Definition
Richard Foltz notes that while "A general assumption is often made that the various Iranian peoples of 'greater Iran'—a cultural area that stretched from Mesopotamia and the Caucasus into Khwarizm, Transoxiana, Bactria, and the Pamirs and included Persians, Medes, Parthians and Sogdians among others—were all 'Zoroastrians' in pre-Islamic times... This view, even though common among serious scholars, is almost certainly overstated." Foltz argues that "While the various Iranian peoples did indeed share a common pantheon and pool of religious myths and symbols, in actuality a variety of deities were worshipped—particularly Mitra, the god of covenants, and Anahita, the goddess of the waters, but also many others—depending on the time, place, and particular group concerned.". To the Ancient Greeks, Greater Iran ended at the Indus.
Richard Nelson Frye defines Greater Iran as including "much of the Caucasus, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, with cultural influences extending to China and western India." According to Frye, "Iran means all lands and peoples where Iranian languages were and are spoken, and where in the past, multi-faceted Iranian cultures existed."
According to J. P. Mallory and Douglas Q. Adams most of Western greater Iran spoke SW Iranian languages in the Achaemenid era while the Eastern territory spoke Eastern Iranian languages related to Avestan.
George Lane also states that after the dissolution of the Mongol empire, the Ilkhanids became rulers of greater Iran and Uljaytu, according to Judith G. Kolbas, was the ruler of this expanse between 1304-1317 A.D.
Primary sources, including Timurid historian Mir Khwand, define Iranshahr (Greater Iran) as extending from the Euphrates to the Oxus
Traditionally, and until recent times, ethnicity has never been a defining separating criterion in these regions. In the words of Richard Nelson Frye:
| “ | Many times I have emphasized that the present peoples of Central Asia, whether Iranian or Turkic speaking, have one culture, one religion, one set of social values and traditions with only language separating them. | ” |
Only in modern times did western colonial intervention and ethnicity tend to become a dividing force between the provinces of Greater Iran. As Patrick Clawson states, "ethnic nationalism is largely a nineteenth century phenomenon, even if it is fashionable to retroactively extend it." "Greater Iran" however has been more of a cultural super-state, rather than a political one to begin with.
In the work Nuzhat al-Qolub (نزهه القلوب), the medieval geographer Hamdollah Mostowfi wrote:
چند شهر است اندر ایران مرتفع تر از همه
Some cities of Iran are better than the rest,
بهتر و سازنده تر از خوشی آب و هوا
these have pleasant and compromising weather,
گنجه پر گنج در اران صفاهان در عراق
The wealthy Ganjeh of Arran, and Esfahān in Iraq,
در خراسان مرو و طوس در روم باشد اقسرا
Merv and Tus in Khorasan, and Konya (Aqsara) too.
The Cambridge History of Iran takes a geographical approach in referring to the "historical and cultural" entity of "Greater Iran" as "areas of Iran, parts of Afghanistan, and Chinese and Soviet Central Asia". A detailed list of these territories follows in this article.
Read more about this topic: Greater Iran
Famous quotes containing the word definition:
“Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords, even in
principle, no unique definition of truth. Any so-called pragmatic
definition of truth is doomed to failure equally.”
—Willard Van Orman Quine (b. 1908)
“Mothers often are too easily intimidated by their children’s negative reactions...When the child cries or is unhappy, the mother reads this as meaning that she is a failure. This is why it is so important for a mother to know...that the process of growing up involves by definition things that her child is not going to like. Her job is not to create a bed of roses, but to help him learn how to pick his way through the thorns.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)