Iran historical timeline

Origins

Elam was writing in the south-west before 2000 BC. In 550 BC Cyrus the Great founded the Achaemenid empire, which became the largest the world had yet seen, stretching from the Indus to the Aegean and governed with a tolerance for local religion unusual for the period. Persepolis was its ceremonial capital. Zoroastrianism, one of the earliest religions to frame the world as a struggle between good and evil, shaped ideas that later passed into Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Alexander burned Persepolis; the Parthians and then the Sasanians rebuilt Persian power and held Rome to a draw for four centuries.

Turning points

The Arab conquest of the seventh century brought Islam, and here something happened that did not happen in Egypt or the Levant: the language survived. Persian re-emerged as a literary language within three hundred years and became the court tongue from Anatolia to Bengal. The Mongols devastated the region in the thirteenth century. In 1501 the Safavids made Twelver Shia Islam the state religion, which set Iran permanently apart from its Sunni neighbours. The Constitutional Revolution of 1906 produced a parliament; oil nationalisation under Mossadegh ended with a British- and American-backed coup in 1953; and the revolution of 1979 replaced the monarchy with an Islamic Republic. The war with Iraq from 1980 to 1988 cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Sanctions, nuclear negotiations and recurring waves of protest have defined the decades since.

Influential people

Cyrus, whose clay cylinder is sometimes read as an early statement of tolerance. Ferdowsi, whose Shahnameh is credited with keeping Persian alive. Rumi, Hafez, Saadi and Omar Khayyam, all of whom are still quoted in ordinary conversation. Avicenna, whose medical canon was taught in Europe for six centuries. Mohammad Mossadegh. Ruhollah Khomeini. And Abbas Kiarostami, whose films made Iranian cinema internationally central.

Cultural evolution

Poetry here is popular culture: people keep a Hafez at home and open it at random for guidance. Nowruz, the new year at the spring equinox, is around three thousand years old, predates Islam and is celebrated across Central Asia and beyond. The Persian garden — four quarters divided by water — is the ancestor of formal gardens from Spain to India, and the word paradise comes from the Persian for a walled one. Taarof, a ritualised etiquette of offering and refusing, governs a great deal of daily interaction and baffles visitors.

Present-day significance

Iran has a young, highly educated population, twenty-eight UNESCO World Heritage sites and very little of the tourism that heritage would otherwise bring. The economy operates under extensive sanctions. A large diaspora, concentrated in North America and Europe, keeps the culture unusually visible abroad relative to how few outsiders see the country itself.