This post was inspired by the post from two days ago on the flags of the world.
I’ve always considered Reza Shah Pahlavi’s 1935 decree requesting that the country formerly known as Persia be referred to as “Iran” by foreign governments with which it had diplomatic relations to be a mistake. Naturally, once governments began to refer to the country as Iran, their citizens followed suit. This change at once led to a severing in the Western consciousness of Iran from the Persian culture of classical antiquity, and also created a situation in which the name of the country can easily become confounded with that of its neighbour and recurrent rival, Iraq, a name which entered the mainstream vocabulary of Western languages only in 1932 with the founding of the Kingdom of Iraq in that year.
Actually, in Arabic and Persian, the names Iraq and Iran sound quite different, and they are not very similar to each other when written in the Perso-Arabic script… » [Expand post] [Permalink]