I get it, my question was in what way does it matter? Since you don't go the racial route, it appears as if you go the cultural route, but as I said culture changes. Iranians 2000 years ago had a very different idea of what it means to be Iranian. To use your analogy, assuming that Real Madrid still exists in 2000 years, then the sport would probably look very different. Let's say for the sake of the analogy that football will have evolved into something Chess-like. So while the fans still root for a team called "Real Madrid", they're still doing something very different. The definition of what it takes to be a Real Madrid fan will have changed dramatically to the point where there's nothing left but the name.
There is a lot left besides the name! What is left is the country, albeit shrunken from its original geographic boundaries; a country that is nonetheless remarkably still the core of what was Eranshahr. Just look at a map of Iran, from the Sassanid empire, to the Safavid empire to Iran's boundaries today. We lost some territories in the periphery, but the core has remained intact and the same. What is left is the shared history, which Iranians mark similarly. Until the advent modern historiography, Iranians -- ever since the Sassanid period -- understood the origins of their history through a collection of myth, legend, and real history that was recounted and captured and put into 60,000 couplets several centuries after the Sassanids (during the 10th century) in Ferdowsi's epic, the Shahhnameh, or the Book of Kings. We just added to the chapters in that history, which Iranians understood to be "our history". Even if in that history, we learned that we had experienced changes. What is left is language. Not exactly the old Persian of the Achaemenids or the Middle Persian of the Sassanids. But a New Persian that evolved from those older languages, and which has been in use in Iran ever since the the Persian renaissance of the 9th and 10th centuries. A language whose works since the new Persian more than a thousand years ago, I can read with no difficulty, as though it might have been written yesterday, in a way that an English reader cannot read even Chaucer. What is left is culture. Sure, no culture is constant and things change. But these changes are built on one another. For Iran, they were not like a storm that totally blew away the past. The Persian New Year, for instance, is and has always been Norooz (the Spring equinox), which dates back to pre-Islamic times and has always been the most important festival in the Iranian calendar. Even today, under the Islamic Republic, it is a two-week holiday period (the only holiday period of such length) when for its first week, practically everything closes, from government offices to even newspapers! And while our customs and practices have slightly changed over the centuries and millenia, much of what we do is derived from exactly what Iranians were doing several millenia ago at that time as well. And there is a lot more! Now, why does it matter? It matters because it defines who we are for those of us, who in Ernest Renan's famous conception about a nation, have chosen to identify ourselves as Iranians in our "daily plebiscite". In terms of the subject of this thread, and the question that is posed by it, at one level, the question itself doesn't mean anything! Why does it matter who had the "greatest empire"? But to the extent we entertain these kind of issues in more or less trivial historically based exchanges, I think it is important in answering that question to ask: which empire has left the most enduring legacy? Which empire started a historical narrative, an identity, that although having gone many changes through the years, remains with us to this day?
A few days ago, National Interest had an article which tried to answer a similar question as the one posed in this thread. While the real reason for the answer to me is actually linked as much to the parenthesis in their identification, i.e., The (First) Persian Empire (reminding us that there were several others to follow), I liked their answer nonetheless. http://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-5-most-powerful-empires-history-12296 The 5 Most Powerful Empires in History ... The (First) Persian Empire
Most Powerful Empire in History!... Do we go for staying power? For how much of the human race it governed over? For it's ability to eradicate the past it inherited, and so change the future? For it's ability to forge a vision of the future which changed the world from what the past had foreseen. For it's Cultural achievements? For it's Technological prowess? For it's Scientific richness? Does the quality of what it built matter? Does it matter if it was more destructive than creative? Does it matter if it was likely to make monsters of men? Or is "Powerful Empire" just about Power, pure and simple?
I think it's obviously a completely open question. That's what makes it fun. The Mongols had the biggest, but it was short and cultural impact relatively low. Modern times you have to give the British a big boost on influence. If you have a western perspective then on influence alone the Romans have lasted the longest. The Chinese of course win real longevity as a single geo political entity for 4000 years. Even if the ruling class changed
We go for the best argument on the various criteria you mentioned But, more important than the answer we chose, is how much we learn in the process about the kind the world we have today and the various issues we all face. On the latter, it is my regret that few in the West (even those who are otherwise educated) have ever really been taught the history of IRAN -- all tied eventually to the memory and legacy of the Persian Empire -- in any really meaningful way. I (and several others) addressed the question and why this is so in some the posts in this thread. But ultimately, from my perspective, the fact that you have never really been taught that history, makes it hard for your to understand much of what is going on around you today. For instance: * Much of what is "Wahhabi Islam" from Arabia is meant to bring the so-called 'pristine Islam" that represents the cultural practices of 6th century Arabia, juxtaposed against the Islam that emerged from the Abbasid caliphate (the Golden Age of Islam) and thereafter -- an Islam, which in the Wahhabi mind, corrupted that "true" Islam. The latter Islam what emerged and developed under primarily Persian influences and dubbed by some "Iranian Islam". And all this separate from the Shia-Sunni split that itself became significant after the 16th century in that it was not merely a rejection of Arabism as defining Islam (which was a battle won with the victory of Iranian Islam over Arab Islam during the Abbasid caliphate), but also represented claims to who and from where legitimate power may be exercised over the realm of "IRAN and non-IRAN" (description of the Persian empire by the Sassanids, rivals and contemporaries of the Roman and Byzantine empires). * The fact that the "Shia-Sunni" split in Islam, alluded to above, became meaningful in the 16th century because it was a rejection of political power being exercised over the real of Islam by the albeit Iranicized Ottomans who nonetheless ruled from a base (the Anatolian peninsula) that was the base which Iran's past enemies (the Byzantine empire) ruled from, with the Safavid rulers in Iran explicitly claiming the legacy of the Persian empire even as they claimed Shia religious ideology at the same time. As noted by Chardin, who traveled to IRAN in the 17 century, the Safavids not only titled themselves as kings of IRAN but traced their rule to the history of IRAN as recounted in the Book of Kings -- Iran's national epic, compiling the stories of IRAN by the poet Ferdowsi in the 10th century. (As an important aside, the Iranians called the Ottomans "Rum" or Rome even then). * The fact that while the boundaries in the Middle East (except for the boundaries of IRAN) drawn after WWI from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, were illegitimate because they were drawn by western colonial administrators, but also because those boundaries and the political arrangements thereafter implicitly also accepted the dividing lines between IRAN and the Ottomans as the latter had accepted but not as the former saw things. To put it in simple terms: IRAN never accepted that Iraq belongs to the Ottoman realm and that dispute was never settled. Indeed, the very fact that Iraq became mostly Shia in the late 19th century under the influence of Persian clerics and missionaries who Iran had secured the right from the Ottomans to engage in their activities in Iraq without the Ottomans having any jurisdiction over them or any right to prosecute them for any crimes (by virtue of the Treaty of Erzerum and a subsequent agreement in 1875) represented that reality. Yet, when the British took over Iraq following WWI, they intentionally set up the Sunni elites from the Ottoman era in power and helped suppress the Shia, which as the Washington Post mentioned just a few days ago in an article entitled The History of Mosul in 5 Maps, helped set the stage for the various rulers that came after them and all that happened thereafter. * The entire concept of the "West" juxtaposed against the "East" has its origins in the divide that arose during the Greco-Persian wars, which I have addressed in more detail in on my very first posts in this thread. Western civilization traces its roots properly in the shared ancient civilizations of the Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Persian empire took all those civilizations and brought them and what they represented under one roof. The ancient Greeks, on the other hand, were an offshoot of those civilization that diverged in their path and set the seeds for what became Western civilization, juxtaposed against the East that was the Persian Empire. That East versus West division (not in the more narrow sense that gained currency during the Cold War but in its broadest sense) lives on to this day. All this aside, there is a nation in the Middle East with adherents who today are working hard to make sure Iran is vanquished. That nation, the Jews, were frankly in many ways a creation of IRAN. A new Judaism as framed and formed under Persian influences (influences which were also meant to make Judaism much more amenable to Persian rule) emerged at the time under Ezra - an envoy of the Persian empire - and a specific definition as to what would even constitute being a "Jew" was developed at the same time precisely to favor the Jews the Persians had freed from captivity to allow them a better claim to the area in the fractious politics of the specific area at the time. Indeed, even early Zionism was the product of IRAN and those policies, as expressed in the words of Cyrus (the Lord Annoited) as attributed by Ezra.