Kermanshah began as a Sasanian king’s namesake city
Western Iran’s Zagros capital holds about nine hundred forty-seven thousand people by the 2016 census, some five hundred twenty-five kilometres from Tehran. Its name preserves Kirmanshah—"King of Kerman"—the title Bahram IV bore before founding the city around the year three hundred ninety.
Archaeology pushes habitation far deeper. Lower Paleolithic hand axes turn up at Gakia east of town; Middle Paleolithic tools fill Tang-e Kenesht, Tang-e Malaverd, and Taq-e Bostan. Iran’s only Neanderthal skeletal finds come from provincial caves such as Warwasi and Do-Ashkaft. Villages including Asiab, Sarab, and Ganj-Darreh rose eight to ten thousand years ago, and Ganj-Darreh near Harsin yielded some of Iran’s earliest pottery. In 2009 researchers announced a Sahneh village dated about ninety-eight hundred years before present.
Sasanian lore and record intertwine: myth credits Tahmuras, while history ties the urban foundation to Bahram IV after he governed Kirman. The city served as imperial capital and royal summer resort; Ardashir I’s campaigns reshaped the region in 226. Arabs took Kermanshah in 629; Seljuk centuries made it a western Iranian market; Mongols under Hulegu sacked it in 1257. Ottomans occupied it in the seventeen-twenties and early seventeen-thirties, and World War I saw Russian then Ottoman then British control before modern Iran’s storms.
Today Southern Kurdish (Kermashani) and Persian share the streets of Iran’s largest Kurdish-majority city, mostly Shia with Sunni, Christian, and Yarsani minorities. Nearby Taq-e Bostan preserves Sasanian rock ivans of Ardashir II, Shapur III, and armoured Khosrow II on Shabdiz beside a sacred spring on an old Silk Road camp. UNESCO’s Behistun Inscription—Old Persian Bagastana, "god’s place"—climbs Mount Behistun, turning this montane Mediterranean climate city into an open-air archive of empire carved in stone.
Source: Kermanshah
