The site's Iranian name is Takht-e-Jamshid, "The throne of Jamshid", a
mythical King of Iran. The ancient name is "Parsa", "Pars's Town". Province of
Fars. A large bare plain, surrounded by mauve cliffs with sharp edges. It is
there, in the center of the Marv Dasht basin, that Cyrus the Great chose, toward
the end of the his reign, to build under the shelter of a fold in the mountains,
a palace worthy of the Empire. It was named Parsa, but later under subsequent
Greek influence became known as Persepolis, "The city of the Persians".
THE IRANIAN PAST AND ITS INTERPRETATION: PRE-ISLAMIC IRAN
First, we should briefly define Iran. People in the West long called Iran, "Persia" and think that when Reza Shah, the first Pahlavi shah, asked foreigners to use the name "Iran" he was requesting a change of name. In fact, "Iran" had been the most common indigenous name for the whole area since pre-Islamic times, while "Persia" was primarily a name for its southwest and "Persian" the name of Iran's main language. The name Persia was used by the ancient Greeks, and hence by later Europeans, for the ancient Achemenian empire whose best-known rulers were Cyrus and Darius. The word "Iran" was used especially in the empires that ruled for a few centuries before the seventh-century Islamic conquest of Iran and it continued to be used later, even when there was not a single state in the territory of today's Iran. The Iranian national epic, the Book of Kings, with pre-Islamic roots, composed by the great poet Firdousi in the l0th century, contrasts Iran with its enemy, Turan.
Some scholars today oppose the writing of national histories, noting that national boundaries and nationalism are modern phenomena, and do not correspond with past boundaries or concepts. This is true, but history must be divided in some way, and national histories are one way to do this. Unfortuately, no good short history of Iran from pre-Islamic times to today exists, although there are important features that carried over and influenced Iran from ancient times. Also, pre-Islamic Iran has been a cultural battleground for twentieth century Iranians.
The most obvious influential and controversial feature is language: Persian is an Indo-European language, which means it is distantly related to English and French, and more closely to Sanscrit and North Indian Languages. A language family, like other families, indicates a common ancestor, and it is thought that all the languages that branched off into Indo-European languages were descended from one ancestral language. Since many of these Indo-European groups conquered or infiltrated quite different peoples, imposing their basic language with some influences added from the preexisting local groups, this does not mean that people speaking related languages are racially close, as can be seen by comparing the appearance of Indo-European Scandinavians with Indo-European South Asians. The false equation of language and race was widespread in the west between around 1850-1950, and some Iranians, influenced by Western racist thinkers, took pride in being Indo-Europeans, or "Aryans" as they were also called until Hitler discredited the term by putting racial theory into horrible practice.
The Old Persian language came to Iran, perhaps around 1500 BC, with the migration of one branch of the Indo-European people-- called Indo-Iranian--into Iranian territory. The language evolved into Middle Persian, and later, after the Arab conquest, into New Persian. The Arab conquest introduced a large number of Arabic words into Persian and the Arabic script replaced old Near Eastern Cuneiform, but a language is considered to belong to the family that provides its basic structure and elementary vocabulary, and this is Persian. Iran was the largest Middle Eastern region to retain its former language after the original seventh-century Arab conquest. Iranians are hence not Arabs, as this term today means those whose basic language is Arabic. Many other languages are also spoken in Iran, mainly from two groups: the Turkic (e.g. Azerbaijani, Turcoman, Qashqai) and Iranian subfamily, related to Persian (e.g., Kurdish, Baluchi, Luri).
In addition to language, the pre-Islamic Iranian empires had a rather sophisticated government structure and supporting theories of government. Much of this influenced the government and culture of Islamic polities, as the conquering Muslim Arabs had less experience with extensive empires and organized states. In the cultural field also, Iranians had a great number of scholars and thinkers, and many of the major intellectuals who wrote in Arabic in the Islamic period came from this Iranian cultural background--the philosopher Avicenna is probably the best-known in the West. Pre-Islamic Iran also had a poetic tradition, now mostly lost, and poetry in Persian flowered in the Islamic period--the names of the mystical poet Rumi and the poet and scientist Omar Khayyam are well-known in the west. Pre-Islamic artistic and decorative skills, perhaps best shown by the magnificent ruins of the Achemenian palace at Persepolis, carried on into new arts and handicrafts in the Islamic period, with Persian miniatures and carpets best known in the West.
In religion, pre-Islamic Iran was predominantly Zoroastrian, following a religion which believed that the forces of good and evil--characterized by two divine figures--are conducting a long battle which the forces of good will ultimately win. Many of the key ideas of Zoroastrianism are generally thought to have influenced Judaism and, mainly through that route, Christianity and Islam. Among these are the figure of the devil, angels, the afterlife, and the last judgment. (Jews were in the Persian Empire from Achemenian times on, and Christians from immediately pre-Islamic Sasanian times.) Pre-Islamic Iran also knew unorthodox and rebellious religious movements, which have characterized Iran from then till now. The most important was the Manichean movement beginning in the third century AD, where the prophet Mani created a syncretic religion that retained the good-evil dualism of Zoroastrianism but changed it by saying spirit was good and matter evil. He had a group of elect who were celibate and pure. Some Manicheans influenced early Islam, and Manichean movements were important heresies in both the Muslim and Christian world. More radical was Mazdak in the fifth century AD, who called for common property in goods and perhaps communism of women.
Several features of pre-Islamic Iran have become important for the trend of Iranian nationalism dominant under the Pahlavi shahs. To weaken the power of the clergy and to provide support for a centralized national state, these shahs and many intellectuals glorified pre-Islamic Iran and even Zoroastrianism, which had previously been despised. Hence this ancient history is not distant for many Iranians, especially of the educated middle classes, but is rather a model for a strong, independent Iran, while they see the Arab-Islamic conquest as a negative event which brought cultural and political decline. (This view is greatly exaggerated, as Iran's greatest scholarly, philosophical, and literary work took place after the Islamic conquests.) The views of those who stress Islam are quite different.