About Iran
PERSIA(IRAN)
AN ANCIENT LAND
To many Westerns the word Persia is at once evocative of the image of a land of far away and long ago, of ancient monuments and beautiful works of art – carpets, tiles, fine ceramics, miniatures and metal work. It also evokes a present reality in the heart of Asia, a land of joining both geographically and spiritually the Mediterranean world with the Indian subcontinent. And Persia is indeed such a reality, a world ancient and contemporary, linking the heartland of Asia and the cradle of Western civilization, a bridge between East and west. Moreover, through the heart of its traditional culture, it has always been a bridge between heaven and earth, reflecting the color of its luminous skies and of its most famous stone, the turquoise, the stone for which Persia has been known perennially throughout the world.
The country is bound on the north and south by two bodies of water, the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. It is bordered on the east by Afghanistan and Pakistan, on the west by Turkey and Iraq and on the northeast and northwest by the five newly independent republics of Central Asia.
Persia is marked by remarkable natural contrasts. The traveler will experience with in distances of a few miles major changes of season – snow on one side of a mountain range and sweltering heat on the other. There is also a great difference in vegetation and landscape between the fertile littoral provinces along the Caspian Sea and the dry lands of the Central Desert.
Persia is richly blessed in natural resources – the land is agriculturally rich although water is spares except in few provinces. The stretches of sand and stone of the Persian desert have also hidden in their depths some of the richest mineral resources of the world.
The people and races that have populated the Persian plateau and provided the human substance for its culture have been many and diversified and yet unified in a most remarkable manner. The plateau, originally peopled by races whose origin stretches into the unknown millennia of prehistory, became the home of the Aryan tribes who settled in it after several waves of invasion from about two thousand B.C. Having absorbed the earlier peoples, they made the plateau thoroughly Aryan in language and culture; hence the name Iran by which the people have called themselves since the dawn of recorded history.
The waves of invaders throughout its long history- the Greeks accompanying Alexander, the Arab armies during its Islamization, the Turkish tribes which forced their way westward from central Asia, and finally the Mongols, all left their mark upon the people of Persia but they, in turn, were assimilated into its cultural world.
The Persians see their history as a series of distinct periods separated by major events and a long continuous process. They see before them a vast prehistoric past whose epochs have been extended even further in time through archaeological excavations, a past which led finally to the foundation of the Persian Empire by Cyrus the Great at the dawn of recorded history. Then there is second period comprised of several phases identified
IRAN – An Archaeological Plum
Archaeologists have often said that wherever they go in Iran, they can put in their thumb and pull out an archaeological plum. Human settlement and civilization on the Iranian plateau go back much further than the earliest Iranian dynasty, the Achaemenian. There is evidence of human habitation in Iran from the ninth millennium B.C. and in tracing movement of the early settlers, pottery has played a basic role. There are innumerable archaeological sites in Iran covering all periods of Iran’s past from preislamic to Islamic times. Excavation of mounds or “Tappehs” carried out from the mid-19th century have opened windows on Iran’s civilization and art in all stages of its long history: Tappeh Marlik in Gilan yielding the priceless treasure, attesting to the high artistic skills of ancient craftmen; Hasanlou near Lake Orumieh where the golden bowl of about ninth century B.C. was found; the 4-5th millennium Tappeh Sialk, near Kashan where the art of Iranian pottery was born; two other important sources of Iranian pottery was prehistoric pottery are Tappeh Hesar, near Damghan and Turang Tappeh near Astar Abad; Sang-e-Chakhmagh, near Qazvin, going back to 7,500 years, thus preceding the Sialk settlement; the Median Tappeh Nush-e-Jan, near Malayer, revealing silver bars, cut silver and ring money belonging to about 760-600 B.C. , thus shattering the idea that the Aegean coins of the Greeks were the world’s first coins; Godin Tappeh, also Median; The Urartuan site of Haftavan Tappeh near Bastam, the 4th millennium B.C. town of Shahr-e-Sukhteh in Sistan, a highly productive community engaged in extensive trade with outside region: Tappeh Yahya in south of Kerman, a fourth millennium settlement whose inhabitants played a key role in the spread of civilization from west to east of which was provided by a number of clay tablets found on site; Tall-e-Malyan, near Persepolis, believed to be the lost Elamite city of Anshan, and many more are a testimony to Iran’s glorious history and rich cultural heritage. Many of these sites and more can be fitted in our various itineraries to suit individual group interests.
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