Lake Urmia ,Iran:

Lake Urmia  is a salt lake in northwestern Iran near Iran's border with Turkey. The lake is between the Iranian provinces of East Azerbaijan and West Azerbaijan, west of the southern portion of the similarly shaped Caspian Sea. It is the largest lake in the Middle East, and the sixth largest saltwater lake on earth, with a surface area of approximately 5,200 km² (2,000 mile²), 140 km (87 mi) length, 55 km (34 mi) width, and 16 m (52 ft) depth.It is protected as a national park by the Iranian Department of Environment. In 1967 the Department sent a team of Iranian scientists to count the deer population and study the ecology of the Shahi Island. A paper on the ecology of the island was published in the Iranian Scientific Sokhan by Javad Hashemi. This included a microscopic study of the breeding habit of Artemia.

One of the early mentions of Lake Urmia is from the Assyrian records from 9th century BCE. There, in the records of Shalmaneser III (reign 858–824 BCE), two names are mentioned in the area of Lake Urmia: Parsuwash and Matai. It is not completely clear whether these referred to places or tribes or what their relationship was to the subsequent list of personal names and "kings". But Matais were Medes and linguistically the name Parsuwash matches the Old Persian word pārsa, an Achaemenid ethnolinguistic designation. The lake was known in medieval times as Kabudan, "azure/blue" to the Iranian peoples.

"Lake Matianus" (Latin: Lacus Matianus) is an old name for Lake Urmia. It was the center of the Mannaean Kingdom, a potential Mannaean settlement, represented by the ruin mound of Hasanlu, was on the south side of Lake Matianus. Mannae was overrun by the people who were called Matiani or Matieni, an Iranian people variously identified as Scythian, Saka, Sarmatian, or Cimmerian. It is not clear whether the lake took its name from the people or the people from the lake, but the country came to be called Matiene or Matiane.

The lake is named after the provincial capital city of Urmia, originally a Syriac name meaning city of water. In the early 1930s, it was called Lake Rezaiyeh (Persian: دریاچه رضائیه‎) after Reza Shah Pahlavi, but after the Iranian Revolution in the late 1970s, the lake was renamed Urmia. Its ancient Persian name was Chichast (meaning, "glittering"–a reference to the glittering mineral particles suspended in the lake water and found along its shores). In medieval times it came to be known as Lake Kabuda, or "azure", in Persian, .

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