the Achaemenian empire.

Alexander and 10,000 of his soldiers took Persian wives in Susa in 324 B.C. in a partially successful attempt to blend the civilizations of the Greeks and Persians. Although Alexander penetrated India and thereby created an even larger empire than that of the Achemenians, it lasted only during his brief lifetime. After his death of a fever in Babylon in 323 B.C., the empire was divided among the four Macedonian generals in charge of its various parts. Most of Persia was ruled by Seleucus I, who had married a Persian wife and sought to continue the mingling of Greek and Persian religious practices.

The Parthians

The Seleucids never really controlled parts of present-day Azerbaijan and Bactria. In 247 B.C. under the leadership of Arsaces, whose name was used by all subsequent kings of his dynasty, the Parthians revolted successfully against Seleucid domination. Parthian rulers claimed descent jointly from the Achemenians and the Greeks and largely restored Achemenian boundaries outside Asia Minor to create an empire that stretched from Armenia to India. The Parthian capital was established in present-day Ray, near Tehran, and later at Hamadan. In winter it moved to Ctesiphon on the Tigris River just southeast of present-day Baghdad, where the winter climate is milder. In the time of the Parthians, Rome replaced the Macedonian-Greek Empire in the West. Throughout most of the 473 years of Parthian domination, Rome ruled the Levant while the Parthians controlled most of Mesopotamia.

The Sassanians

In 226 A.D. a revolt in Fars, the cradle of Iranian civilization and the home of the Achaemenians, brought an end to Parthian rule and the founding of a new dynasty by Ardashir (Artaxerxes) I. The Sassanid rulers, who adopted the title of Shahanshah (king of kings), sought to resuscitate Iranian traditions and obliterate the Greek influence. Historians believe that in this period Persian society was fairly rigidly stratified into four classes consisting of priests, warriors, functionaries and commoners. The stratification was reinforced by Zoroastrianism, whose priests became extremely powerful.

Some of the early great Sassanian kings after Ardashir I were his son, Shapur I, who waged successful campaigns against the Romans in Syria and in 260 A.D. took the Roman emperor Valarian prisoner, and Shapur II who conquered Armenia and persecuted the Christians there.

Khosrow I, also known as Anushirvan the Just, ruled the Sassanian empire from 531 to 579. He made peace with the Romans and was known not only for reforming the tax system and reorganizing the army but also for building new towns and for importing and translating books from India, whose contents found their way via the Persians into the later Islamic civilization.

Khosrow Parviz (590-628) maintained famously splendid royal courts in Ctesiphon and Firuzabad. He invaded the empire of the Byzantines, who had replaced the Romans, conquered Jerusalem and then Egypt and reached the Asian side of the Hellespont, facing Constantinople. However, eventually his armies were defeated by the Byzantine emperor, Heraclius. The struggle so weakened both the Byzantine and Sassanian Empires that both were fairly easily overcome by a totally new power emerging from the Arabian peninsula.

The Coming of Islam

The Prophet Muhammad died in 632 A.D. and for the first months afterward his Muslim followers were engaged in consolidating Islamic rule among the tribes and settlements of the Arabian peninsula. In 633 Muslim Arabs attacked Mesopotamia and invited its Sassanian ruler, Yazdgird III, to embrace Islam. He refused but in 637 the Arabs took Ctesiphon on the East bank of the Tigris River and in 642 they defeated the Sassanians at Nahavand, bringing to an end the rule of Iranian dynasties for nearly one thousand years.

In the subsequent shifts of Arab rule from Mecca and Medina to Damascus, the capital of the Ommiyads, and particularly after it shifted to Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasids, Persians often played key roles. In the course of these shifts, most of the inhabitants of Iran adopted Shi'i Islam, while the majority of Arabs and of Muslims in general are adherents of Sunni or orthodox Islam. Throughout subsequent history this division has played a major role in Persian relations both with the Arabs and with the Turks, the majority of whom also are Sunni Muslims.

The replacement of feudal and socially stratified Zoroastrianism by relatively democratic Islam throughout Iran is one of the seminal events of world history. It opened the way to the fusion of Arab, Persian and Indian cultures that became Islamic civilization. It resulted in the adoption of the Arabic script in Iran, greatly influenced the Persian language, and revolutionalized Iranian art.

The Seljuk Turks

The decline of the Abbasid caliphs led to a period of small, independent dynasties ruling parts of Iran. Among them were the Taharids in Khorasan; the Saffarids, based in Sistan; the Samanids, centered in modern Afghanistan; and the Ghaznavids, who originated in Afghanistan and made various incursions into Persia and who left important architectural remains in both countries and in India.

The Seljuks, a clan of the Oghuz Turks, were early converts to Sunni Islam. They seized Marv from the Ghaznavids and by 1055 their leader, Toghril Beg, had set up an empire of his own in Baghdad. His successors were Alp Arsalan, Malik Shah and Sultan Sanjar. Alp Arsalan and Malik Shah's vizier was Nizam ul-Mulk, the patron of Omar Khayyam. Order never was completely established in their empire, which at times had separate and rival dynasties in Kerman and Iraq. Seljuk rule increasingly was threatened by the growing power of the Ismailis, also known as the Assassins, who were responsible for the murder of Nizam ul-Mulk and possibly of Malik Shah.

The Mongols

Between 1219 and 1227 Mongols led by Genghis Khan overran and largely destroyed Bokhara, Samarqand, Marv, Neishabur and all of northern Iran. Southern Iran escaped this unparalleled wave of murder, looting and destruction, and this aided Persia's eventual recovery. A quarter of a century later, with Iran as the center of a Mongol dynasty called the Ilkhans, Hulagu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, destroyed the Assassins and extinguished the Caliphate in Baghdad at the price of further bloodshed and destruction.

Under the later Mongol rulers, however, there was a flowering of culture and civilization and a new wave of building. It was at this time that Marco Polo traveled across Iran. The Mongol dynasty disintegrated with the death of Oljaitu in 1316, giving birth to local dynasties including the Muzaffarid dynasty in southern Iran, one of whose rulers was the patron of the poet Hafez.

The Timurids

Timur Lang (Tamerlane), who set out to restore the Mongol Empire, raided and conquered from Moscow to India to modern Turkey. One of his successors, Shahrokh (1408-1447), moved his capital from Samarqand to Herat, which he beautified. His wife, Gowhar, built the great mosque at the heart of the shrine in Meshed.

The Safavids, Zands and Qajars

With the decline of Timurid rule, after eight and a half centuries of alien rule over Iran, Shah Ismail (1499-1524) founded the Safavid dynasty, which continued in power until 1736. It restored internal order and established Shi'i Islam as the state religion. The Safavids were succeeded during various chaotic intervals of history by the Afshars, Zands and, in 1787, the Qajars.

The Pahlavis

In 1921, General Reza Khan established a military dictatorship. In 1925 he deposed the last Qajar Shah and established himself as Shah and founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. In 1941, after German Nazi forces invaded the Soviet Union, Russian and British forces occupied Iran and forced Reza Shah to abdicate in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. The latter ruled until 1979, when he was forced by a popular uprising to leave the country. After a very brief period of rule by a secular provisional government, the Islamic Republic of Iran was established under the leadership of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He ruled until his death of a heart attack in 1989.