Iran

From Cyrus the Great's first world empire to the Islamic Republic.

Iran is heir to one of the world's oldest civilisations. On the south-western plateau the kingdom of Elam flourished from the early third millennium BCE, but it was Cyrus the Great's founding of the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire around 550 BCE that created history's first true world empire, stretching from the Aegean to the Indus. Persia outlasted conquest by Alexander, was reborn under the Parthians and Sasanians, and after the Arab conquest of the seventh century became a heartland of the Islamic golden age. The Safavids made Iran a Twelver Shia state in 1501; the Qajar and Pahlavi shahs wrestled with modernity and foreign power; and in 1979 a revolution swept away the monarchy and established the Islamic Republic of Iran under Ayatollah Khomeini.