Definition of "Iran"

"The Persians, in naming their country, make use of one word, which they indifferently pronounce Iroun, and Iran."

ca. 1675, Jean Chardin (Sir John Chardin), Travels in Persia, 1673-1677, fasc. reprint 1988, Dover, page 126

Light was happiness; and the people of Iran, the land of light, were the favourites of heaven; while those of Turan, the gloomy region beyond the mountains to the north, were its enemies.

1828, Thomas Keightley, The Fairy Mythology, volume I, London: William Harrison Ainsworth, page 25

"Iran is a vast and ancient country in a strategic location in the Middle East. It borders Russia, Iraq, Turkey, Pakistan, the Gulf of Oman, and the Persian Gulf."

2005, Massoume Price, editor, Iran's Diverse Peoples, ABC-Clio, page xiii

"Kavi means a king, but it is particularly used of the kings belonging to the second and most celebrated of the two mythical dynasties of Iran." / "One certain fact is the occurrence of geographical names [Bactria, Sogdiana, etc] in Vendidad I, which are obviously intended to describe the earliest homes of the Iranian races whose lore was the Avesta."

1882, James Darmesteter, The Zend-Avesta, volume 1 (SBE, volume 31), Oxford UP, page 7, xxviii

"Zoroaster of Iran. — Zoroaster, it is believed, sprang up in the seventh century before the Christian era, somewhere in the land between the Indus and the Tigris."

1898, A. V. W. Jackson, Zoroaster: The Prophet of Ancient Iran, Macmillan, page 10

"Iran. in early times, the name applied to the great Asiatic plateau which comprised the entire region from the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea, and Russian Turkestan on the north to the Tigris, the Persian Gulf, and the Arabian Sea on the west and south, and extending to the Indus on the east, likewise comprising the modern Afghanistan and the territory to the north of it as far as the Jaxartes River."

1909, “Iran”, in John Huston Finley, editor, Nelson's Perpetual Loose-leaf Encyclopaedia, volume 6, page 479

"[W]e may surmise that there was a strong sense of Iranian unity lending solidarity to the eastern half of the empire. It is only in the generations after Alexander, in Eudemus and in Eratosthenes (ap. Strabo), that we find mention of the concept of a greater nation of Iran (Arianē) stretching from the Zagros to the Indus; but the sense of unity must have been there, for Herodotus tells us that the Medes were formerly called Arioi, and Darius I (followed by Xerxes) in his inscriptions proclaims himself an Iranian (Ariya) by race - he speaks of himself in ascending order as an Achaemenid, a Persian and an Iranian (Naqsh-i Rustam)."

1985, J. M. Cooke, “The Rise of the Achaemenids”, in Cambridge Historiy of Iran, volume 2, page 290

"[The] Cambridge History of Iran [is] a survey of the history and historical geography of the land which is present-day Iran, as well as other territories inhabited by peoples of Iranian descent."

1990, Hubert Darke, “Cambridge History of Iran”, in Encyclopedia Iranica, volume 4, page 724