CONCEPT OF “PERSİA” İN ANCİENT AND MEDİEVAL TİMES

Abstract

After all this, we come to the conclusion that the name Persia was used in ancient sources during the reign of the Achaemenids and Sassanids. The reason was that these dynasties was from the province of Persia (Fars) in the present-day Republic of Iran. In this case, the expression "Persians" used in the sources did not have a purely Persian/farsi meaning. All the peoples of these two empires are named after their masters as subjects of the empire. Since the Sassanid period, we see that the name Persia has changed from a political to a geographical meaning, and in almost all medieval Western sources, most of the territories covered by the former Achaemenid and Sassanid empires were referred to by the term Persian geographically. The peoples of Persia were called Persians. However, we would like to note here that the Persian name used for the population in these sources does not have an ethnic meaning, the translation of the Persian word as farsi is incorrect. The Persian territory we encounter in European sources is a multi-ethnic area, and all of these nations are mentioned in these sources as Persian because they live in the same territory. We should not be surprised to see in these sources that the territories of Azerbaijan were given within Persia, and we should not think that Azerbaijan was under occupation at that time. We see that the Medes, the Achaemenids, the Parthians, the Sassanids, and the subsequent empires established in these territories covered approximately the same territories, and that the peoples of these empires had the same rights and created a common culture. In view of all this, we should not understand the Persian culture in Western historiography as farsi culture. This is a culture created by different peoples in a large geography, so we cannot say that any nation that existed in these empires is under the occupation and enslavement of another (except for certain short periods). Also, when we look at the sources, we see that Persia and Iran cover different geographical areas, and the concept of Iranian territory is smaller than that of Persia. Therefore, considering that it is not correct to translate Persia as Iran, we are in favor of keeping this name in our language as Persia. Finally, we would like to note that during the Sassanid period, Iran meant more territories inhabited by Aryans or Zoroastrians, but after the collapse of this empire, this essence disappeared, because many Arabs, Turks and others settled in these territories. Although Iran remained a geographical name, it was no longer inhabited by Aryans or Zoroastrians.