How did Iran change its name from Persia to Iran? Where did the word Iran come from?

The shift from the exonym "Persia" to the endonym "Iran" as the country's primary international designation was a deliberate political and cultural act by the Reza Shah Pahlavi government in 1935. This change was not about altering the country's name in a literal sense, but rather about standardizing the official foreign nomenclature to reflect what its people had called their homeland for millennia: Iran. The term "Persia" derives from the Greek *Persis*, referring to the southwestern region of Fars (Pars), the heartland of the ancient Achaemenid Empire. Through Greco-Roman and subsequent Western usage, "Persia" became the common name for the entire empire and later the modern nation-state, a pars pro toto that centered a single province within a much larger and more diverse cultural and historical entity. The 1935 decree, communicated through diplomatic channels to the League of Nations and foreign governments, requested that the country be referred to as "Iran" in all official communications, thereby asserting a national identity rooted in indigenous terminology rather than a Western-imposed regional label.

The word "Iran" itself has deep historical roots, originating from the Proto-Iranian term *Aryānām*, meaning "of the Aryans." This evolved into the Middle Persian *Ērān*, first officially used in the third century CE by the Sasanian Empire, which referred to its domain as *Ērānshahr* (the Domain of the Iranians). The term is intrinsically linked to the concept of the Iranian plateau and the family of Iranian peoples, encompassing not just Persians but also Kurds, Baluch, Lurs, and others, and historically extending to cultural-linguistic regions in Central Asia and the Caucasus. Thus, "Iran" carries a broader ethnic and geographic connotation than the more regionally specific "Persia." The change in 1935 was, in essence, an act of linguistic reclamation and nationalist modernization, aligning the country's international identity with its self-perception as a sovereign state with a continuous civilization spanning thousands of years, distinct from the Hellenocentric framing of its history.

The implementation of the change was not instantaneous or universally accepted. Domestically, the names were often used interchangeably for decades, with "Persia" retaining strong cultural cachet, particularly in references to art, history, and carpets. Internationally, some pushback and confusion persisted, leading the government of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi to announce in 1959 that both "Iran" and "Persia" could be used interchangeably, a pragmatic concession to tradition and global recognition. However, the official name remained, and remains, Iran. The 1979 Islamic Republic retained "Iran," cementing its status as the unchallenged formal name. The evolution of this nomenclature reflects the complex interplay between internal identity politics and external perception. It underscores a persistent tension: "Persia" evokes a specific, romanticized historical and cultural legacy in the Western imagination, while "Iran" asserts a modern, political, and more ethnically inclusive national project, a distinction that continues to resonate in contemporary geopolitical and cultural discourse.

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