It’s been a month since the United States took to bombing Iran. Donald Trump marked the occasion this Monday, by dropping several one-tonne bunker-buster bombs on Isfahan from stratosphere skimming B-52 bombers outside the reach of Iranian air defence. By the time this war gets over, and that will be a long time coming, Iran, as Trump insists, will be reduced to rubble. Unless, of course, ‘The Regime’ capitulates to unconditional surrender. Now.
So, what does the future hold for Iran?
A wasteland.
That brings us to some deep civilisational musings: How did Iran inherit its name? What does Iran really mean?
Etymologists, scholars who trace how names evolved over time, and there are many; lexicographers, who define words used in language; linguists, who study the phonetics, syntax, and semantics of language; and historians, who study the footprints of time - all of them agree that Iran got its name from Ērān, a name firmly established since the 3rd century CE Sassanid rule, when Ardeshir I (224-242 CE) inscribed his credentials on the rockface of Naqsh-e-Rustam as “šāhān šāh ī ērān” that losely translates to the “King of kings of the Iranians.” Sounds good, but only partially so.
Modern scholarship would have us believe that Ardeshir’s Eran did not mean a country in the sense that we mean it today. Rather, it meant, the realm over which he ruled. If you look at the map below, Iran is a vast expanse of wasteland, interspersed with oases, where urban habitations were restricted, yet flourished over centuries. But unlike with India, China and later Europe, there was no contiguous and continuous civilizational spread of a distinct race of people who owned that land. Which is one reason Iran belonged to anybody and nobody in alternate timelines. Robbers and barons alike, robber-barons if you please, and whoever else occupied an oasis, made that habitat his capital: whoever commanded a chain of oases towns across the desert vastness honoured himself as King of kings without a kingdom.
In that Sassanid world of Eran, modern historians have transplanted an Achaemenid Avestan (Old Persian) word to suggest that Eran, modern Iran, is rooted in Aryan, drawing inspiration from the word airya, that finds mention in the Avesta, the Zoroastrian scriptural text. And that is where the misreporting begins. For, history, after all, is mostly liberal guesswork garnished with archaeological evidences, often misinterpreted.
Iran, for the record, was ruled by only two Persian dynasties, totalling 647 years, with a break of 550 years between them, in its 2500 years of documented history. The Avesta is the scriptural text of the Zarathustri (Zoroastrian) faith to which these two dynasties belonged. The Avesta’s oldest rendition has come down to us in the Gujarati script in which it was written following the flight of the Parsis to India, in the wake of the Islamic conquest. The Avesta, our historians tell us, uses the words airya and airyanəm that provide the basis of the country that the US is now busy bombing. Scholars translate these two words to “Aryan, and of the Aryans,” respectively. Much, actually, is lost in translation.
Academics say that Darius I (522-586 BCE), known in Avestan as Darayavaus, called himself ‘ariya,’ an ‘Aryan,’ an ethnic term, not the name of a country. Five-hundred and fifty years later, ariya and aryan evolved into Eran. Modern Iranians largely accept this prognosis based on what they have been taught by western articulation of their long-lost and eventful history, though descendants from old Persian clans, still preserving their ancient bloodlines, prefer to identify themselves either as Parsi, or Zarathustri, after their ancient homeland of Pars, and the Avesta doctrine of Zarathushtra, into which they were born.
The Aryan origin story is lazy scholarship, born of a misplaced notion of race by western academics. Let me tell you how.
To start with, the Achaemenid never called themselves so. Neither did the Sassanid identify themselves as one. These dynasties were created by western scholars depending on how they wished to conveniently locate the ancient Persian rulers. Greek chronicler Herodotus first referred to the royal line of Daravayus (Darius I) as Achaemenidai, descendants of the mythical Persian king Achaemenes, Persian: Haxamanis (haxa: companion and manis: mind, therefore, mind’s companion, perhaps, memory, akin to, perhaps, Vedik Manusmiriti, the progenitor of all mankind). Modern historians adopted the Greek reading and created the term Achaemenid Empire. Likewise, these very same scholars created the Sassanid empire after Sasan, the so-called mythical ancestor of Shahpur I, Middle Persian Šābuhr (240-270 CE), who carved his genealogy in trilingual (middle Persian, Parthian and Greek) inscription at the Ka’ba-ye Zartosht thus:
‘Šābuhr, šāhān šāh Ērān ud Anērān, pus ī Ardaxšīr šāhān šāh, nāf ī Pābag šāh, az nāf Sāsān’
Our scholars translate this as: “(I am the Mazda-worshipping lord) Shapur, King of Kings of Ērān and Anērān, son of Ardashir, grandson of Pāpak, descended from Sasan.” They claim this to be the starting point of their Iran scholarship, where Ērān, that is Iran, clearly points to “the realm of the Aryans,” and Anērān, that is non-Aryan, hence, “the outside world,” distant and distinct from the Avestan airyanem vaejah, the mystic homeland of the Aryans. This, in turn, they also insist, makes the Sasanian Ērānšahr an imperial state.
This is distorted reading of history.
First, the ariya of Darayavaus were not a race. The Avesta holds that the ariya are noble people of good conduct, exactly as their Vedik counterpart, the arya of the Indian civilizational narrative. Unlike the Persians, the Indian civilizational records come down to us almost intact, and in a continuous chain, over the past 5,000 years, with the earliest textual reference to the word arya-ariya. Airyanem vaejah, then, is only an old Persian rendition of Aryavarta of the Vedik people to whom the ancient Persians were spiritually, culturally, and civilisationally tied by a common umbilical cord and origin story. Arya is a social and moral construct undefined by national or racial boundaries.
By the same Vedik-Avestan equivalence, Sasan of the Sassanid cannot be a mythical dynast, that westerners would like us to believe. The word is an exact rendering of the Vedik Sanskrit sashan, meaning rule.
In referring to Sasan as progenitor of the Sassanid dynasty, modern European chroniclers merely translated Islamic records without grasping its true meaning. Following the Islamic conquest of Persia, Arab chronicler al Tabari, informed of Shapur’s inscription, speculated in his Tarikh al-Rasul wa ul-Muluk, or History of the Prophets and Kings, that the Sassanid lineage, originated from Sasan, of whom, the Sassanids themselves seemed to be unaware of. For all one knows, Shapur may have simply mentioned in his inscription … Shapur, son of Ardashir, in the line of rule of Papak. The crucial point of departure in the rendering is the Persian word nāf in the inscription above, meaning centre or navel, that our scholars mistranslated from 'nasl' or lineage of the later Arabicised Iranian. It is the same misreading that led to ‘Saman Khuda’ as the progenitor of the Central Asian Samanid, when the term merely meant ‘God of the shraman’ that is Buddha.
Scholars mislead themselves to the faulty premise, when they build a case for Iran, suggesting that the so-called Aryan race is rooted in the race of arya-ariya. As the late Indologist Charles Allen wrote in his last work, Aryans, that race in only a modern mid-nineteenth century CE fanciful construct of French aristocrat Joseph-Arthur Comte de Gobineau who brought race theory into our understanding of nations. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzshe picked up and advanced Gobineau’s misinterpretation with disastrous consequences, firing the Nazi zeal for racial genocide against the Jewish people. That mindset also inspires and indoctrinates the white supremacist cults in the Wild West today, among them, Aryan Brotherhood, White Aryan Resistance, Canadian Aryan Guard and other ultra-nationalist movements, in their quest of an origin story.
For the record, the ‘Achaemenids’ of Persia called their land Parsa. There was no Eran then, neither was Eranshahr a notion of archaic nationhood.
Vedik and Classical Indian sources (1500–500 BCE) that preceded the Achaemenid Persian Avesta called the land and its people, Pārśava or Pārśu. These texts have also preserved much of the knowledge resources on the Pārśava-Parsa-Persian trope that we shall deal with shortly.
The Greeks who first conquered the Achaemenid realm called it Persis, the Parthians who followed the Greeks left no record, and the Romans, inheriting the Greek civilization, modified the name to Persia in Latin, as did the Byzantine eastern Romans of the common era, centered in modern Turkey, and the Orthodox Russians. The Sassanids, who reclaimed their land from the Parthians, called it Eran and their realm Eran Sahr, but they did not dispense with Parsa as a civilizational signpost. Even the early Arabs, who conquered Sassanid Persia between 632 CE and 642 CE, and from who the westerners acquired much of their understanding of Iran, variously called the territory and its people al-ʿAjam (non-Arabs), Furs and Fārs. The Turks called it Acem, the Chinese, Bosi.
In this Islamic universe, Ferdowsi, a native of Tus at the crossroads Sogdian, Iranian, Indian, Turkic, and Islamic influences in Khorsan, now in northeastern Iran, and a man of questionable ethnicity, probably Turkish, introduced Iran-zamin as the land of the ancient pre-Islamic Persians, in his make-belief mythological history Shahnameh, in 1010 CE, a good four hundred years after the Arab conquest.
Marco Polo, the Venetian who crossed the area enroute to Kublai Khan’s court in China, used the French term Persie, derived from Latin Persia. His contemporary Ilkhantae historian Rashid al din (1247-1318 CE) drew a line between Fars and Iran, the former the Achaemenid-Sassanid core, and the latter, the wider-wilder Ilkhanate realm, creating two clear civilizational constructs of a territory viewed from binary perspectives.
Ever since, that name has come to stay: Iran as a continuous reference point for Persia.
Where, then, did Eran really come from to shape our understanding of modern Iran?
You can locate that ‘well-guarded’ secret space in The Ramayan.
Valmiki’s mid-first millennium BCE epic, approximating the Achaemenid reign, is a repository of ancient Iranian contexts, like few other contemporary narratives on what has come down to us as Avestan-Persian records. It provides a mythological spin on several frontier races of its time, among them the Kamboj, Pahlav, Yavan, Saka, Mlechh, Harit and Kirat. Valmiki also vested distinct Persian names to the Rakshas horde commanded by Ravan, the anti-hero of his epic. Two such were Mahodara, the Great Dara, and Mahaparsva, the Geat Persian, among Ravan’s most formidable generals. Further, Valmiki documented several cultural signposts in the Rakshas universe that we have come to identify with the Persians. They lived in large opulent palaces adorned with ‘a thousand pillars’ that remind us of the hazar-suttan of later Persian architecture, made ornate with gold and precious gems, carved vines, and exquisite carpets; they enjoyed lavish feasts, including exotic varieties of meats, identified with the Persianate culture. Interestingly, while the rakshas lived in equatorial Lanka, they rode camels, horses and asses, all endemic to the dry and barren wastelands of western Asia.
Along the way, Ram’s epochal journey in Valmiki’s Ramayan also leads us into a long discourse on kingship, when the prince of Ayodhya Bharat comes to meet his elder brother and would-be king Ram, in exile, at the edge of the forest heading down south into the Deccan.
There, Ram informs Bharat that the King’s best bastions (Sanskrit: durg/a, Persian: duzga) are secured in five types of remote and formidable (Sanskrit: durgam, Avestan: dusgam) places: apdurg (water fortified), giridurg (mountain fortified), vrksadurg (forest fortified), ksutadurg (desert fortified) and, significantly, irindurg (fortified wasteland).
Irin (इरिण) or Irina in Sanskrit is Airyana in Avestan, the first meaning desolate wilderness, and the other, vast expanse (of desolate landscape) that Iran once was and still is. This is shared Indo-Iranian inheritance where both languages preserve the ideas of landscapes and heirlooms with minor phonetic divergence, as is also the case with Avestan ap for water, gar for mountain, vareza for forest (also, van/vana), and xsaota for desert.
Irin, Airyan, Eran, Iran, as the records tell us, was that vast fortified wasteland (irindurg) of the Parsva-Parsa-Persian kings where the Achaemenid and Sassanid dynasties secured their empires. Just as Ravan's Lanka of the Rakshas was fortified by the sea (apdurg).
As the map in this post reveals, Iran is that desolate expanse, dotted with oases towns, that the Sassanid called Eransahr, their dominion, ruled mostly through history by non-Persian races, among them the Greek-Seleucid and the Parthian in antiquity, and starting with the consolidation of Islamic colonization since 651 CE, by various bandit hordes, among them the Rashidun, Umayyad and Abbasid Arabs, followed by several Central Asian clans, among them, Tahirid, Saffarid, Samanid, Buyid, Zand and Pahlavi; and Turkic warmongers, including the Ghaznavid, Seljuk, Afsharid, and Qajar, interrupted by Mongol and Turco-Mongol armies of the Ilkhanate and Timurid sultans. Each one of these invaders, since the dawn of human memory, has left behind their cultural imprint on a vast desert wasteland we still call Iran, where they rode from oasis to oasis to occupy territory, that western scholars mistakenly imagine to be the ancestral homeland of their make-belief Aryan race.
One month into American bombings, Iran is at that forever twilight moment in the immensity of time through which its rulers have carved their remarkable journeys in the ‘wasteland’ of civilizations from one oasis to another.
It cannot get any worse from here, even if its worst is yet to come.
Iran must be destroyed to reclaim Persia.
….
THE WASTE LAND
~TS Elliot (1922)
Part V: What the Thunder Said
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain
There is not even solitude in the mountains
But red sullen faces sneer and snarl
From doors of mudcracked houses
If there were water
And no rock
If there were rock
And also water
And water
A spring
A pool among the rock
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass singing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water
Who is the third who walks always beside you?
When I count, there are only you and I together
But when I look ahead up the white road
There is always another one walking beside you
Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded
I do not know whether a man or a woman
—But who is that on the other side of you?
What is that sound high in the air
Murmur of maternal lamentation
Who are those hooded hordes swarming
Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth
Ringed by the flat horizon only
What is the city over the mountains
Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air
Falling towers
Jerusalem Athens Alexandria
Vienna London
Unreal
A woman drew her long black hair out tight
And fiddled whisper music on those strings
And bats with baby faces in the violet light
Whistled, and beat their wings
And crawled head downward down a blackened wall
And upside down in air were towers
Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours
And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells
In this decayed hole among the mountains
In the faint moonlight, the grass is singing
Over the tumbled graves, about the chapel
There is the empty chapel, only the wind’s home
It has no windows, and the door swings
Dry bones can harm no one
Only a cock stood on the rooftree
Co co rico co co rico
In a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain
Ganga was sunken, and the limp leaves
Waited for rain, while the black clouds
Gathered far distant, over Himavant.
The jungle crouched, humped in silence.
Then spoke the thunder
DA
Datta: what have we given?
My friend, blood shaking my heart
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender
Which an age of prudence can never retract
By this, and this only, we have existed
DA
Dayadhvam: I have heard the key
Turn in the door once and turn once only
We think of the key, each in his prison
Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison
Only at nightfall, aetherial rumours
Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus
DA
Damyata: The boat responded
Gaily, to the hand expert with sail and oar
The sea was calm, your heart would have responded
Gaily, when invited, beating obedient
To controlling hands
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih
(c) Shubhrangshu Roy
1 April, 2026
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