Iran

The one Middle Eastern state that was never a European colony or mandate, with a continuous imperial and literary tradition of two and a half thousand years. Cyrus founded an Achaemenid empire that stretched from Egypt to India and issued a decree on the treatment of subject peoples sometimes read as an early charter of rights. Parthians and Sasanians fought Rome for centuries. Arab conquest in the seventh century brought Islam but not Arabic - Persian survived and revived, and Ferdowsi's Shahnameh deliberately preserved it. The Safavids made the country Shia in the sixteenth century, which is the root of its distinct position in the region. Britain and Russia carved out spheres of influence, and in 1953 an Anglo-American coup removed the elected prime minister Mossadegh after he nationalised the oil industry, restoring the Shah, whose rule ended in the revolution of 1979. The Islamic Republic that followed combines elected institutions with clerical supervision. War with Iraq from 1980 to 1988 killed hundreds of thousands. Sanctions over the nuclear programme have shaped the economy for two decades. Persian carpets, poetry and gardens are its cultural signature. Tehran is the capital. The country has about ninety million people and is the seventeenth largest by area. Persian is official, with Azeri, Kurdish, Arabic and Balochi widely spoken. Twenty-eight of its sites are World Heritage listed, among the most in Asia. The qanat underground water channels have irrigated the plateau for nearly three thousand years. Nowruz, the new year at the spring equinox, is celebrated across a wide region.

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