So you only consider the land of the Medes and Persians to be ancient Iran?
Yes. That's ancient Iran were the Achameanid Dynasty came from... and were after all talking about Achameanid Persia. There were proto-Iranian people in what is today Iran before (Elamites in Southern Iran) but that's not the Persians we are dealing with. The giant Persian Empire had Iran at it's core, but as you know consisted of the conquered countries.
well, the problem is that history doesn’t fit into neat little boxes. Iran in a wider sense included a whole bunch of Irani peoples including the modern day Ossetians, the people of Sogdiana (northern Afghanistan) that are now Tajiks and also Cimmerians and maybe also ancestors of the Germans.