A dynastic record of the successive empires that ruled the Iranian plateau — from Cyrus the Great to the eve of the modern age. Select a dynasty to trace its kings and their lineage.
From Cyrus the Great’s unification of the Persians and Medes to the Arab conquest that ended Sasanian rule, this is the age of the shahanshah — nearly twelve centuries in which native Iranian and foreign dynasties alike claimed the title King of Kings.
Founded by Cyrus the Great and expanded by Darius I and Xerxes, the Achaemenids ruled the largest empire the ancient world had yet seen, from the Aegean to the Indus.
Enter the Dynasty →Carved from Alexander’s conquests by his general Seleucus Nicator, the Seleucids ruled Persia, Mesopotamia and Syria as a Greco-Iranian successor kingdom for over two centuries.
Enter the Dynasty →A feudal confederation of noble houses under the Arsacid kings, Parthia held the eastern frontier of Rome for nearly five centuries.
Enter the Dynasty →A centralized Zoroastrian state and Rome’s great rival, the Sasanians presided over a golden age of Persian art, administration and kingship.
Enter the Dynasty →From the Arab conquest to the eve of the Safavids, Iran was ruled in turn by Arab caliphs, native Persian regional dynasties, and successive waves of Turkic and Mongol conquerors — 850 years in which the Persian language and culture endured, and often flourished, under almost continuous foreign rule.
Arab caliphs ruled Iran from the conquest onward — the Rashidun, then the Umayyads of Damascus and the Abbasids of Baghdad. The Abbasid caliphate outlasted every other dynasty in this section, surviving as a figurehead long after real power had passed to others, until the Mongols ended it in 1258.
Muhammad’s first four successors extended Arab rule from Arabia into Persia, ending four centuries of Sasanian kingship within a single generation.
Enter the Dynasty →Ruling from Damascus, the Umayyads turned the caliphate into a hereditary Arab monarchy stretching from Spain to the edge of India.
Enter the Dynasty →Brought to power by Iranian revolutionaries, the Abbasids ruled — and later merely reigned over — the Islamic world from Baghdad for five centuries, until the Mongols ended it in 1258.
Enter the Dynasty →As Abbasid power weakened, native Persian dynasties — the Samanids, Tahirids, Saffarids, Ziyarids and Buyids — took control of Iran’s provinces. They were followed by Turkic sultanates: the Ghaznavids, the Great Seljuks and the Khwarazmshahs.
Ruling from Bukhara, the Samanids revived New Persian as a literary language and patronized the poets whose work fed directly into Ferdowsi’s Shahnameh.
Enter the Dynasty →Rewarded with the governorship of Khorasan for their loyalty to the caliph, the Tahirids became the first Persianate dynasty to rule in all but name.
Enter the Dynasty →Founded by a former coppersmith turned soldier, the Saffarids carved an independent state stretching from Sistan to the gates of Baghdad.
Enter the Dynasty →A Daylamite dynasty of the Caspian coast, remembered today chiefly for Qabus ibn Wushmagir’s soaring brick tomb tower, still standing near Gorgan.
Enter the Dynasty →Three brothers of humble Daylamite origin conquered Iran and Iraq and reduced the Abbasid caliphs to powerless figureheads for over a century.
Enter the Dynasty →Founded by a former Turkic slave-soldier, the Ghaznavids raided deep into India and patronized Ferdowsi’s Persian national epic, the Shahnameh.
Enter the Dynasty →Oghuz Turkic invaders who restored Sunni authority over the caliphate and shattered Byzantine power at Manzikert, opening Anatolia to Turkic settlement.
Enter the Dynasty →Briefly the largest empire in the Islamic world, the Khwarazmshahs were annihilated within two years by Genghis Khan’s invading Mongol armies.
Enter the Dynasty →The Mongol invasions destroyed the Khwarazmian Empire and, in 1258, the Abbasid caliphate. After the Ilkhanate collapsed, Persianate, Turkmen and Teymourian successor states divided Iran among themselves until the Safavids reunited it.
Descendants of Genghis Khan who sacked Baghdad and ended the Abbasid caliphate, before converting to Islam and patronizing Persian art and historiography.
Enter the Dynasty →Rulers of Shiraz and Isfahan whose fractious, short-lived court is remembered today chiefly as the setting and subject of Hafez’s poetry.
Enter the Dynasty →A Persianized Mongol dynasty ruling Baghdad and Tabriz, celebrated for a school of manuscript painting that shaped later Timurid and Safavid art.
Enter the Dynasty →Founded by the conqueror Teymour, the dynasty’s later Herat court under Sultan Husayn Bayqara became a byword for Persian artistic and literary achievement.
Enter the Dynasty →A Turkmen confederation that seized Baghdad and Tabriz from the Jalayirids, before being destroyed by their bitter rivals, the Aq Qoyunlu.
Enter the Dynasty →Iran’s dominant power under Uzun Hasan, until succession wars let a young Safavid leader named Ismail seize Tabriz and found a new empire.
Enter the Dynasty →From the Safavid founding of a unified, explicitly Shi’a Iranian state to the Pahlavi dynasty’s fall in 1979, this is the story of Iran’s re-emergence as a coherent nation — and its collision with European empire, oil and revolution.
Ismail I united Iran under Twelver Shi’ism for the first time, founding a dynasty whose court at Isfahan became a center of Persian art and architecture.
Enter the Dynasty →Nader Shah built a vast, short-lived empire on the ruins of Safavid Iran, sacking Delhi and carrying off the Peacock Throne before his assassination plunged the dynasty into chaos.
Enter the Dynasty →Karim Khan Zand, who refused the title of Shah, gave Iran a rare interlude of stability from Shiraz before renewed civil war ended the dynasty in Lotf Ali Khan’s defeat by the Qajars.
Enter the Dynasty →Ruling from Tehran through the age of European imperial pressure and constitutional revolution, the Qajars carried Iran into the 20th century.
Enter the Dynasty →The final royal house of Iran, ending with the 1979 revolution — closing three millennia of Persian kingship.
Enter the Dynasty →