I have been for more than a week traveling in Iran. I am overwhelmed by its geography, its long history and the friendliness and hospitality of the Iranian people. Truly this is the cradle of civilization as Iran has been called. Iran is a vast country bounded by many nations as its borders stretch to Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Syria and Iraq. For millennia, people and cultures have moved back and forth from these areas and Iran has been a crucible where environment and people have forged the Iranian identity through culture, the interaction of people with their environment. Iran is a country of mountains, its vast space is the Iranian Plateau where people first thought to have come from the Russian steppes settled and domesticated the horse and the dog, hunted and gathered, settled down to sedentary agriculture, evolved a script for writing and then went on to unite their tribes into one state, then one nation and finally an empire, the Persian Empire. It is a story dating back thousands of years, more than two thousand of recorded history.