Sections Section I: Ancient Biblical History of Iran Section II: Iranian Theology — From Ahura Mazda to the Hidden Imam Section III: Origins of the Country of Iran Section IV: The Overthrow of 1979 Section V: Iran the Terrorist State Section VI: Iran and Israel — A 46-Year Jihad Against the Jewish State Section VII: The Modern War on Iran Appendix A: References

Section I: Ancient Biblical History of Iran

The land we call Iran today is the oldest continuously functioning civilizational core in the modern Middle East. Long before Arabs, before Islam, before the European nation-state, the Iranian plateau produced one of the four great empires of antiquity — and produced it under a king whose name is preserved in Hebrew Scripture, in Greek histories, and on a clay cylinder now housed in the British Museum. Any honest account of "the problem with Iran" has to begin by acknowledging that Persia was, for a critical century of biblical history, the most consequential friend the Jewish people had outside of God Himself.

Cyrus the Great and the Return from Exile

The story begins in 539 BCE. Cyrus II, founder of the Achaemenid dynasty, marched into Babylon, ended the Neo-Babylonian Empire, and almost immediately reversed the policy of forced exile that the Babylonian kings Nebuchadnezzar II and his successors had imposed on conquered peoples (Kuhrt, 1983; British Museum, n.d.). The biblical record places Cyrus inside the divine economy: "Thus says the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped, to subdue nations before him" (Isaiah 45:1, ESV). Isaiah 44:28 calls Cyrus God's "shepherd" who "shall fulfill all my purpose, saying of Jerusalem, 'She shall be built,' and of the temple, 'Your foundation shall be laid.'" The book of Ezra opens with the historical fulfillment: "In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, that the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah might be fulfilled, the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom" (Ezra 1:1, ESV) — a decree to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem and to repatriate the exiled Judahites with the original temple vessels (Ezra 1:2–4, 7–11; Williamson, 1985).

The decree is not merely a confessional Jewish tradition. The Cyrus Cylinder, discovered in 1879 at the site of ancient Babylon by Hormuzd Rassam and now held by the British Museum (object number 1880,0617.1941), independently attests to Cyrus's policy of returning displaced peoples and restoring their sanctuaries (British Museum, n.d.; Finkel, 2013). The cuneiform text, forty-five lines of Akkadian, records that Cyrus "returned to these sacred cities on the other side of the Tigris, the sanctuaries of which had been ruins for a long time, the images which used to live therein and established for them permanent sanctuaries. I also gathered all their former inhabitants and returned to them their habitations" (Finkel, 2013, pp. 4–7). The United Nations holds a replica and has called the Cylinder "the world's first declaration of human rights" — a characterization scholars debate, but one that captures the cylinder's unique status as antiquity's earliest surviving document of state-sponsored religious tolerance (United Nations, n.d.; Mitchell, 1988).

Daniel, Esther, and the Persian Court

Cyrus's successors continued Persian engagement with the post-exilic Jewish community. The Book of Daniel locates its protagonist at the Persian court: Daniel serves under "Darius the Mede" (Daniel 6:1–28) and survives a night in the lions' den after refusing to abandon prayer to the God of Israel (Collins, 1993). Daniel 8 records the ram-and-goat vision — a ram with two horns "standing on the bank of the canal" representing "the kings of Media and Persia," subsequently overthrown by a male goat "from the west" whose conspicuous horn represents Alexander the Great of Macedon (Daniel 8:20–21, ESV). The vision is striking in its historical specificity: the Persian-Median dual horn, with one horn longer and rising later, exactly maps to the historical reality that the Persians under Cyrus eclipsed the Medes their predecessors (Goldingay, 1989).

The Book of Esther carries the narrative further into the reign of Ahasuerus — identified by virtually all modern scholars with Xerxes I (486–465 BCE), the same Persian king who invaded Greece (Yamauchi, 1990; Berlin, 2001). The Esther narrative records the elevation of a Jewish queen, the foiling of Haman's genocidal plot, and the establishment of the Festival of Purim, which Jews still observe today (Esther 9:20–32). Whatever one's view of the historicity of every detail, the cultural memory it preserves — that Persia was the place where a Jewish queen sat beside the king of the known world — is historically irreplaceable (Levenson, 1997).

The Achaemenid World, Behistun, and the Greco-Persian Wars

The empire that produced Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes was the largest the world had ever seen. Under Darius I (522–486 BCE), the Achaemenid Empire stretched from the Indus Valley in the east to the Aegean in the west, from the Caucasus and Black Sea in the north to the Nile cataracts in the south (Briant, 2002). Darius reorganized administration into approximately twenty satrapies — provincial governorships whose number rose to thirty-six by the end of his reign — each headed by a satrap responsible for tribute, military levies, and local justice, with separate royal secretaries and inspectors ("the King's Eyes") providing checks on satrapal autonomy (Wiesehöfer, 2001; Briant, 2002).

The Behistun Inscription, carved roughly 100 meters up a cliff face in modern Kermanshah Province in Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian, records Darius's victories over rebellious satraps and was the trilingual key that finally unlocked cuneiform decipherment for European scholars in the nineteenth century — making it to Mesopotamian studies what the Rosetta Stone was to Egyptology (Schmitt, 1991; World History Encyclopedia, n.d.). Darius also instituted gold and silver coinage (the daric), the Royal Road from Sardis to Susa, and one of the ancient world's earliest postal systems (Briant, 2002).

The Persian collision with Greece — the Greco-Persian Wars of 499–449 BCE — produced the battles that European civilization would mythologize for two and a half millennia: Marathon (490 BCE), where 10,000 Athenians and Plataeans repulsed a much larger Persian landing force under Darius's generals Datis and Artaphernes; Thermopylae (480 BCE), where King Leonidas of Sparta and his Greek coalition delayed Xerxes's invasion at the narrow pass before being overwhelmed; and Salamis (480 BCE), where the Athenian admiral Themistocles lured the Persian fleet into narrow straits and shattered it in the decisive naval engagement of the war (Holland, 2005; Cartledge, 2013). The Greek victories did not destroy the Persian Empire — Persia remained the dominant power in the region for another 150 years — but they preserved the political independence of the Greek city-states and, with them, the philosophical, dramatic, and political traditions that would seed Western civilization. From the Persian point of view, however, Salamis was a setback in a vast empire's western frontier, not a civilizational catastrophe. The empire continued to thrive until Alexander the Great's invasion of 334–330 BCE.

Sassanid Renewal and the Arab Conquest

After Alexander, his Seleucid successors, and the Parthian Arsacid dynasty (247 BCE–224 CE), Persian sovereignty was renewed under the Sassanid dynasty (224–651 CE). The Sassanids made Zoroastrianism the official state religion, codified the Avesta, and fought Rome and then Byzantium to a standstill for four centuries (Daryaee, 2009; Britannica, n.d.). At their height under Khosrow I (531–579) and Khosrow II (590–628), the Sassanids briefly recaptured Jerusalem from the Eastern Romans in 614 CE — only to lose it again to Heraclius in 628 (Howard-Johnston, 2010). The wars with Byzantium exhausted both empires and left them vulnerable to an unexpected force from the south.

That force was Islam. Beginning around 633 CE, Arab armies under the early caliphs Abu Bakr and Umar broke out of the Arabian Peninsula. At the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah (likely 636 CE), Arab forces under Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas decisively defeated the Sassanid army, opened the way to Ctesiphon, and effectively ended Persian sovereignty west of the Iranian plateau (Donner, 1981; Daryaee, 2009). The last Sassanid king, Yazdegerd III, fled east and was assassinated near Merv in 651 CE — closing twelve hundred years of indigenous Persian imperial rule from Cyrus to Yazdegerd. Over the following two centuries, Persia was Islamized, often by force, with Zoroastrians facing the choice of conversion, the jizya (tax on non-Muslims), or exile; many fled to India and became the Parsis (Boyce, 1979; Choksy, 1997).

Persian Is Not Arab — The Distinction That Matters

Here lies a distinction that any serious Iran paper must underline. Persians are not Arabs. The Persian language belongs to the Iranian branch of the Indo-European family — kin to Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin. Arabic is a Semitic language belonging to the Afro-Asiatic family. The Persian people trace their ethnic origins to Indo-European migrations into the Iranian plateau in the second millennium BCE; Arabs trace theirs to Semitic peoples of the Arabian Peninsula (Frye, 1996). Despite seventh-century conquest, Persians retained their language, their literary tradition (the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, composed c. 1010 CE, deliberately used Persian rather than Arabic vocabulary to preserve national memory), and pre-Islamic markers like Nowruz, the spring equinox new year still celebrated in Iran but absent from the Arab world (Yarshater, 1989; Frye, 1996).

The 1979 regime in Tehran is Persian-ruled in name but Arab-Islamic in confessional identity in a way that runs against the grain of two and a half millennia of Iranian civilization. The Iranian people are the heirs of Cyrus, Darius, Esther's court, the Shahnameh, and Nowruz. The regime is the heir of something else.