A Summary of Kurdish Linguistic Problems
In the Light of a Persisting National Question
By : Ismet Sherif Wanli
Lausanne, mid-March 2007
Preliminary Remarks
My name above as author of the present article is written as it should be in the Kurdish Roman script as modified according to my proposals of June 1992 , while my usual name as author and Swiss citizen is Ismet Chériff Vanly. Any reference hereafter to my work as author will be done under the initials ICV.
The reader would allow me to use, in parts of this paper , the 1st pronoun ‘I’ for recalling some significant events I have personally experienced . I was advised to write the paper in English to make it understandable by the largest number possible of educated Kurds .
This paper is constituted of two parts. While Part II , divided into subtitles, corresponds to the general topic of the paper, a summary of Kurdish linguistic – dialectical and alphabetic – problems , posing in the long run the question of unification of the written Kurdish , in the light of a persisting national question, Part I , consisting of glimpses of the Kurdish historical and geographical heritage, does not. It is related neither to today’s Kurdish linguistic problems , nor directly to the national question. No need, however, to say how fundamental is the historical and geographical heritage of a nation in the making , for its future. That is a topic on which , beside a few published articles, I have actually written tow manuscripts, one already several decades old , typed in French (that I today see as insufficient) , and the other, written in 2002 in English , which would still need some research work. I ignore whether I shall have the opportunity to do this research. That is why these glimpses of the Kurdish heritage figure as Part I of this paper, somehow by way of ‘introduction’ , or rather a selection about the Kurdish and the proto-Kurdish past . The selection is presented in bloc , without subtitles ; yet it is easy to read and it should , hopefully , interest the Kurdish readers.
Part I
Glimpses of the Kurdish Historical and Geographical Heritage
To put it summarily, the Kurds are a large people of the Near East speaking an Indo-European language belonging to the Iranic family . They inhabit a country called after their name , Kurdistan , and are heirs to successive ancient civilisations. These include the proto-Kurdish Hurri-Mitanni civilisation.
The Hurrians were a people native of the area of today’s Turkish and Syrian Kurdistan - Upper (northern) Mesopotamia and around - , including the ‘Cedar Mountains’ (the Amanus) near Iskenderun , on the Mediterranean, the Anti-Taurus half circle, the northern valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris Rivers, and the mountainous area around the Lake of Van . They spoke a language which was neither Semitic , nor Indo-European. They had a pantheon including the national storm-god of the mountains , Teishup , and his consort Hepa (a mother-goddess), and a characteristic art of painted ceramics, with colourful birds and flowers . The Hurrians had a kingdom whose roots go back to the 3rd millennium BC. From the 18th century, large and prosperous Hurrian communities settled in northern Syria and in present-day Iraqi Kurdistan , area of Kirkuk. By the beginning of the 16th century BC , if not earlier , the Mitannians , an Indo-Aryan element, settled in the Hurri country as a ruling aristocracy . They finished by adopting the Hurrite language , but they brought the Hurrians the horse, the equestrian training, the use of the horse chariot for warfare and its vocabulary, as well as their Aryan pantheon , Indra , Mithra, Varuna, Burias, the same as in the Indian pantheon. The Mitanni kings had their capital at Wasuqani , which some academics identify with the town of Ras-al-Ain, in the Kurdish part of today’s northeastern Syrian province of Jazireh (Hasaka) , close to the border with Turkey (see Georges Contenau : La Civilisation des Hittites, des Hurrites et du Mitanni , Paris, 1948 . ) Another Hurri kingdom continued to exist on the west of Mitanni and in its shadow, face to the rising power of the Hittite kingdom of Boghaz-Koy , in Anatolia. The arrival of the Indo-Aryan element amongst the native Hurrians, bringing a new military technology , with a body of professional chariot drivers, the Mariani (the same as in India), was to make of the kingdom of Mitanni , over a short period of hardly two hundred years (circa 1540-1345) , one of the great powers of the ancient world. We find in G. Contenau’s work a list of seven successive Mitanni kings , beginning with Parsatatar and ending with Mattiwaza . They defeated Assyria and reduced it to silence, extended their supremacy on present-day Iraqi Kurdistan and into the Zagros ; they shared domination on Syria with the pharaohs of Egypt, with whom they had intermarriage relationship and a formal diplomatic, yet family, correspondence. Two Mitanni princesses married pharaohs and became ‘real queens of Egypt’ , writes Contenau . Thoutmès IV of Egypt (1420-1411) married the daughter of Artatama , king of Mitanni . The pharaoh Amenophis III sent an ambassador to the Mitanni king Tusratta, demanding the hand of his daughter , Tadu-Hepa, for marriage. That was followed by a long negotiation and finally concluded by a marriage and an exchange of letters calling upon gods as witness . As to Nefertiti , queen of Egypt as wife of Amenophis IV (1375-1358) , famous for her bust at a musueum in Berlin, there is discussion among scholars whether she was another Mitanni princess or just her husband’s sister (see Contenau). The Hurrian language , in cuneiform inscriptions , was deciphered thanks to the diplomatic correspondence exchanged between the pharaohs and the Mitanni kings, discovered at Tell-Amarna, in Egypt, and written, for the Mitanni, in both Hurrian and Babylonian , the latter being the international language of the time. Hurrite inscriptions were also found at the Hittite Boghaz-Koy. The Mitanni dynasty , under Mattiwaza , succumbed before the Hittites, who adopted a hostile policy towards the Egyptians, but about two hundred years later, by the 12th century, the Hittites succumbed themselves before the wave of the ‘Sea Peoples’ that hit Asia Minor.
See other and more recent information in : ‘The Hurrians’, by Gernot Wilhelm, transl. into English from German (Aris & Phillips, Warminster, England, 1994 ; original German pub. in 1989). See about the social and family life in this proto-Kurdish society, as told by clay tablet inscriptions discovered in the area of Kirkuk, Iraqi Kurdistan, in ‘The Archive of the Wullu Family’ , by Katarzyna Grosz, Univ. of Copenhagen, 1988.
The Hurrians represented only one link in a continued chain of peoples and tribes speaking Japhetic , extending from the Sind Valley in India to Iberia and the Basque country, across Iran, Kurdistan, Armenia, Asia Minor, southern Europe , Greece and its islands, and the Etruscans of Italy . They all spoke kindred languages from the same group, which was neither Semitic nor Indo-European , but they had two skull varieties , and a matriarchal family structure (see Roman Ghirshman : L’Iran des origines à l’Islam, Paris, 1951; Clément Huart + L. Delaporte : L’Iran antique, Elam et Perse , Paris, 1952 ; Georges Roux : Ancient Iraq, 1966, transl. from French ; Ephraim Speiser : Mesopotamian Origin: The Basic Population of the Middle East, Philadelphia, 1930.) These languages have disappeared since long ago , but not without having left a substrata in the languages that replaced them, to the exception of the Basque people, who still speak a language , the sole in Europe, which is pre-Indo-European. In the Caucasus , Georgian and some other languages still belong to the same Japhetic group, whence some call the group ‘Caucasic’ . The trouble with this designation it reverses the route that culture had generally followed in its space development, since , for instance , the agricultural technology and the domestication of animals, which started some ten thousand years ago at the foothills of Kurdistan, passed from there into the Caucasus, and from the Caucasus into Russia, but not the contrary ; the same agricultural culture also advanced westwards across Asia Minor into Europe (see : Michael Roaf : Cultural Atlas of Mesopotamia and the Ancient Near East , Equinox, Oxford, 1990 ; R. Braidwood + B. Howe : Prehistoric Investigations in Iraqi Kurdistan , Univ. of Chicago Press, 1960). The linguistic group at stake is also called ‘Asianic’ (not to be confused with Asiatic) . Yet, although the term Japhetic is merely Biblical , we prefer to use it as more fitting, and more neutral, than the others . A Semitic language replaced Japhetic, at an early epoch, in most of the areas of Lower Mesopotamia (future Akkad/Babylonia, Assyria) , to the exception of Sumer, where Japhetic was still spoken when the culture of city-states and writing began in the area (by the beginning of the 3rd millennium BC.)
By the 11th century BC , the Iranic-speaking peoples (Mada/Medians , Perses/Persians, Haraiva) immigrated into Iran , coming from the plains of southern Russia. They got mixed with the local Japhetic population during about three centuries (see Ghirshman), before organising themselves as a political and military power , under the Medians, to invade the orderly states on their west. In the beginning of the 8th century BC , two other Iranic-speaking peoples of horsemen, the Scythians (Sakka as they called themselves, Ishkuzaï in the Bible), followed by the Cimmerians (Gimmerraï in the Bible, who left their name to Crimea), arrived into northwestern Iran. They were refractory to union , at least in the beginning, and accomplished, the Sakka in particular, devastating raids across the old and orderly states westwards, as far as Asia Minor and Syria . The name of the Sakka survived in Sakkiz, their capital, ‘one of the rare towns of Kurdistan that have kept their ancient name till today’ , says Ghirshman. Sakkiz is located south of Mahabad , in today’s Iranian Kurdistan.
The ‘orderly states’ coveted by the Iranic nations, their eastern neighbours, were three . In the centre, we had Assyria which, after its liberation from the Hurri-Mitanni occupation consecutively to the fall of their state by 1345 BC, recovered its independence and became a mighty and warlike empire, constantly at war to extend its possessions in the mountains and plains around . On the south we had Babylonia (former Akkad), which was suffering from Assyrian supremacy. On the north of Assyria, we had a new mountainous and autochthonous state in the area of the Lake Van , that the Assyrians called Urartu (whence the name of the Ararat mountain) and resented as a dangerous enemy. The Urartians called their kingdom ‘the Land of Biaini’ (a name that survived in Van) , but their ethnic name, as that of their national god, was Khaldi (not be confused with the ancient Chaldeans of southern Mesopotamia). The Khaldi people spoke a Japhetic language akin to Hurrian, which was deciphered thanks to the Assyrian and Van inscriptions. The geographical area of Urartu and around was called in the Assyrian and Babylonian royal records Subartu , a name that survived in the modern Kurdish Zibari (close to Barzan , in the northern part of Iraqi Kurdistan). Another geographical name for the mountainous areas in the Assyrian records was Naïri , which also survived in the modern Kurdish place-name of Nahri (in the Kurdish Hakkari area , Turkish Kurdistan , not far from Zibari). The creation of the kingdom of Urartu , by 860 BC , was due to a local king named Arame , who united other Naïri chiefs to resist military campaigns by Assyrian kings. Urartu became a powerful and prosperous kingdom , famous for its city fortresses, built with huge stones, and for its water dams and irrigation canals for agriculture. Its capital was Tushpa, which is the fortress of Van . The Urartian art of architecture influenced that of Iran as well as the classical Greek building art .
Media rose as a Great Power in Iranian Kurdistan and, in 612 BC , the Median king, Cyaxare , occupied Niniva and destroyed the Assyrian empire, once for ever, in alliance with Babylonia. Cyaxare advanced westwards across the former Assyrian possessions, at Harran, into Lydia , in Asia Minor . According to the peace agreement concluded between him and king of Lydia , says Herodotus, the western frontier of Media was fixed up on the Halys River , present Kizil-Irmak . Let us note that , in spite of the changing events of history, the northwestern edge of the Kurdish inhabited areas in today’s Turkey is on the Kizil-Irmak River , on the same borderline agreed upon between the kings of Lydia and Media, more than twenty-five centuries ago (this Kurdish edge being the town of Zara and its area , between Sivas and Erzinjan, where a Kurdish uprising took place in 1919.) Shortly after the fall of Assyria, Urartu was eradicated from the world map, by 585 BC, not because of the arrival of the Armenian people into the area, as it was believed and written till about the 1960s, but its fall was due to the Median army, supported by the Scythian cavalry , as it is today established by archaeological excavations (see Boris Piotrovsky , ‘Urartu’ , transl. from Russian, series Archaeologia Mundi, Nagel pub., Geneva-Paris-München, French ed. ‘Ourartou’, 1970). The northern Urartian stronghold of Teishebaini , today’s Karmir-Blour , in today’s Republic of Armenia , near Erivan (Erebuna under Urartu), was forced and burnt in a sudden attack by the same Medo-Scythians forces, as described in detail by Piotrovsky, who was an archaeologist and led the excavation on the spot, as director of the Ermitage Musueum of Leningrad .
The fall of Assyria and Urartu created a ‘vacuum’ that was to be filled . In Xenophon’s Anabasis, book IV, the Greek historian and general mentions how it was difficult, for his army of ten thousand Greek mercenaries., in their retreat from Persia , in 401 BC , to fight their way against the Kardu(kh) people . These toughly resisted the Greek intrusion in their mountainous country , overlooking from the south the valley of the Kentrites River (present Bohtan River, a northern tributary of the upper Tigris, to the south of Lake Van). The final ‘kh’ in Kardu(kh) being a foreign suffix, . it was easy for generations of Europeans to identify the modern Kurds with the Kardu of Xenophon – although the latter did not bring us a single word of their language . By the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, German academics (Th. Nöldeke, M. Hartmann, Weissbach , C.F. Lehmann-Haupt) established that the forms of Kardu and Kurd are incompatible phonetically , said that the Kardu of Xenophon have nothing to do with the Kurds but should have emigrated northwards to become the southern Kartu(eli) Georgians. It was added that according to the Georgian tradition , their ancestry came from the south . As to the modern Kurds’ ancestry, said the same German academics , it is represented by the Kurti people and other Iranic-speaking tribes who had emigrated from Iran .
Professor Vladimir Minorsky developed the thesis advanced by the German academics . To put it briefly, he says the origins of the Kurds go back to two kindred Iranic tribes or peoples, the Kurti and the Mards, who advancing westwards , from Atropatenian Media, present Azerbaijan, on the steps and under the protection of the Median army , profited from the fall of Assyria and Urartu to occupy a new homeland (see Minorsky’s articles ‘Kurds ’ and ‘Kurdistan’ in Encyclopaedia of Islam , 1st edition, and his paper , ‘Les origines des Kurdes’ , in Travaux du XX° Congrès International des Orientalistes, Bruxelles, 1938, pub. in 1940) . Although our knowledge of the Median language is limited to place-names and personal names, Minorsky notices, with reason , the unity of the Kurdish language , before the expansion of the Kurds over a considerable mountainous area , can be explained only by the Median/Medic linguistic factor. He says Kurdish belongs without any contest to the northwestern branch of the Iranic family , and differences between modern Kurdish and Persian are found in all the Kurdish dialects . He agrees with Marquart to qualify Kurdish as a ‘Neo-Medic’ language , but admits that the Kurds , in their expansion across the mountains, should have absorbed some local , that is autochthonous elements. We should observe, however, that Minorsky wrote his paper and his articles before knowing that the fall of Urartu was due to the Median-Scythian forces , as established by B. Piotrovsky. Minorsky supposed, as it was then believed, that the fall of Urartu was due to the arrival of the Armenians (who are, properly speaking, the Haï/Haic people, see below) , whence his hindrance as to the ways the Kurdish tribes took in their expansion westwards. Yet Basile Nikitine (in ‘Les Kurdes, Etude sociologique et historique’ , Paris, 1956) does not hesitate to present Minorsky’s thesis on the matter as being ‘the Median-Scythian origin of the Kurds’ . See also the present writer : ICV , ‘Regards sur les origines des Kurdes et leur langue’ ( in Studia Kurdica , Inst. Kurde de Paris, No. 1-5, 1988.). History is full with events about peoples and tribes arriving with men,women, children, and flocks of animals into a new homeland, but it is questionable whether the new-comers could eliminate physically the former inhabitans or if these were not , more or less , absorbed by the new-comers. We know the Iranic-speaking nations got mixed with the sparse Japhetic population of Iran , over some three centuries, before attacking the ‘orderly states’ westwards. Perhaps many of the Kardu of Xenophon emigrated into Georgia, yet it is difficult to believe that none of them was not assimilated by the Kurti and other Kurdish ‘Medic-Scythian’ tribes . Anyway, the Kardu cannot account alone for the origin of the Kurds, nor for the Kurdish language being Iranic . Besides, they inhabited a too limited geographical area; and fought on feet , while the classical Kurds were horsemen and expanded over a considerably larger area.
The Greek geographer Strabo, from Asia Minor, who lived at the time of Christ (c. 64 BC-AD 21) - and had possibly a Kurti family ascendance , on the part of his mother - tells in his ‘Geography’ (XI, xiii, 3) that the Kurtians, Mards,and Kadussians, who live scattered in the mountains of Azerbaijan, Persia and in the Zagros , and those peoples who have the same names in Armenia (see below as to the understanding of the name) and in the Niphates (the huge mountain complex of Ala-Dagh and Tendourek, north and northeast of Lake Van) ‘belong to the same race if we judge them by their physical features’.
The Greek classical historian Polybius , in his ‘Histories’, mentions the Kurtians (Kurti) , in 220 BC, as mercenaries in the army of the governor of Media against the Greek Seleucid king Antiochus III. Thirty years later , the Roman historian Livy (Tite-Live) mentions the Kyrtians as mercenaries in the other camp, serving the same Antiochus, and, in 171 BC , we find them as far as Pergamom , the Greek city-state on the eastern Aegean coast , serving its king as mercenaries . Apparently , these Kurtians were, for a while, a group of men appreciated as paid professional soldiers , serving the king offering them the best pay , while their families were left at home . They constituted special units using the sling as weapon to catapult stones on the enemy, their name in the sources is mentioned as efficient slingers . Herodotus describes the fighting tactics of the Zikurtu as slingers in Atropatenian Media, whom he call Sagart , who settled in the area of Arbil , on the western slopes of the Zagros, just after the fall of Assyria. They were to revolt against the Aechemenid Cyrus, under their king Partatua.
Richard N. Frye , professor of Iranian at Harvard, dedicates his book ‘The Heritage of Persia’ (London, 1962) ‘to my (his) Iranian Friends : Afghans, Baluchis, Kurds, Ossetes, Persians, Tajiks’ . This does not mean the nations he mentions are Iranian in today’s understanding of the word ; it means they speak Iranic languages , abstraction being made of their political condition, somehow as English, Swedish and German are presented as Germanic languages, or Russian and Polish are Slavic. Belonging to the northwestern branch of Iranic family , Kurdish had its starting point in Azerbaijan. This should explain the close historical kinship between Kurdish and Gileki , the Iranic language spoken (or which was spoken) in Gilan (Guilan , area of Recht), on the southwestern mountainous coast of the Caspian.
While the Kurtians settled in what was to become , perhaps from the 4th century BC, the kingdom of Korduene (or Kordyen) , roughly in the same area as the former Hurrians, the Mard tribes settled in the area to the east and north of Lake Van , but were not organized as a kingdom, living on agriculture and, more especially, on breeding . For Marquart , quoted by Minorsky, the name of Mard was perhaps just a nickname for the northern Kurtians , living as wild tribes . As to the Kadussi mentioned by Strabo, they were apparently to be scattered and lost amongst other tribes.
As in Herodotus , the Armenian people were originally a fraction of the Phrygians of western Anatolia. According to the Armenian traditions, after the destruction of Phrygia, a Phrygian tribe , or section , led by a legendary chief , the eponymic Haïk , left Phrygia looking for a new country eastwards to settle. with his people. Whence the national , or ethnic name of the Armenians as they call themselves, the Haï People, and their country, Hayastan . The normal and sole path leading from Anatolia to future Hayastan
is between the Pontic mountains and those overlooking the Upper Euphrates (Qara-Su). The new Armenian homeland was to be found on the northern bank of the middle Araxes River and its northern affluents , such as the Garni . All the successive Armenian capitals , from ancient Artaxata to taday’s Erivan , as well as the residence of the Armenian patriarchal church, at Etchmiadzin , are found in this area, on the north of the Araxes , roughly corresponding to present Armenia .This does not mean the Armenians were to be confined in this area . They had a restless feudal aristocracy, and their king Tigranes II, was to prove to be ‘the Great’ for a short period , in the 1st century BC (see below).
Till about the 1960s, all the western , Russian (Minorsky included) and modern Armenian authors who wrote about ancient Armenian history could not but suppose it was the Armenians who destroyed Urartu , annihilated or assimilated the Khaldi people (Urartians) of the ‘Land of Biaini’ , without having any evidence to tell us how this could have happened . Most of these authors ignored the Kurdish ancient presence and history . We know today – not only thanks to Piotrovsky – that history was not true to this hypothesis, the destruction of Urartu, by 585 BC , being due to the Medians and their Scythian allies, these ancestors, among others more ancient , of the Kurds, some time before the arrival of the Haic Phrygian Armenians into Hayastan . If we take the example of René Grousset , French academician and author of ‘Histoire de l’Arménie , des origines à 1071’ (Paris, 1947), he ignores practically the Kurdish presence in the area from Antiquity , while he speaks of the ‘armenisation of Armenia’ (meaning former Urartu, supposed to have been conquered by the Armenians) . When Grousset comes to the Turkic Saljukid conquest of 1071, we find him suddenly speaking of the Kurdish Muslim orderly state of the Merwanid dynasty - corresponding to the ancient Kurdish kingdom of Korduene - , which was strong and wealthy enough to purchase the life of the Armenian prisoners made by the Saljukids . Did then the Kurdish Merwanid state fell down overnight from heavens ? Why to ignore the ancient kingdom of Korduene, going back probably to the 4th century BC ?
It may seem paradoxal, a puzzle, that the names of Armenia and of the Armenians, who are the Haïc people, are not Armenian. It is not the first time foreigners call a nation by a name other than its own. The name of ‘Armenians’ is related to ‘Aramé’ , the Japhetic founder of Urartu in the 9th century BC, who had nothing to do with the Haïc coming from Phrygia , several centuries later, and speaking an Indo-European language not belonging to the Iranic family . As to the name of Armenia, it comes , Grousset knows it (p.51), from ‘Urmeniuqini’, name of a district of Urartu, northwest of Lake Van (area of Mush, Taron in Armenian.) This confusion between Armenia and Urartu does not help to have a clear vision of the history of the area, and has offen, as a consequence , to ignore the Kurds, or to marginalize their role in history, and even to consider them as Armenians , as some modern Armenian authors did by the beginning of the 20th century. That the Kurds of today are a large, but not a free nation , left stateless in the aftermath of WW1, divided between four states that are indeed not democratic, does not help to establish historical truth.
The Armenian modern authors do not agree between themselves as to the ancient history of their people and their relationship with the Kurds . Nicolas Adontz (1875-1942) , in his ‘Etudes arméno-byzantines’, published posthumously (Lisbonne, 1965), prefers to ignore the Kurds. Professor H. Hyvernat , in ‘L’histoire ancienne de l’Arménie’ (Strasbourg, 1892) knows the people of Urartu did not speak the Armenian language, yet he says the kingdom of Urartu was ‘Armenian’ . Father Joseph Sandalgian, in ‘Histoire ducumentaire de l’Arménie’ (Roma, 1917, in 2 vol., maps), presents us an exceedingly extensive historical Armenia, overlapping large parts of Georgia, Kurdistan, Transcausia, and areas far to the west of the Euphrates , and including, according to him , thirteen ‘foreign nations’ . He enumerates one by one these so-called “foreign nations” and among them , ‘the Medians and the Mards’, mentioned together as one nation , but ‘foreigner’ in Armenia. He knows about Mardastan , but reduces it to the dimension of a canton. Kevork Aslan , in ‘Etudes historiques sur le peuple arménien’ (Paris, 1928 : 31-32, 85), is closer to historical reality . He says correctly Urartu was conquered by the Medians and knows about the Median/Medic origin of the Kurds ; he admits the Khaldi people of Urartu were to be assimilated by the Armenians and the Kurds. K. Aslan says the presence of the Kurds in ‘historic Armenia’ , in the plateau and the highlands of Van , and between the two branches of the Euphrates (Qara-Su and Murad-Su) goes back to the great antiquity…There are still many hiatuses to be filled up about the ancient relationship between the two peoples. But here is no room in the present paper to dwell further on this historical problem , which would need a particular research work by itself.
The Armenian kingdom lived in the shadow of the Iranian Parthian empire (247 BC- AD 226). There will be a change under Tigranes II ‘the Great’ of Armenia, who profited of Parthian difficulties on their eastern border to created himself, for a period of some twenty years, a large cosmopolitan and multinational empire , stretching from Ecbatana to Syria, as a half circle across the mountains , including two Kurdish kingdoms, Korduene and, on its south, Adiabene, the latter member of the Parthian federation. Allied to a Parthian and apparently dissident governor of Azerbaijan, Tigranes committed a political mistake by offering hospitality to Mithridates , king of Pontus and his-father-in-law, who had been defeated and was wanted by rising Roma, after its victory at the battle of Magnesia, in 89 BC, in Asia Minor . Tigranes ruled his empire as a despot and a pompous oriental monarch . He built himself a new capital, Tigranocerta , whose vestiges are lost, and brought people to inhabit it by force from everywhere . He obliged king Zarbienus of Korduene to be his vassal and used its Kurds as skilled workers to open roads across forests, cut down trees, and build fortifications (see Rheinach , in his article ‘Les Kyrtiens’, quoted by B. Nikitine , p, 11, op.cit.) . Tigranes army itself was heterogeneous , with proper Armenian units , a large number of Kurds under different names according to their areas , Kurtians, Adiabeni., perhaps Mards , Medians , the latter name being rather a global one for them, beside Arabs, and the Anatolians of Mithridates . The Republic of Roma sent its general and Consul Lucullus , to check Tigranes and enlarge the Roman power eastwards . Lucullus , from Antioch , sent an ultimatum to Tigranes , demanding to deliver him Mithridates, what he refused . The Roman general, advancing with his army, occupied Tigranocerta , the new Armenian capital, and had intelligence with Zarbienus, king of Korduene. Tigranes occupied the Kurdish capital and killed its king Zarbienus ( this capital was one of the fortified cities of Sareisa, Pinaca, or Satalca , as mentioned in the Greek-Roman sources, probably Pinaca , present Finik, on the Upper Tigris. ) Lucullus was soon on the spot , defeated Tigranes and organized ‘royal funerals’ for the dead Kurdish king, calling him ‘the ally and friend of Roma’ . The body of Zarbienus was burnt on a pyre, apparently according to the Kurdish funeral customs of the time, in the presence of his widow and his children (see Plutarch, in Parallel Lives , Lucullus , LVII.). That happened in 69 BC. Lucullus spent the winter 69/68 in the royal fortress of the Kurdish capital , where he found treasures of gold (that he took for himself), and plenty of food and cereals for his soldiers, then he pursued Tigranes in the large Plateau north of Lake Van , but the Armenian king avoided any decisive battle . It was up to another Roman general, Pompey , to receive the submission of the aging Tigranes , at Artaxata, the real Armenian capital, on the northern bank of the Araxes River, in 66 BC . After the imperial, but ephemeral adventure of Tigranes II , Armenia was reduced to a kind of protectorate , a kingdom torn between the Parthian and the Roman empires.
When Lucullus was pusuing Tigranes in the upper plateau to the north of Lake Van, in the summer heat of 68 BC , he had to protect himself and his units against attacks by the armed horsemen of the wild Kurdish Mard tribes, who were in their annual summer pasture highlands with their flocks of sheep, alongside the Arsanias River (Murad-Su). The Mards , half-nomadic in these areas, did cultivation in their winter abode , in villages found on the slopes of the mountains to the east and north of Lake Van. On the east . their highlands go from Van northwards to the Ararat (on today’s mountainous border between Turkey and Iran, home of the Shakak and Jalali Kurds, with Salmas and Maku towns). On the northern side of the Lake, the winter abode of the Mards was the slopes of a series of mountains going northeastwards, from the Sipan-Dagh to the Ala-Dagh (called Niphates in the Greek classics), then the volcanic Tendourek (meaning in Kurdish oven), and then the majestic Ararat, capped with eternal snow and culminating at 5'200 m, whose slopes have been inhabited by Kurds from the Median epoch (where the Kurdish uprising of 1927-1930 started) .These highlands to the east and north of Lake Van were called Mardastan till the late Middle Age . At springtime, the Mards, or rather their tribal aristocracy , used to set out with their flock to their pasture highlands , on the Murad-Su , and even at the sources of the Araxes River (at Bingol , to the south of Erzerum.) Tthat is the old Kurdish ‘zozan,’ beginning on the ‘Newroz’ day (New Year ), in the tradition of the Iranic nations.
In the wild Mardastan ,Lucullus and his army had nothing to eat but the sheep of the Mards, who just defended themselves by attacking the Roman invader (see Louis Dillemann . ‘Haute Mésopotamie orientale et pays adjacents’, pub. by Inst. Français d’Archéologie de Beyrouth , and Librairie Geuthner, Paris, 1962, pp. 96, 269 , with detailed maps and full references to Greek and Roman classics, such as Plutarch, Tacitus, Strabo , Themestius , Dion Cassius.)
To whom belongs , between the Roman and the Parthian empires , the suzerainty over the Armenian king at Artaxata, on the northern bank of the Araxes ? Whose vassal is he ? The Armenian king had a Parthian, royal ascendance, but was he a Parthian or a Roman client ? That was the question trusted, in AD 59 , under emperor Nero , to general Corbulo , with full power to resolve it and settle the Roman military affairs in the Orient . He had fought the Germans on the Rhine , with efficiency.
Corbulo marched straight ahead into Artaxata, and levelled it to earth. He thus cut his supply point from the north. Many Armenians were killed , or fled into the mountains. Then he advanced southwestwards, contrary to Lucullus , on the plateau to the north of Lake Van , the pasture highlands of the Mards , in full summertime. The legionnaires soon found themselves short of supply and had to sustain themselves on the sheep flock of the Mards. These were excellent mounted archers and, besides, armed with spears, shields, and wore a helmet (according to engraving). Once more, they defended themselves by attacking the Romans , as their fathers had done against Lucullus . The legionnaires much suffered , and Corbulo was so weary that he sent his second in command, general Paetus, in a punitive expedition against the Mard villages, somewhere on the slopes of the Ala-Dagh . The presumptuous Paetus destroyed perhaps a few villages , but he could not do more , owing to the large space occupied by the Mards in this wilderness, and to their mobility . Besides, Corbulo had other things to do (see L. Dillemann, op.cit. p. 284, with references to Greek-Roman classics .)
In AD. 114, the Roman emperor Trajan led personally a campaign over three years against the Parthians and their allies , to establish a ‘Roman order’in the Orient. According to the Roman and Greek classical sources, and modern authors, not always convergent , or presenting gaps, mentioned and discussed by L. Dillemann (op.cit.. pages 271-286 , with references and maps), the events of the campaign interesting us could be summed up as follow : In 114 , following the northern road , to the north of Erzerum and the Araxes River, the Emperor entered into Armenia without fighting, and proclaimed it a ‘Roman province’.
One of his generals, Lusius Quietus, in his return way, had to fight , said Dillemann, ‘the courageous Mards’, by the Arsanias River . These northern Kurds had memory and , once more (the 3rd time since Lucullus and Corbulo), they resisted the intrusion of a roman army in their country , the violation of their vital space. Trajan spent the winter 114-115 in Edessa (Urfa) , where he received an important visitor, king Manisaros of Korduene, and concluded with him a deal . There is some divergence, and gaps, in the interpretation of the deal text (sentences of which are quoted in Greek by Dillemann.) Manisaros recognized Armenia as a ‘Roman province’ (with a Roman garrison ) and, apparently , he promised the Emperor not to keep ‘his possessions in Armenia’ (which Armenia, where ?). In 115 Trajan campaigned in ‘Upper Mesopotamia’ and, to prepare the 116 campaign , he occupied Nisibin and mount Sinjar , belonging to the Kurdish kingdom of Adiabene, partner of the Parthians. The king of Adiabene retreated to the mountainous and main part of his country, the area of Arbil, on the eastern bank of the middle Tigris. Trajan spent the winter 115-116 in Antioch and, in 116 , he attained his main objective: Starting the campaign from Nisibin , he advanced southeastwards, occupied Ctesiphon , capital of the Parthians (ancient Babylonia, to the south of today’s Baghdad ) , and attained the Persian Gulf . One may say, however, all these conquests were practically useless, since the Emperor returned back to Roma in 116, and the large curve of the Euphrates River was to be agreed upon as the frontier between the Roman and the Parthian empires.
In the Armenian literary tradition, which begins by AD 5th century , the names of Kurd and Median (Mar in Armenian) are synonymous and interchangeable, even in today’s academic dictionaries (see A.K. Sanjian : ‘Colophons of Armenian manuscripts , 1301-1480 : A Source for Middle Eastern History’, Harvard, 1969). In these Armenian manuscripts , many Kurdish princes are mentioned, called by their names; the same physical person is said here to be a Kurd, and there, at the same page, to be a ‘Mar’(Median). These Kurdish princes were Muslims and may be praised if they are just towards the Christians, or the contrary, if they are unjust ; their country is often called Kurdistan, sometimes Armenia . That depends perhaps on the area.
The Arab-Muslim classical geographers and historians , at the Abbasid era, translated the Iranic name of ‘Kuhistan’ , meaning « the Country of Mountains » , as it had been used by the Sasanians (the last pre-Islamic Iranian empire), by the Arabic word of al-Jibal , just meaning ‘The Mountains’ . At the time of the Arab Islamic conquest there were no longer any people called « Medians » , the name having ceased to be used for about twelve centuries earlier . This Kuhistan / al-Jibal/Mountainous Country , or just The Mountains , used as a proper name , once the heart of ancient Media , was inhabited by the Kurds. In other words, when the name of Medians had become obsolete , the Kurds were found inhabiting the same country . One of these medieval Arab-Muslim geographers, al-Ya’qoubi , who achieved his work in A.D.891 , Hijra year 218 , says « the rugged and snowy Mountains are the homeland of the unpleasant Kurds » (in Arabic : ‘dâr ul-Akrâd…’). Despite the unfair epithet , al-Ya’qoubi can be thanked for the precision . Another Arab geographer, Ibn Hauqal, native of Baghdad , in his geography book of 367 H/A.D. 978, left us a very interesting geographic definition of ‘the Mountainous Country inhabited by the Kurds’, also corresponding to ancient Media (see Richard N. Frye, The Golden Age of Persia , The Arabs in the East , London, 1975 :p. 11 ; and ICV, 1988, op.cit.) . Under the Abbasids , Dar–ul-Islam , meaning the Country of Islam was divided into several iqlîm , plural aqalim , from the Greek clime , one of which was Misr (Egypt) , another ash-Sham (Syria) , a third al-‘Iraq , a fourth al-Jibal (the Mountains) , homeland of the Kurds.
Prior to the Islamic conquest , the Kurds were known under different names , according to the areas of their extensive and mountainous country, then more covered with forest than today. They had, however, a geographically continued country over which they had been ruling , sometimes within the framework of larger empires , the same way of life, living in small fortified towns and villages, on agriculture and breeding . They had a tribal organisation that was to continue under Islam , and spoke a language of their own. It was the early Arab Muslim writers , like al-Baladhuri (in Futouh al Buldan = Conquest of the Countries), who called the Kurds by one of their old different names, Kurd (plural Akrâd )for the old Kurti (instead of Median ,
