Iran

Iran is a high plateau ringed by mountains, between the Caspian Sea and the Gulf. The Alborz walls off the Caspian shore, a damp green strip of rice fields and tea gardens, with the dormant volcano Damavand above it, and the Zagros runs down the whole west. Inside the ring lie two great deserts, the salt-crusted Dasht-e Kavir and the Dasht-e Lut, where satellites have measured some of the hottest ground on earth. Towns grew wherever qanats, hand-dug tunnels, could bring mountain water down.

The Achaemenid Empire of Cyrus and Darius, ruled from Persepolis in the sixth century BC, stretched from the Aegean to the Indus. Parthians and Sasanians followed until the Arab conquest of the seventh century, but Persian survived as the language of poetry and government across much of Asia. The Safavids made Shi’a Islam the state religion in 1501 and filled Isfahan with tiled domes. A constitutional revolution in 1906 created a parliament, the Pahlavi dynasty ruled from 1925, and the revolution of 1979 founded the Islamic Republic.

Lines of Hafez and Saadi are quoted in ordinary conversation, and families open a volume of Hafez for guidance. Nowruz, the new year at the spring equinox, is the great festival, and carpets from Tabriz, Kashan and Kerman are woven to patterns centuries old. The economy rests on oil and gas, most of it under Khuzestan and the waters of the Gulf, along with petrochemicals, steel, cars, pistachios and saffron.