As strikes by the United States and Israel trigger Iranian retaliation, the ancient polity once known as Persia returns to centre stage, inviting a historical reckoning with a name that transcends centuries of empire, identity and global geopolitics.

Yet, internally and historically, the land called Iran has rarely bequeathed that foreign epithet by its own people.

Instead, the modern appellation reflects an odyssey of identity as enduring as the Zagros Mountains and as intimate as the syllables of its own tongue.

The ethnonym Persia traces to ancient Greek -- Persís -- itself derived from Parsa, a region in the southwest that was the cradle of the Achaemenid Empire.

To classical ears, it stood for a vast dominion stretching from the Indus to the Aegean; to modern historians, it was an exonym, a name applied by outsiders that eventually became shorthand for the entire civilisation.

Meanwhile, long before the word “Persia” was cast across western tongues, the inhabitants of the Iranian plateau called their land "Iran" or variations such as Eran -- terms rooted etymologically in the ancient Indo-Iranian Arya, meaning “noble” or “Aryan,” and signifying “land of the Aryans”.

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This picture taken on July 4, 2023 shows a general view of the Zoroastrian site of the Yazd Tower of Silence (Dakhmeh-ye Zartoshtiyun), about 15 kilometres southeast of Yazd in central Iran. Photo: AFP/Atta Kenare

Under successive indigenous dynasties from the Sassanians to the Safavids, variations of this name endured in courtly titles and imperial inscriptions.

Yet the world outside continued to speak of Persia, because Rome and later Christian Europe did not hear the inner cadence of local languages, and because the geopolitical maps of Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe were drafted in the language of classical education.

Centuries of foreign chronicles, travelogues and diplomatic correspondence entrenched Persia in international parlance even as native tongues described the land as Iran.

The decisive turn arrived in the 20th century, amid the winds of nationalism and modern statecraft.

In 1935, under the rule of Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Iranian government formally asked the world to cease using Persia in diplomatic dealings and instead employ Iran, the name its people had long used for themselves. The request went to all foreign embassies and heralded a recalibration of external identity to match internal self‑designation.

This was not merely cosmetic. It was a declaration of sovereignty. Iran resonated with a deeper provenance -- a lineage not confined to a single province, but a broader cultural and linguistic civilisation stretching over millennia. It anchored the modern nation in an indigenous matrix of continuity rather than an externally imposed moniker.

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Even after 1935, the term Persia did not vanish from the world’s lexicon. To this day, it lingers in cultural contexts and in the romance of history.

But the political and legal identity of the country remained, and remains, Iran.

The Pahlavi dynasty later opened the door to using either name interchangeably, but in formal statehood it is Iran that endures.

It is paradoxical that at a moment when drones and missiles crisscross the skies over Tehran, as United States and Israeli forces launch coordinated strikes dubbed "Operation Epic Fury" and Tehran fires back in a crescendo of missiles and drones, the world speaks once more of the land that was Persia.

The echoes of that venerable name resonate with astonishment and curiosity, even as historians remind that Iran was never a sudden reinvention but a reaffirmation of an identity long spoken within its own hearth.

The urgency of current events -- attacks that have shaken capitals, drawn condemnations and sparked fears of wider conflagration -- brings into sharp relief the intricate layers of history that inform modern geopolitics.

The name matters, because it carries the weight of experiences that span empires, revolutions and nation‑building.

Iran today is more than its immediate headlines; it is a living continent of cultural memory, linguistic tradition and sovereign will, even as it reacts to the shockwaves of war in 2026.

In the end, what changed in 1935 was less the essence of a land and more the world’s perception of it.

Persia gave way to Iran in international diplomacy, but the deeper narrative is not one of rupture -- it is one of continuity, an affirmation that the name a people choose for themselves carries the force of history far more enduring than the transient titles assigned by others.