Iran Raya adalah istilah mengacu pada daerah dengan pengaruh budayaIran. Daerah ini meliputi wilayah di dataran tinggi Iran dan bawahnya kemudian membentang dari Mesopotamia Irak, Kaukasus, Anatolia Timur Turki sampai ke Sungai Indus Pakistan.[1][2][3] Sementara Encyclopædia Iranika menggunakan istilah Benua Budaya Iran.[4]
^Marcinkowski, Christoph (2010). Shi'ite Identities: Community and Culture in Changing Social Contexts. LIT Verlag Münster. hlm. 83. ISBN978-3-643-80049-7. The 'historical lands of Iran' – 'Greater Iran' – were always known in the Persian language as Irānshahr or Irānzamīn. Both terms refer to the Iranian plateau in addition to the Persianate world at large, those regions that had been historically under significant Persian cultural influence, roughly corresponding to the territories ruled over by the ancient Parthians and Sasanids – i.e., in addition to 'Iran proper', also the Caucasus, Mesopotamia (Iraq), Central Asia, and large parts of what is now Pakistan and Afghanistan and conforming to the Persian 'historical understanding' of the 'full territorial extent' of Iran. The capital of this entity was, at times, situated in what is now Iraq.
^Richard N. Frye, interview by Asieh Namdar, CNN, 20 October 2007. "I spent all my life working in Iran. and as you know I don't mean Iran of today, I mean Greater Iran, the Iran which in the past, extended all the way from China to borders of Hungary and from other Mongolia to Mesopotamia". [1]Diarsipkan 2016-04-23 di Wayback Machine. [2]Diarsipkan 2011-06-02 di Wayback Machine.
^Richard Nelson Frye, The Harvard Theological Review, Vol. 55, No. 4 (Oct., 1962), pp. 261-268 http://www.jstor.org/pss/1508723 I use the term Iran in an historical context[...]Persia would be used for the modern state, more or less equivalent to "western Iran". I use the term "Greater Iran" to mean what I suspect most Classicists and ancient historians really mean by their use of Persia - that which was within the political boundaries of States ruled by Iranians.