Tehran wakes under a hard blue morning, and the map of Iran stretches away from it to the Caspian Sea in the north, the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman in the south, Iraq and Turkey to the west, and Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east. This is a country of 31 provinces, over 92 million people, and a place where mountains, deserts, and old trade routes have always shaped the way power moves.

Its story begins far earlier than any modern border. Around 800,000 years ago hominins were already present here, and by 4400 to 4200 BC Susa had been settled near modern Shush. Agriculture appeared about 12,000 years ago, with early domestication at Chogha Golan and goats at Ganj Dareh. From the 7th century BC the Medes first unified the land, and in the 6th century BC Cyrus the Great founded the Achaemenid Empire, with Susa and Persepolis at its heart.

Darius the Great built roads and raised Persepolis, while Xerxes I fought the Greeks and Alexander the Great shattered the empire between 334 and 331 BC. Later came the Parthians, who freed Iran from Seleucid rule, and then Ardashir I, who killed Artabanus IV in 224 AD and founded the Sasanian Empire. That Sasanian world, with its bureaucracy and Zoroastrian revival, was a golden age before the Islamic conquest between 632 and 654 changed the faith and language of the country.

Iran did not simply vanish into conquest. During the Abbasid era, Persian dynasties such as the Tahirids, Saffarids, Samanids, and Buyids revived Iranian power and helped restore the Persian language. The Mongols arrived in the early 13th century, razed cities like Nishapur, and later Ghazan Khan converted to Islam. Timur then invaded in 1381, and in 1387 ordered the massacre of Isfahan, killing 70,000 people. Out of that upheaval, the Safavids reunited Iran in the 16th century and made Twelver Shia Islam the state religion.

The modern state was forged through loss and revolution. The Qajars took power in the 1790s, then Iran lost Caucasian territory to Russia in the 19th century. The Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1905 to 1911 brought a parliament, and Reza Shah replaced the Qajars in 1925, centralising the country until the Anglo-Soviet invasion of 1941 forced his abdication. His son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, ruled through the 1953 coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh, after Mosaddegh tried to nationalise oil.

By 1978, the Shah faced mass protests and Black Friday. In 1979, Ruhollah Khomeini returned, the monarchy fell, and a referendum on 31 March created the Islamic Republic. The embassy seizure on 4 November 1979 held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. Then Saddam Hussein invaded on 22 September 1980, beginning the eight-year Iran-Iraq War, which ended in stalemate in 1988 and cost about 500,000 lives.