Nahavand

The Nisaean plain was a fertile plain in Media, a historic region in Iran. It was best known for being the home of the esteemed Nisaean horse. The plain may be identical with the Nisaya district mentioned in the Behistun Inscription of Darius the Great. However, Rüdiger Schmitt notes that this cannot be strictly proven. The name of the plain possibly survived into the Medieval era, as Yaqut al-Hamawi, writing in the 13th century, mentioned a town in Hamadan with the name Nisa. The city of Nahavand is located on the Nisaean plain.

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages, native to Greece, Cyprus, southern Italy, southern Albania, and other regions of the Balkans, the Black Sea coast, Asia Minor, and the Eastern Mediterranean. It has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning at least 3,400 years of written records. Its writing system is the Greek alphabet, which has been used for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary. The alphabet arose from the Phoenician script and was in turn the basis of the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, Coptic, Gothic, and many other writing systems.

Western Iran consists of Armenian Highlands, Northern Zagros and the rich agricultural area of the Khuzestan Plain in the south.

The Zagros Mountains are a long mountain range in Iran, northern Iraq, and southeastern Turkey. This mountain range has a total length of 1,600 km (990 mi). The Zagros mountain range begins in northwestern Iran and roughly follows Iran's western border while covering much of southeastern Turkey and northeastern Iraq. From this border region, the range continues to the southeast under also the waters of the Persian Gulf. It spans the southern parts of the Armenian highland, the whole length of the western and southwestern Iranian plateau, ending at the Strait of Hormuz. The highest point is Mount Dena, at 4,409 metres (14,465 ft).

Hamadan or Hamedan is the capital city of Hamadan Province of Iran. At the 2019 census, its population was 783,300 in 230,775 families. The majority of people living in Hamadan identify as ethnic Kurds and Persians.

Alvand is a subrange of the Zagros Mountains in western Iran located 10 km (6.2 mi) south of the city of Hamadan in Hamadan Province. Its summit has an elevation of 3,580 m (11,750 ft). The main body of the Alvand range extends for about 50 km from east to west, while their maximum north-south width is about 30 km. Formed as part of the Zagros orogeny in the late Jurassic and early Cretaceous, the mountains rise sharply from the surrounding plains and are scored by many deep valleys. The mountains are mostly granite and diorite, which are types of intrusive rock.

Iraq, officially the Republic of Iraq, is a country in Western Asia. It is bordered by Turkey to the north, Iran to the east, the Persian Gulf and Kuwait to the southeast, Saudi Arabia to the south, Jordan to the southwest and Syria to the west. The capital and largest city is Baghdad. Iraq is home to diverse ethnic groups including Iraqi Arabs, Kurds, Turkmens, Assyrians, Armenians, Yazidis, Mandaeans, Persians and Shabakis with similarly diverse geography and wildlife. The majority of the country's 40 million residents are Muslims – the notable other faiths are Christianity, Yazidism, Mandaeism, Yarsanism and Zoroastrianism. The official languages of Iraq are Arabic and Kurdish; others also recognised in specific regions are Suret (Assyrian), Turkish and Armenian.

Kermanshah, is the capital of Kermanshah Province, located 525 kilometres from Tehran in the western part of Iran. According to the 2016 census, its population is 946,681. A majority of the people of Kermanshah are bilingual in Southern Kurdish and Persian, and the city is the largest Kurdish-speaking city in Iran. Kermanshah has a moderate and mountainous climate. Most of the inhabitants of Kermanshah are Shia Muslims, but there are also Sunni Muslims, Christians, and followers of Yarsanism.

Isfahan, from its ancient designation Aspadana and, later, Spahan in middle Persian, rendered in English as Ispahan, is a major city in the Central District of the Isfahan Province of Iran. It is located 440 kilometres south of Tehran and is the capital of Isfahan Province. The city has a population of approximately 2,220,000, making it the third-largest city in Iran, after Tehran and Mashhad, and the second-largest metropolitan area.

Borujerd is a city and the capital of Borujerd County, Lorestan Province in western Iran. At the 2016 census, its population was 234,997 people. Among the existing modern cities in Iran, Borujerd is one of the oldest reported at least since the 9th century. In Sassanid Empire, Borujerd was a small town and region neighboring Nahavand. Gaining more attention during Great Seljuq Empire in the 9th and 10th centuries, Borujerd stood as an industrial, commercial and strategic city in Zagros Mountains until the 20th century. In its golden ages, Borujerd was selected as the state capital of Lorestan and Khuzestan region during Qajar dynasty in the 18th and 19th centuries. Due to the existence of a large number of production and industrial units and the supply of their products in the domestic and foreign markets, Borujerd is considered the industrial hub of Lorestan province.

Mount Bisotoun is a mountain of the Zagros Mountains range, located in Kermanshah Province of western Iran. It is located 525 kilometers (326 mi) west of Tehran.

The history of Iran is intertwined with the history of a larger region known as Greater Iran, comprising the area from Anatolia in the west to the Indus river and the Syr Darya in the east, and from the Caucasus and the Eurasian Steppe in the north to the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman in the south. Central to this area is Iran, commonly known until the mid-20th century as Persia in the Western world.

A humid continental climate is a climatic region defined by Russo-German climatologist Wladimir Köppen in 1900, typified by four distinct seasons and large seasonal temperature differences, with warm to hot summers and cold winters. Precipitation is usually distributed throughout the year but often does have dry seasons. The definition of this climate regarding temperature is as follows: the mean temperature of the coldest month must be below 0 °C (32.0 °F) or −3 °C (26.6 °F) depending on the isotherm, and there must be at least four months whose mean temperatures are at or above 10 °C (50 °F). In addition, the location in question must not be semi-arid or arid. The cooler Dfb, Dwb, and Dsb subtypes are also known as hemiboreal climates.

The Köppen climate classification is one of the most widely used climate classification systems. It was first published by German-Russian climatologist Wladimir Köppen (1846–1940) in 1884, with several later modifications by Köppen, notably in 1918 and 1936. Later, German climatologist Rudolf Geiger (1894–1981) introduced some changes to the classification system, which is thus sometimes called the Köppen–Geiger climate classification.

In meteorology, precipitation is any product of the condensation of atmospheric water vapor that falls from clouds due to gravitational pull. The main forms of precipitation include drizzle, rain, sleet, snow, ice pellets, graupel and hail. Precipitation occurs when a portion of the atmosphere becomes saturated with water vapor, so that the water condenses and "precipitates" or falls. Thus, fog and mist are not precipitation but colloids, because the water vapor does not condense sufficiently to precipitate. Two processes, possibly acting together, can lead to air becoming saturated: cooling the air or adding water vapor to the air. Precipitation forms as smaller droplets coalesce via collision with other rain drops or ice crystals within a cloud. Short, intense periods of rain in scattered locations are called showers.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas and the most-visited museum in the Western Hemisphere. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 Fifth Avenue, along the Museum Mile on the eastern edge of Central Park on Manhattan's Upper East Side, is by area one of the world's largest art museums. The first portion of the approximately 2-million-square-foot (190,000 m2) building was built in 1880. A much smaller second location, The Cloisters at Fort Tryon Park in Upper Manhattan, contains an extensive collection of art, architecture, and artifacts from medieval Europe.

Ernst Emil Herzfeld was a German archaeologist and Iranologist.

House of Karen, also known as Karen-Pahlav (Kārēn-Pahlaw) was one of the Seven Great Houses of Iran during the rule of Parthian and Sassanian Empires. The seat of the dynasty was at Nahavand, about 65 km south of Ecbatana. Members of House of Karen were of notable rank in the administrative structure of the Sassanian empire in multiple periods of its four century-long history.

Jean-Baptiste Eugène Napoléon Flandin, French orientalist, painter, archaeologist, and politician. Flandin's archeological drawings and some of his military paintings are valued more highly by museum authorities than his purely artistic paintings. He is most renowned for his famous drawings and paintings of Persian monuments, landscapes, and social life made during his travels with the architect Pascal Coste during the years 1839–41. Flandin's observations on the state of Persia and international politics in the mid-19th century also continue to provide important documentary information.

The Achaemenid Empire or Achaemenian Empire, was the ancient Iranian empire founded by Cyrus the Great in 550 BC; the First Persian Empire. Based in Western Asia, it was the largest empire the world had ever seen at its time, spanning a total of 5.5 million square kilometres from the Balkans and Egypt in the west to Central Asia and the Indus Valley in the east.

Media is a region of north-western Iran, best known for having been the political and cultural base of the Medes. During the Achaemenid period, it comprised present-day Azerbaijan, Iranian Kurdistan and western Tabaristan. As a satrapy under Achaemenid rule, it would eventually encompass a wider region, stretching to southern Dagestan in the north. However, after the wars of Alexander the Great, the northern parts were separated due to the Partition of Babylon and became known as Atropatene, while the remaining region became known as Lesser Media.

Ecbatana was an ancient city, which was first the capital of Media in western Iran, and later was an important city in Persian, Seleucid, and Parthian empires. It is believed that Ecbatana is located in the Zagros Mountains, the east of central Mesopotamia, on Hagmatana Hill, an archaeological mound in modern Hamedan in Zagros mountains.

Babylonia was an ancient Akkadian-speaking state and cultural area based in the city of Babylon in central-southern Mesopotamia. It emerged as an Amorite-ruled state c. 1894 BC. During the reign of Hammurabi and afterwards, Babylonia was called "the country of Akkad", a deliberate archaism in reference to the previous glory of the Akkadian Empire. It was often involved in rivalry with the older state of Assyria to the north and Elam to the east in Ancient Iran. Babylonia briefly became the major power in the region after Hammurabi created a short-lived empire, succeeding the earlier Akkadian Empire, Third Dynasty of Ur, and Old Assyrian Empire. The Babylonian Empire rapidly fell apart after the death of Hammurabi and reverted to a small kingdom.

Bactria, or Bactriana, was an ancient Iranian civilization in Central Asia centered on modern day Northern Afghanistan and including parts of southwestern Tajikistan and southeastern Uzbekistan.

Antiochus III the Great was a Greek Hellenistic king and the 6th ruler of the Seleucid Empire, reigning from 222 to 187 BC. He ruled over the region of Syria and large parts of the rest of western Asia towards the end of the 3rd century BC. Rising to the throne at the age of eighteen in 222 BC, his early campaigns against the Ptolemaic Kingdom were unsuccessful, but in the following years Antiochus gained several military victories and substantially expanded the empire's territory. His traditional designation, the Great, reflects an epithet he assumed. He also assumed the title Basileus Megas, the traditional title of the Persian kings. A militarily active ruler, Antiochus restored much of the territory of the Seleucid Empire, before suffering a serious setback, towards the end of his reign, in his war against Rome.