Today in Middle Eastern history: Iran becomes “Iran” (1935)

I know that title seems too cutesy and I apologize for that. It is both a historical oddity and a signifier of our general Orientalist indifference toward the peoples of the Middle East that the nation (kingdom, empire, whatever it was at any particular point in history) of Iran was never officially called “Iran” by anybody other than Iranians until 1935. Iranians, on the other hand, had been calling it “Iran” for millennia.

This is just a placeholder. If you’d like to read the rest please check out my new home, Foreign Exchanges!

Advertisement

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.