Prehistory
According to Bridgat, Iran has traces of human occupation since the Stone Age. During the Neolithic, a process of sedentarization, stable food production and the establishment of short-distance exchange routes developed.
The Copper Age, characterized by the appearance of copper and painted ceramic elements in Susiana (Southwest Iran) and Sialk (central-west), extends in Iran throughout the 4th millennium BC. Urban settlements begin to emerge, in a regional process that takes place between Anatolia, Mesopotamia, the Archaeological Complex of Bactria-Margiana and the Indus Valley Culture.
Antiquity
At the beginning of the 3rd century BC, a form of writing appears in Susa, possibly derived from the Sumerian system to represent the Elamite language. From 2000 BC the Medes and Persians, Aryan or Indo-European peoples, began to move from the plains of southern Russia and Central Asia to Europe and Asia.
The Median rule, however, was brief, thanks to the work undertaken by a Persian nobleman of the Achaemenid family, Cyrus (555-529 BC), king of Anshan, who unified the Persians, subdued the Medes, and conquered Babylon. Syria, the Mediterranean Levant and Asia Minor. His work of conquest was continued by his son and successor, Cambyses (530-522), who annexed Egypt and marked the maximum extension of the Achaemenid Empire, configuring the largest empire hitherto known in the Near East.
The splendor of the Persian Empire is marked by the figure of Darius I (522-486). He devoted himself primarily to organizing the vast inherited empire through satrapies. He drew up a network of roads that were intended to link the various parts of the empire, the most famous of which is the Royal Road from Susa to Sardis, and also palaces and monuments in the capitals: Susa and Persepolis. He made Mazdeism an official religion. With him also began the decline of the Achaemenid Empire, by undertaking a fight against the Greeks that would become known as the medical wars and continued by his successors: Xerxes, Artaxerxes, Darius II, Artaxerxes II and Darius III. The continuous defeats of the Persians culminated in the invasion (in 334 BC and the end of the empire itself by Alexander the Great (336 BC). At his death, the successors or Diádocos divided their territories, and passed to Seleuco I Nicátor (300 BC).
Middle Ages
When the Arab conquest took place, after 641, the country was Islamized, but it maintained, like almost no province in the Arab empire, its marked individuality, both in its language and in the peculiar orientation of the arts and letters. When the crisis of the Baghdad caliphate struck, Persia gained virtual independence under the descendants of Tahir, the last Arab viceroy, and then under the Seleucid Persian or Turkish dynasties. Despite the political upheaval, the cultural and scientific life of the period was remarkably rich, of which the poet, mathematician, philosopher and astronomer Ummar al-Khayyam is an exponent.
Modern age
In 1258 a new era opens with the Mongol invasion of Kublai Khan. After three centuries of Mongol domination, the dynastic struggles between the descendants of Timur Lenk (Tamerlane) and the Ottomans ended up making room for the Persian Ismail Sha. His grandson Abbas I (1557 – 1629) managed to unify the country, expel the Turks from the western area and the Portuguese who had occupied the Hormuz region, as well as conquer part of Afghanistan. For a short period, Iran was the hegemonic power, from India to Syria. But then he had to face the ambitions of the Russians who were advancing in Central Asia and the English, who were approaching from the Gulf and Afghanistan.
The king’s weakness in the face of the growing foreign presence gave rise to a strong nationalist movement, influenced by the ideas of Syrian pan-Islamic intellectuals.
Recent history
In 2002, the president of the United States George W. Bush included Iran in the so-called axis of evil, alluding to it being a state that supports terrorism. Iran is also accused of trying to develop an atomic weapon.
Iran accuses the United States of waging “psychological warfare” by spreading false news about Tehran’s plans to make atomic bombs. According to the Iranian Foreign Ministry, Tehran will continue its peaceful nuclear activities without being influenced by the statements of the head of the CIA, Leon Panetta, who said that the Persian nation could build two atomic bombs within two years, justifying a foreseeable attack by United States against Iran.
The US, the largest driver of sanctions on Iran and North Korea for their nuclear programs, has more than 6,000 tactical nuclear warheads, and invests $ 40 billion a year in its nuclear arsenal and in developing new ones. destruction systems, which go to the coffers of the multinationals of war nucleated in the North American Military Industrial Complex.
Except for Russia, the US mathematically surpasses all the capitalist powers on the planet by 9 to 1 in nuclear power and its capacity to deploy troops and conventional weapons is close to the same percentages.
The Islamic Republic was subjected to the fourth round of sanctions by the United Nations Security Council as a result of the development of its nuclear plans, to which the United States and the European powers attribute military objectives.