[eternalban]

https://www.arcade-history.com/?n=darius&page=detail&id=585

I went fishing to find out why it was named Darius. (Nothing. It's the name of a planet targeted by a galactic empire in the game. lol) It piqued my interest since Japan also has a company named Mazda (both being ancient Persia themes). (Mazda's website says the name pick was a deliberate reference.)

[PhasmaFelis]

Yeah, Japanese creatives have always (well, for decades) loved naming things random western words they don't really understand. Be glad when you get "Darius" instead of "Bravely Default."

[kragen]

Technically "Darius" is an Asian name, not a Western name, because Persia is in Asia. Persia has been in "Asia" much longer than Japan has!

[nine_k]

Practically all of Asia is west of Japan anyway. So Persia is far, far west, and a part of ancient Western history along with Greece.

[Razengan]

Persia, some of which is now Iran, is a part of Western history? Oh boy.

[eternalban]

If you read history the answer is yes. So is Babylon, as a matter of fact. "West" is an offshoot of the Egyptian-Greek-Persian-Jewish cultural matrix, with themselves built on generous helping of Mesopotamian civilization.

[eternalban]

Just adding that: That cultural matrix was a point of departure for Rome, and Rome (including the latter Roman Church) was an adaption of the above cultural matrix which then developed independently, distinctly, and now we know it as Western civilization. Western intellectual circles (from beginning) declared themselves from and for the Greeks, but more honestly considered, West is essentially a Roman affair. In any event, until the advent of Islam, there was continual and pervasive mingling of these core cultures and use of the shared language of Aramaic, going back to at least a thousand years before (circa ~500BC).

[kragen]

If you read history, the original East/West split was Persia/Greece.

[Gordonjcp]

Would you say that Kazakhstan was part of the West? What about Volgograd? Was the Chelyabinsk Meteor part of western or eastern history?

[nine_k]

Volgograd, née Stalingrad, was a site of a major battle of WWII, which makes it a part of Western history. That same logic makes the Japanese city of Hiroshima a major part of Westetn history, too. But these events are not yet a century old.

Wars between ancient Greece and ancient Persia are 25 or so centuries old. An excited description of the Persian emperor Cyrus by Xenophon, a Greek, is about as old; that book was a bestseller in Europe for several centuries. Persia interacted with the European West a lot.

Ancient Egypt is also a major part of Western history, for a really long list of reasons. (Arabian Egypt, not so much, of course.)