A short ethnogeographic name tied to Pars/Persia, used as a marker of Persian heritage and identity.
Pars (پارس) is the ancient Persian name for the heartland of the Iranian civilizations — the region known today as Fars province in southern Iran, from which the entire Persian culture, language, and people take their name. When the Greeks encountered the Achaemenid Empire, they rendered *Pars* as *Persis*, and later *Persia*, giving the Western world its word for one of history's greatest civilizations. The Achaemenid kings, including Cyrus the Great and Darius I, called themselves *Parsa* — men of Pars — and from their plateau they built an empire stretching from the Aegean to the Indus.
In the Persian literary and cultural tradition, the word carries immense pride. *Pars* or *Parsi* has long been used as a marker of authentic Persian identity, and it appears throughout classical poetry and historical chronicles as both a geographical and a civilizational designation. The Zoroastrian communities who emigrated to India after the Arab conquest in the seventh century CE are still called Parsis — *Parsiyān* — people of Pars, preserving the name across more than a thousand years of diaspora.
As a given name, Pars is used in contemporary Iran and among Persian diaspora communities worldwide, chosen by parents who want to connect their child explicitly to the deep roots of Iranian history and culture. It is a name of lapidary simplicity — one syllable that carries the weight of one of the ancient world's great civilizations.