Iran

Long before “Iran” appeared on modern maps, speakers of Iranian languages were calling themselves something like *arya—possibly “compatriot,” a word that began as an in-group badge rather than a racial theory. Its Middle Persian descendant, Ērān, literally meant “of the Iranians,” and eventually supplied the country’s name. English orientalists such as Alexander Dow and William Jones began using Iran in the 1760s, but usually treated it as an ancient or scholarly name for Persia. Then, in 1935, Reza Shah Pahlavi asked foreign governments to use Iran in official diplomacy, restoring the indigenous name over the Greek-derived Persia. The same ancient self-designation later traveled into the modern word Aryan, whose nineteenth-century scholarly sense was dramatically distorted by racial ideologues—an extraordinary reminder that a word meaning “our compatriots” can acquire a very different passport.