Persian names

Persian, called Farsi by its speakers, is a living Iranian language of the Indo-European family, spoken today by roughly 130 million people. It is the national language of Iran, and closely related standard forms are spoken as Dari in Afghanistan and as Tajik in Tajikistan. Persian also carries one of the world's great classical literary traditions, the poetry of Ferdowsi, Rumi, Hafez, and Saadi, written and recited for more than a thousand years and still read and loved today.

Persian names often draw on that poetic sensibility. Many come from nature, flowers, light, and the stars, and others reach back to Zoroastrian belief and the old Iranian dynasties. Because Persian and Arabic have shared centuries of close contact, a great many names cross both traditions, and a name that is common in Iran may be just as common far beyond it. Jasmine is one that traveled west. The English word comes through Old French and Arabic from Persian yasamin, the name of the fragrant white flower.

Kian is a common Persian name linked to kiyan, meaning king or realm, and tied to the legendary Kayanian kings of Iranian tradition. It also exists on its own as the Irish name Cian, meaning ancient, so the two origins meet in sound rather than in root. Arya comes from the Old Iranian word arya, meaning noble, which ancient Iranian and Indian peoples used as a description of shared language and custom, not of race. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries European writers took the word and built a false racial theory around it that the Nazis used to terrible ends. The Persian given name predates that misuse by many centuries and keeps its older meaning. Cyrus, and names in the Dario and Dariel family, echo the Achaemenid kings Cyrus and Darius, who ruled the first Persian empire.

The library gathers many of these together. Arya and Kian, Leila and Leyla, Kira, Dario and Dariel, Cyrus, Jasper, and Esther all sit here alongside Jasmine, names shaped by a language and a poetry that are still very much alive.