Persian Culture: History, People and Common Myths

1Who are Persians and Iranians? Terms and people

Iran is the name of the modern state. It is also used as a geographic and cultural term, and its adjective “Iranian” describes, independently of political borders, an ethnolinguistic family: the Iranian languages.¹ The word comes from Old Iranian *Aryānām, “of the Aryans,” meaning the Iranians in the old sense of an Iranian-speaking people. Under the Sasanians the empire was called Ērānšahr, the Iranian realm.²

Persian is the name of the language and of the people most closely tied to it. The language, Fārsī in Persian and “Farsi” in English usage, is the official language of Iran, and Britannica calls it the predominant one.³ Iran’s own constitution makes Persian the official language and script and “the lingua franca of its people,” while allowing regional and tribal languages in the press and media and for teaching their literature in schools.⁴ Britannica notes that languages from three families, Indo-European, Turkic and Afro-Asiatic, are spoken in the country.³

Persian is one language with several standard forms. Encyclopaedia Iranica treats the Persian of Iran (Farsi), Tajiki and Dari as distinct branches of the Persian language, each with many local dialects.⁵ Afghanistan’s standard written Persian has officially been called Dari since 1964.⁶ “Persian” and “Farsi” therefore refer to the same language; see myth 4.

Compiled from the sources cited in this section.⁷

Who lives in Iran. The most commonly cited estimate puts Persians at about 61 percent of the population, followed by Azerbaijani Turks (16 percent), Kurds (10), Lurs (6), Baloch and Arabs (2 each) and Turkmen and other Turkic tribes (2).⁸ Treat those numbers with care: Minority Rights Group notes that Iran has not collected data on ethnicity or language since 1976, and that the Pahlavi-era state then put Persians at only 51 percent.⁸ The shares are best read as estimates, and Britannica describes the country simply as “ethnically diverse.”³

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2Before the Persians: Elam and the Medes to the 6th century BCE

From the rise of literate civilization until the early first millennium BCE, western Iran was dominated by the Elamites, who spoke an isolate language, one unrelated to any other known tongue. By the mid-9th century BCE two Iranian-speaking groups, the Medes and the Persians, had become the dominant force on the plateau; the Medes were at first the more politically important.⁹ The Persians eventually settled in the region of Fars, known as Persis.⁹

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3The Achaemenid Empire 559–330 BCE

Cyrus II, later called Cyrus the Great, inherited the throne of Anshan in 559 BCE and defeated the Medes in 550.⁹ He captured Croesus at Sardis, the Lydian capital, in 546 and marched into Babylon in 539, which carried Persian power to the borders of Egypt.⁹ At its greatest extent the empire stretched from Egypt to the Indus River, from Gandhara in the east to Khwarezm and Armenia in the north, and west through parts of Greece. Britannica calls it the largest empire the world had yet seen.⁹

How it was run. Darius I completed the organization of the empire into provinces called satrapies, initiated by Cyrus, and fixed the annual tribute due from each. He standardized coinage, weights and measures, developed land and sea routes and completed a canal from the Nile to the Red Sea.⁹ The Achaemenids adopted a policy of tolerance toward conquered peoples, and Britannica says Cyrus conciliated local populations by supporting local customs and even sacrificing to local deities, and that on entering Babylon he seized the hands of the statue of the city god Marduk as a signal that he would rule as a Babylonian and not as a foreign conqueror.¹⁰⁹ UNESCO describes Pasargadae, Cyrus’s first capital, as the capital of “the first great multicultural empire in Western Asia” and says it is considered the first empire to respect the cultural diversity of its peoples.¹¹

Not an idyll. The same sources record the limits. Darius took more than a year of hard fighting (522–521 BCE) to put down revolts across the empire. His son Xerxes broke with the light hand of Cyrus and Darius, governing Egypt harshly and ignoring local customs, and suppressed a Babylonian revolt “with a heavy hand.”⁹ Tolerance was a method of rule, not a modern ideal of equality.

Capitals and monuments. Darius I founded Persepolis in 518 BCE as the capital, on an immense half-artificial, half-natural terrace, with a palace complex inspired by Mesopotamian models.¹² At Bisotun, Darius ordered a relief and an inscription of about 1,200 lines in three languages, Elamite, Babylonian and, for the first time, Old Persian, telling of the rebellions he put down in 521–520 BCE.¹³

The Greek wars. After Ionian Greek cities revolted in 499 BCE, Darius’s forces were defeated at Marathon in 490 BCE. Xerxes invaded Greece in 480 BCE, burning the Acropolis of Athens before losing at Salamis, and the invasion ended with the defeat at Plataea in 479 BCE.⁹ Britannica adds that the Persians later used gold and diplomacy to play Greek states against each other, and that the “King’s Peace” of 387–386 BCE let Artaxerxes II dictate terms to the Greeks.⁹ The wars were a contest between rival powers, not a simple clash of freedom and despotism.

End of the dynasty. The empire entered a slow decline after Xerxes’s death in 465 BCE. Alexander the Great defeated Darius III, Persepolis fell in April 330 BCE and Darius, the last Achaemenid, was murdered that summer.⁹

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4The Cyrus Cylinder, and what it says 539 BCE

The Cyrus Cylinder is a fired-clay cylinder, about 22 cm long, found in Babylon in the 19th century and held by the British Museum. Its text, written in Babylonian script and language, records Cyrus’s conquest of Babylon in 539 BCE, says he entered the city without a fight, and describes him restoring temples and returning deported gods and peoples.¹⁴

The museum is explicit about what it does not say. The cylinder is written “from a purely Babylonian point of view,” and the label “charter of human rights” is a modern one: “Such a concept would have been quite alien to Cyrus’s contemporaries, and indeed the cylinder says nothing of human rights.” But the museum also notes that returning deported peoples was “a significant reversal” of Assyrian and Babylonian policy.¹⁴ Britannica adds that the accounts of Cyrus in Herodotus and Xenophon are legend-laden and that Xenophon’s portrait is of an ideal ruler, not a historical treatise.¹⁰

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5Seleucids and Parthians 330 BCE–224 CE

After Alexander, Seleucus I conquered the eastern part of Iran after 308 BCE, but the Seleucids lost large parts of their Iranian possessions within about fifteen years, between 250 and 235 BCE, to the Parni, an Iranian tribe, whose leader Arsaces gave his name to the Arsacid (Parthian) dynasty.¹⁵ Ancient writers give conflicting accounts of Arsaces’s origins, which Iranica lists at length.¹⁶ The Arsacids were overthrown in 224 CE after civil strife, an epidemic and repeated wars with Rome.¹⁷

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6The Sasanian Empire 224–651 CE

The Sasanians, a Persian family from Fars, ruled from 224 to about 650 CE and were, in Iranica’s words, the last Persian lineage to achieve hegemony over much of Western Asia before Islam.¹⁷ The word ērān (“of the Iranians”) is first attested in the titles of Ardashir I, and Shapur I’s inscription at the Ka‘ba-ye Zardosht in Fars contains, for the first time, the Persian word ērānšahr, “the Iranian realm,” for the empire.² Iranica suggests that the royal family’s carvings at Persepolis may express a claim to Achaemenid heritage.¹⁷

The Sasanian era was also when Zoroastrian priests codified the Avesta, the scriptures of the religion, in a period removed from the times when the individual texts were composed.¹⁸ Iranica notes that one Sasanian king’s tolerant religious policy let Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, preach freely.¹⁷

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7The Arab conquest and the Persian Islamic world 651–1501

During the 7th and 8th centuries, mostly Arab armies of the early Islamic state conquered the Sasanian state and much of eastern Iran. Iranica cautions that the accounts are “often contradictory” and the exact course of events unclear, and says Persian forces appear to have outnumbered the Muslim armies at key battles such as Qadisiya and Nehavand and contested the advance fiercely.¹⁹ By 651, most urban centers of Iranian lands had come under Arab domination, with the notable exceptions of the Caspian provinces and Transoxiana.²⁰ Conversion was gradual, accompanied in places by violence: Zoroastrian scriptures were burned and priests executed.²⁰

Persian came back. Britannica describes an Iranian cultural renaissance in the late 8th century that revived Persian literary culture, now in Arabic script and with many Arabic words, and native Persian Islamic dynasties began with the Tahirids in the early 9th century.³ Later, after the Seljuks defeated the Ghaznavids in 1038, they left the administration in Iranian hands; several Anatolian Seljuk rulers took Iranian names and made Persian the official language of court, an influence Iranica says spread as far as India.²¹

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8The Safavids, Qajars and Pahlavis 1501–1979

Britannica describes successive Persian, Turkish and Mongol conquerors until the rise of the Safavids in the early 16th century, who introduced Twelver Shi‘ism as the official creed; over the following centuries a Persian-based Shi‘i clergy produced a synthesis between Persian culture and Shi‘i Islam.³ Shah Abbas I built the Meidan Emam in Isfahan at the beginning of the 17th century, which UNESCO calls an “impressive testimony to the level of social and cultural life in Persia during the Safavid era.”²²

The Safavids fell in 1736 and, after several short-lived dynasties, the Qajars rose in 1796. Britannica says Qajar rule was marked by the growing influence of European powers and of the Shi‘i clergy; the Pahlavi dynasty took power in 1925.³ Under Reza Shah (1925–41), the state adopted Persian as the sole official language and banned publication in other languages, a policy Minority Rights Group calls “Persianization.”⁸ Minority Rights Group notes that the state was known as Persia until 1935; see myth 3.

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91979 and today 1979–present

The revolution of 1978–79 overthrew the Pahlavi dynasty and brought to power a system Britannica describes as combining elements of a parliamentary democracy with an Islamic theocracy run by the clergy. Iran then fought a long war with Iraq (1980–88).³ Britannica reports that Iranians took to the streets in 2022 after the death of Jina Mahsa Amini, and again from December 28, 2025, in protests it says were brutally suppressed in January 2026.³ Events since then are covered in our Iran hub and War Room, not on this page.

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10Poetry and language 10th–14th centuries and after

Ferdowsi. Abu’l-Qasem Ferdowsi, from Tus (today’s Mashhad), completed the Shahnameh, the “Book of Kings,” on March 8, 1010, according to the date he gives in the poem itself.²³ Sa’di of Shiraz (born about 1210, died 1291 or 1292), author of the Bustan and Golestan, is widely recognized as one of the greatest masters of the classical tradition; Iranica warns that many of the autobiographical reminiscences in his works are probably fictionalized.²⁴ Hafez, Iranica says, is “the most popular of Persian poets”: if a book of poetry is found in a Persian home, it is likely to be his Divan, which is also used for divination (fāl).²⁵

Khayyam is known in English as the poet of the Rubaiyat, but Iranica stresses that the details of his life, including his birth and death dates, are disputed, and that he was a philosopher and mathematician too; it places him at Nishapur, where a visitor saw his grave in 1136.²⁶ Rumi (died 1273) wrote in Anatolia. Iranica lists Sa’di (Iran), Amir Khosrow (India) and Rumi (Anatolia) as three of the best-known figures in Persian literature, an illustration of how far the Persian language traveled.²¹ Even rival courts took part: Ottoman Sultan Selim I wrote poetry in Persian, while his enemy Shah Esma‘il I of Iran wrote in Turkish.²¹

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11Festivals: Nowruz, Chaharshanbe Suri and Yalda Ancient and living

Nowruz, “New Day,” marks the new year at the spring equinox. Iranica’s Mary Boyce describes it as the holiest and most joyful festival of the Zoroastrian year and, as far back as records go, a celebration of early spring and the renewal of nature.²⁷ UNESCO lists Nowruz among the elements of intangible cultural heritage that Iran shares with other countries.²⁸

Chaharshanbe Suri falls on the eve of the last Wednesday of the Persian solar year, no more than six days before Nowruz, and is marked most notably by jumping over fire; the festival has many regional names, from Kurdistan to Gilan and Isfahan.²⁹ Yalda is the night of the winter solstice, the longest of the year, when families traditionally gather to eat fruit and read poetry from Hafez and the Shahnameh.³⁰

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12Architecture, gardens, carpets and music Heritage

Iran has 30 properties on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, 28 of them cultural, including Persepolis, Pasargadae, Bisotun and Meidan Emam.³¹ The Persian Garden listing covers nine gardens in as many provinces, always divided into four sectors, with water central to irrigation and ornamentation and design principles that UNESCO traces to the time of Cyrus the Great.³² UNESCO’s intangible heritage lists include ayeneh-kari, the art of mirror-work in Persian architecture, and the traditional skills of carpet weaving in Fars and in Kashan.²⁸

Carpets. Iranica’s survey is candid that the history of Persian carpet making is “fraught with unproved hypotheses.” Knotted-pile weaving is far older than once thought, because the Pazyryk carpet was found in a Siberian tomb, but, apart from some Sasanian-period fragments, no Persian pile carpet can definitely be said to survive from before the 16th century.³³

Music. The radif, the basic repertoire of classical Persian music, was developed in the late Qajar era, notably by Mirza Abd-Allah (about 1843–1918), and UNESCO lists the Radif of Iranian music as intangible heritage.³⁴²⁸ Iranica notes that members of ethnic minorities have contributed to Persian musical traditions throughout history.³⁴

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13Contributions to the wider world Statecraft, learning and the arts

Administration. The Achaemenid system of satrapies, standard coinage and tribute became the template for Alexander and his successors (section 3). Gardens. UNESCO says Persian garden design influenced the art of garden design as far as India and Spain.³² Literature. Persian was the language of poetry and court administration far beyond Iran (section 7).

Philosophy, medicine and mathematics. Avicenna (Ibn Sina) is described by Iranica as a thinker who attempted to redefine the course of Islamic philosophy.³⁵ With the exception of two Persian works, including the Danesh-nameh-ye ‘Ala’i, all of his works on logic are in Arabic, the shared language of learning.³⁶ Khayyam’s mathematical works include a treatise on algebra, Maqāla fī’l-jabr wa’l-muqābala.²⁶ In modern mathematics, Maryam Mirzakhani received the 2014 Fields Medal for her work on Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces.³⁷ The point is that “Persian” scholarship worked in several languages.

Film. Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry shared the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1997,³⁸ and Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation won the Oscar for Foreign Language Film for Iran in 2012, with Farhadi accepting.³⁹ Human rights. Shirin Ebadi, one of Iran’s first female judges, won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize as, in the Nobel Foundation’s words, the first female Peace Prize laureate from the Islamic world, and the 2023 prize went to the imprisoned Narges Mohammadi.⁴⁰⁴¹

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14Religion and diversity Today

Iran is overwhelmingly Muslim: the Iranian government estimates 99.4 percent, of whom 90 to 95 percent are Shia and 5 to 10 percent Sunni, mostly Turkmen, Arabs, Baluch and Kurds.⁴² The U.S. government says groups making up the rest, under 1 percent, include Baha’is, Christians, Yarsanis, Jews, Sabean-Mandaeans and Zoroastrians.⁴²

Figures are estimates; no authoritative current count exists for several groups.⁸ Parliament reserves seats for Christians (three, including two Armenian), Jews (one) and Zoroastrians (one).³

The pre-Islamic faiths did not disappear. Zoroastrianism, whose scriptures Sasanian priests collected and codified,¹⁸ still has a community in Iran, concentrated in Yazd, Kerman and East Azerbaijan, and its festival Nowruz is celebrated across the country.⁸²⁸

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15Ten common myths, checked Myth / Reality / Source

Each card gives the claim, what the sources show and where to verify it. The “Source” line summarizes the evidence; full citations are in the numbered list at the end of the page.

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16The Iranian people, the Iranian state and the diaspora Distinguishing them

Peter’s World reports critically on the Islamic Republic’s military and regional policies in the Iran hub and War Room. That reporting is about a government. This page is about a culture, and the two should not be confused. Britannica itself separates them: it describes Iran’s cultural and social continuity as dating back to the Achaemenian period, which began in 550 BCE, and the Islamic republic as a system that has existed only since 1979.³

Iranians have organized outside the state as well as within it. Iranica describes Iran Nameh as the oldest post-revolution scholarly journal published by the Iranian diaspora; its publisher, the Foundation for Iranian Studies, was established in 1981, and the journal was designed to stay clear of day-to-day Iranian politics and concentrate on preserving the Persian language and understanding Iranian culture and society.⁴⁶ Within Iran, human rights advocates such as Ebadi and Mohammadi won Nobel Peace Prizes for their work on human rights and women’s rights.⁴⁰⁴¹ Minority Rights Group records that a countrywide “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement erupted in September 2022 after Jina Mahsa Amini died in custody.⁸

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