a remarkable role in developing the royal ideology. He tried to announce himself as a Mazda worshiper connected to god and owner of divine khvarenah. The claim of his royal eligibility as a rightful newcomer from the line of mythical Iranian shahs and the propagations attributed to Ardashir against the eligibility and the role of the Parthians in the Iranian history sequence confirms the excellent place that the Achaemenid legacy had in the minds of the first Sasanian shahanshahs; though the consensus is that the Sasanians probably did not know much about the Achaemenids and the status. On the other hand, Shahbazi believes that the first Sasanian shahanshahs were familiar with the Achaemenids and their succeeding shahanshahs turned to the Kayanians deliberately. About that, Daryee adds that the Sasanians knowingly ignored the Achaemenids in order to be able to attribute their origins to the Kayanians; and that is why they applied the holy historiography. In that method, the social familiarity and bureaucracy did not matter and the court propagated its custom history by the help of the religious system. In order to remark his victories, Ardashir carved pictures in Firuzabad, Naqsh-e Rustam and Naqsh-e Rajab; on his picture in Naqsh-e Rustam, Ardashir and Ahura Mazda are opposite to each other on horsebacks and the bodies of Artabanus IV and Ahriman are visualized under the nails of Ardashir and Mazda's horses. It can be deduced from the picture that Ardashir believed or wanted others to believe that his reign over the land that is called "Iran" in inscriptions is designated by the Lord. The word "Iran" was previously used in Avesta and as "the name of the mythical Aryan land". In Ardashir's period, the title "Iran" was applied to the geography under Sasanian rule. The thought of "Iran" was accepted by both Zoroastrian and non-Zoroastrian societies in the whole empire and the collective memory of the Iranians has continued and survived until the modern period today in different stages and various layers of the Iranian society. What is clear is that the concept "Iran" has had a religious application too and has later ended in the formation of its political face meaning a collection of lands. Choosing a place like Naqsh-e Rustam, which is mausoleum of Achaemenid shahs, for carving and inscribing, the site of the temple of Anahita in Istakhr and the existence of the names of some Achaemenid shahs