MAPS OF HISTORY · HISTORY OF · Iran

ONE LAND · 7 ATLASES

Iran, on the map of history

What was Iran before it was Iran? Below, every era of this land in the Maps of History collection — who ruled it, what it was called, and when control changed — each line linked to the dated map that shows it. Modern borders stand in as an honest approximation; every atlas says so on the map itself.

Parthia/Persia (mod. Iran) · The Rise and Fall of Rome, 264 BC – AD 476

Parthia, then Sasanid Persia — the rival Rome could never remove. Parthia annihilated Crassus at Carrhae (53 BC) and swallowed Trajan’s conquests within a year of his death; the Sasanids from 224 were worse: a peer state that sacked Antioch and captured the emperor Valerian alive (Ch. 8). Seven centuries of Roman-Persian war ended only when the Arab conquests took both contestants’ richest lands.

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Persia (Khwarazm, then Ilkhanate) · The Mongol Empire, 1206–1294

Persia under the Khwarazm-shahs was annihilated 1219–21 — Khorasan’s golden cities became the war’s deliberate message — then rebuilt as the Ilkhanate after Hülegü (1256), with Tabriz as capital and Maragha’s observatory nearby. The dynasty that burned Baghdad converted to Islam within two generations and presided over a Persian literary and historiographical golden age. Both halves of that sentence are true; hold them together.

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Iran · The Age of Revolutions, 1775–1848

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Persia · The Russian Revolution, 1905–1924

Persia was a theatre of the “Great Game” turned civil-war sideshow: British and Soviet forces both operated on its soil, and a short-lived Soviet republic rose in Gilan on the Caspian. A weak state whose north Moscow treated as a sphere of influence.

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Persia · The Great War, 1914–1918

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Iran · The War Room — WW2, 1936–1945

Jointly occupied by Britain and the USSR in August 1941 to secure the “Persian Corridor” — the truck route delivering 8 million tons of Lend-Lease aid to the USSR. Small nations’ sovereignty routinely yielded to great-power logistics; Iran remembers.

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Iran · The Cold War, 1945–1991

The Cold War’s northern-tier prize: jointly occupied in the war, its elected premier deposed by a CIA–MI6 coup in 1953 for nationalizing oil, its Shah armed as the Gulf’s policeman — until 1979, when revolution removed it from both columns at once (Ch. 10). The era’s interventions are the first chapter of every explanation of Iran since.

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