> Earliest written records are from the Sasanid Empire.

I assume you mean the earliest records that document the name "Iran"? Written records of that region go back multiple thousands of years before the Sasanids.

I did find on Wikipedia at various points the claims that...

- The name "Persia" is just a misunderstanding of the provincial name Fars or Pars; the country has never thought of itself that way.

- The name Iran dates to the 3rd century AD.

Those two claims, both of which you seem to be repeating here, conflict in a pretty obvious way. The classical Greeks fought against and eventually conquered an empire they knew as "Persia", the Achaemenids, several hundred years before the Sasanids were established. Cultural contact between Greece and Persia was quite extensive, with many Greeks serving as mercenaries in Persian armies.

Wikipedia saw a big fight over the endonym of Achaemenid Persia -- the page went from noting it as "Parsa", rendered in Old Persian cuneiform, to claiming it was known by the modern Arabic name, rendered in modern Arabic -- a development at least a thousand years too late to be plausible -- to now recording "ch'shassa" ("the Empire"), again in Old Persian cuneiform.

The name Iran easily could go back long before the Sasanids, in that it represents a piece of culture shared with India and therefore presumably dating to before the Indo/Iranian split. But are you aware of any evidence that the country referred to itself that way during the classical period? Judging by what you can find on Wikipedia, this question is one of major political concern to some groups, and is mostly fought on the basis of assertion rather than evidence.

I have provided links to an academic resource. Wikipedia is not an authoritative site.

Equally, it is entirely irrelevant what the Greeks called their neighboring nations.

> the modern Arabic name, rendered in modern Arabic

Have no idea what you are talking about here. Arabs called Iran "Ajam".

But your link says this:

> The word ērān is first attested in the titles of Ardašīr I (q.v.), founder of the Sasanian dynasty.

> The combination *aryānām xšaθra- is nowhere found in the Old Persian inscriptions of the Achaemenians. In the later Yašts there is only mention of airiiå and anairiiå daiŋhāuuō “Aryan” and (unspecified) “Non-Aryan lands.” Thus the term Ērānšahr was evidently an invention of the Sasanians.

If the name "Iran" dates back to the 3rd century AD, and the name "Persia" dates back to the 5th century BC, it doesn't make sense to claim that "'Persia' is merely a province of Iran".

quote:

Cyrus The Great (r. ca. 558-530 B.C.E.). Judging from a variety of evidence, such as some Medians holding important positions under Cyrus, the representation of the Medians in the Persepolis reliefs, and the Medians constituting the most important element in the Achaemenid Empire next to the Persians, it appears that the defeat of Astyages by Cyrus marked a transition from one power to another rather than the total annihilation of one by the other. In fact, Cyrus mixed Medians and Persians in his army as a prelude to his unification of the entire Iranian population and others under his banner.

end quote

http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/iran-ii1-pre-islamic-t...

And it should be further noted that Kurosh'e Kabir (Cyrus the Great) was half Median and half Persian. (His mother was Mede.) Both are Iranian tribes.

And further note that as a Persian I have no interest in diminishing the decisive and leading role of Persians in the historic context of the Iranian civilization.

Modern usage of the name "Persia" to refer to Iran by certain elements of the Anglospehere is in my opinion a malicious imperialist construct. We reject it just as we reject the absurdly denuded "Gulf".