Rey, Iran Rey, Iran Rey or Ray (; , Šahr-e Rey, “City of Ray”), also known as Rhages (; , or Europos (Ευρωπός) "Rhagai"; or "Rhaganae") and formerly as Arsacia, is the capital of Rey County in Tehran Province of Iran, and the oldest existing city in the province. Ray today has been absorbed into the Greater Tehran metropolitan area. Ray is connected via the Tehran Metro to the rest of Tehran and has many industries and factories in operation. Limited excavations of what was not bulldozed began in 1997 in collaboration with the Iranian Cultural Heritage and Tourism Organization (ICHTO), the
Prehistory of Iran the plateau. By the mid-first millennium BC, Medes, Persians, and Parthians populated the Iranian plateau. Until the rise of the Medes, they all remained under Assyrian domination, like the rest of the Near East. In the first half of the first millennium BC, parts of what is now Iranian Azerbaijan were incorporated into Urartu. Prehistory of Iran The prehistory of the Iranian plateau, and the wider region now known as Greater Iran, as part of the prehistory of the Near East is conventinally divided into the Paleolithic, Epipaleolithic, Neolithic, Chalcolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age periods, spanning the time from