In 1935, Rezā Shāh ordered foreign chancelleries to no longer call his country Persia. As of then it was to be Irān, a name that was not used at all in the West except by geographers to denote the high plateau between the Zagros and the Alborz. For Iranians, the name of their country had always been Irān, a name that originally meant “land of the Aryans.” The change in name perfectly symbolized their declared willingness to present themselves in a new way to the world. Westerners knew the country by a term that was used in antiquity, associated in the collective imagination with carpets, poetry, literature, architecture, and exotism