Zarbian

An important 2025 publication investigating how Öcalan’s democratic confederalism opposes only one state, the Kurdish one, by socially engineering and removing Kurdish social and political structures that act against assimilation. This is proven using his own writings and notes. In his original Turkish he calls Turkey’s borders legitimate and says the Turkish flag can fly over his grave. He told Kurdish MPs that asking the state for Kurdish education “is a mistake”. He promised that his model removes the “danger” of Kurdish becoming an official language, and eases the assimilation process of Kurds in the countries they live in. He said he built the KCK during talks with Turkish intelligence chief Emre Taner. He also called the Kurdish National Congress the body that would “determine the Misak-ı Milli”, the 1920 pact that claimed Mosul, Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah for Turkey. It draws on Öcalan’s post-2000 Turkish texts, including the KCK Social Pact, Democratic Confederalism, Problems of Democratization in Turkey, Defending a People and his İmralı notes from 2013 and 2014, and prints the originals in the footnotes. Democratic confederalism is presented as an alternative to the nation-state, yet it leaves all occupying forces that rule Kurdistan untouched and treats them as legitimate. The translation problem is specific. Democratic Confederalism is under 50 pages, yet its flag statements, “I respect the Turkish flag” and “your flag is mine”, appear only in the Turkish edition. The English version uses the word “assimilation” five times, always critically. The Turkish original uses it once, and there Öcalan accepts the “natural assimilation” of Kurds, describing them as a “sociological phenomenon” and a “richness” for the Turkish nation. Most Western scholarship on Öcalan, including Jongerden, Akkaya, Gunes, Dirik and Graeber, rests on these selective translations. Kamran Matin and Michiel Leezenberg are among the few critical exceptions. The story that Öcalan converted from Kurdish statehood to post-nationalism under Murray Bookchin’s influence does not hold, because there was no statehood project to give up. In 1977 he said the PKK “did not emerge exclusively for only one nationality”. In 2004 he admitted that “Independent Kurdistan” was a slogan and that the PKK never thought the question of a state through. In a 1988 interview with Mehmet Ali Birand he spoke of coexistence and “internal independence”. At a 1993 press conference in Lebanon with Jalal Talabani he said Kurds and Turks could not separate, comparing them to “a fingernail and the surrounding flesh”, and offered to disarm in return for legal guarantees. In 1996 interviews with Nabil al-Mulham he denied that Western Kurdistan exists, saying “it is correct to say Syrian Kurds”, and proposed federalism inside Turkey, Iran and Iraq on the German, Spanish and Swiss models. The real shift after his capture was from supporting Kurdish federalism to opposing it. He also claims that without his “insight” in prison he “would have been a primitive nationalist aspiring for the nation-state”, which contradicts his own account. Behind this sits a Kemalist view of Kurds that runs through his writing. In 2004 he wrote that Kurds “were not even aware of the extent of their betrayal” and that “neither human nor animal laws applied to them. They almost played the role of a third kind of being.” He spoke of the “old Kurdish trouble”. He told cadres that Kurds who believe they are free “must first be enslaved, and then these slaves must be freed”. He said his personality and principles “are more like those of a prophet”. In 1992 he told Birand that Kurdish power must stay under a single leadership: “I hold all these strings in my hand.” The PKK’s working language remained Turkish, and in 47 years it has produced no serious plan to revive Kurdish. Meanwhile the war emptied 2,685 Kurdish villages and hamlets by 1996, according to Human Rights Watch. A Van teachers’ union estimate puts the share of Kurds speaking Kurdish at 90% in the 1920s and around 7 to 8% today, with voluntary assimilation peaking during the Turkeyification years under the AKP. In Öcalan’s own words, democratic confederalism leaves the Turkish state untouched. “The institutions and existing borders of the Republic of Turkey are considered legitimate. Issues such as whether it should be unitary, federal or confederal are not discussed, and it is not even recommended to bring them up.” “Yes to state reform, no to opposition to the state.” A completely stateless democracy is “adventurism”. “I am not saying that Turkey should become confederal. I am saying that it should be a democratic republic without losing its unitary structure.” Kurds should build their confederalism “without touching the borders”. The 2005 KCK Social Pact declares that three legal systems will now apply in Kurdistan: EU law, unitary state law and democratic confederal law. Öcalan describes the KCK as a civil society body that belongs “within the totality of the people or nation of Turkey”. He calls it parallel and complementary to the unitary state, and says its flexible idea of the nation will block “the problem-causing potential of federalist solutions”. He calls the nation-state fascist and compares it to Hitler and Mussolini, yet he declares the Turkish nation-state legitimate by calling it a republic. France, the first modern nation-state, was also a republic. Real multinational states such as Switzerland and Belgium rest on decentralisation and constitutional multilingualism, the very things Öcalan rules out. On where the KCK came from, the İmralı notes are blunt. “We want to be a fundamental democratic element of this state… I built the KCK on this condition during Emre’s time.” Emre Taner was then head of Turkish intelligence (MİT). Öcalan describes five exhausting years of negotiations with Taner and a 156-page roadmap that was rejected. In his 2009 book he calls for “an intensive dialogue with the state’s security forces” to resolve the KCK’s legal questions. The KCK came out of bargaining with the Turkish state, not out of a Bookchinite change of paradigm. Then there is the Misak-ı Milli. The last Ottoman parliament adopted it in 1920, and it defined Turkey’s borders as the armistice line of 1918. Mustafa Kemal’s own definition ran from south of İskenderun through the Jarablus bridge between Aleppo and Katma to the Euphrates and down to Deir ez-Zor. It included Mosul, Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah, which means South and West Kurdistan. He wrote to Talat Pasha that “all our provinces where Turkish and Kurdish are spoken will belong to us”. He told parliament that “the line that we will determine with our strength and power will be the border”. Turkey annexed Hatay on the same logic in 1939, and Erdoğan invoked the Pact over Mosul in 2016. Öcalan presents this pact as a Kurdish-Turkish brotherhood. He writes that its borders were “built on the unity of Kurds and Turks”. He says its break-up after 1925 “is actually the fragmentation of the Kurds” and that “when we mention the Middle East Confederation, it is about reviving this”. He says he does not see it as “an imperial event”. He tells the PKK: “All Kurds will establish a strong alliance with Turkey. The National Pact Commission will discuss this… This alliance has existed since the Hittites.” He describes the KCK as an umbrella for “all Kurds of the Middle East within the framework of Turkey’s national integrity”. He builds a thousand-year history for this alliance, from Manzikert in 1071 to the Treaty of Qasr-e Shirin in 1639, which he calls a betrayal of it. He says he pitched the Mitanni-Hittite alliance to Emre Taner and the Battle of Manzikert to Taner’s successor, Hakan Fidan. He also claims Kemal’s speech of 23 April 1920 described Kurds and Turks respecting each other’s rights. The parliamentary minutes show that Kemal never mentioned Kurds. He spoke of Turks, Circassians and “Islamic elements” and put off all details until “after our existence is saved”. The plan was put into practice through the Kurdish National Congress. “This Kurdish congress will be the thing that determines the Misak-ı Milli,” Öcalan told a pro-Kurdish delegation. He proposed four conferences. One was in Diyarbakır and open even to Hizbullah and Kemal Burkay. One was in Ankara under the HDP, one in Europe, and one in Erbil, which “should approach it within the framework of the National Pact”, with Kurds from Syria taking part. When Selahattin Demirtaş asked for a message for the Erbil conference, Öcalan told him to explain “the issue of Misak-ı Milli in the right form”. HDP MP Nursel Aydoğan put it plainly: Öcalan “is the main obstacle to the establishment of a Kurdish state”, and every negotiation on İmralı aimed to resolve the Kurdish issue within the framework of the Misak-ı Milli. The whole project fits the AKP’s neo-Ottoman foreign policy. Öcalan says Jewish lobbies first planned “a proto-Israeli project” in South Kurdistan. Later they “got rid of Saddam” in order to take over the Kurds through Kurdish nationalism. He recasts Sheikh Said’s 1925 revolt as a British-provoked attempt to restore the caliphate, which reverses his earlier view that it was a religious and national uprising against near-genocidal attacks. He calls Iraqi Kurdish self-rule “a bomb” placed at “the very bottom of Turkey’s belly” and the Kurdistan Region “a cheap collaborator state”, likening it to Enkidu. In the Social Pact, self-determination shrinks to villages, neighbourhoods and cities managing their own affairs, and the UN system is dismissed as a failed model built on nation-states. From 2004 the Kurds stop being a nation in his writing and become a people, and Kurdish becomes “the local language”. By 2011 he questions whether Kurds have even “reached the stage of nationhood”, while Turks remain “the Turkish nation”. He writes that “considering the Kurds as a sociological phenomenon serves the interests of the Turkish nation better” and that “leaving social phenomena to natural assimilation” has been humanity’s basic tendency. His “fraternal unity” comes with a guarantee: “With this approach, there is no danger of Kurdish becoming the official language, followed by a federation.” He dismisses insistence on nation and language as “dogmatic values” and writes that he was “born into a society that has not really progressed beyond Neolithic culture”. He calls this policy Türkiyeleşme (Turkeyification) and presents it as Atatürk’s own inclusive idea of a “nation of Turkey”. In reality Kemal used “Turkish State” and “Republic of Turkey” interchangeably, spoke of the “Turkish nation”, and called Kurdish identity an “incorrect label” left over from despotic times. Turkeyification is voluntary Turkification. The İmralı notes from 2013 show where this leads. When pro-Kurdish MPs pressed for state-funded Kurdish education, Öcalan replied: “Asking the state is a mistake. This is not the duty of the state but of society. If you cannot teach your mother tongue to your own child, how can you ask the state?” He said there is “a principle of equality in the constitution”, so such education “cannot be demanded”. He said boycotts only inflame things and that the MPs should open model schools in Diyarbakır instead. A Kurdish school did open there in 2013, and the authorities later sealed it. Elsewhere in the notes he says: “I am not even discussing language education.” When the PKK leadership in Qandil demanded that the new constitution name the existence of the Kurdish people, he refused: “Do not conflate national identity with state citizenship.” The only wording he proposed was “our constitution accepts all historical cultures as the richness of Turkey”. He told MPs “we belong to the state” and borrowed the AKP’s Islamic language of a shared millet. He summed it up: “There is a Turkish nation, and that is a reality… We can call it the nation of Turkey.” Elsewhere he says: “We have no objections to the unitary state, to the republic. Turkish will remain the official language, the flag will of course be there.” This is the constitution he declared legitimate. Article 66 says that everyone bound to the state by citizenship is a Turk. Article 42 says no language other than Turkish may be taught as a mother tongue. The preamble places sovereignty in the Turkish nation alone, and Article 301 of the penal code makes “insulting Turkishness” a crime. It is the system İsmet İnönü summed up as “our task is to Turkify everyone, no matter what the cost”. Iran’s constitution allows regional languages in the media and the teaching of their literature in schools, which is more than Öcalan asks for. His position also falls short of UN standards on language rights. It is a neoliberal position: a self-declared enemy of “capitalist modernity” leaving the survival of Kurdish to the market. In 2003 he wrote that forced assimilation should end and “voluntariness should be the basis”, because “the necessities of life take care of one’s own language”. He warned that forcing Kurds to count as Turks damages “Turkish purity” and produces “an ugly hybridisation”. In 2004 he described assimilation before the Republic as “peaceful and culturally enriching”. The results can be measured. A 2023 Kurdish Studies Center survey found that only 30% of Kurds in Turkey are proficient in Kurdish, 30% have intermediate skills and 40% do not use it in daily life. More than half the children of fluent parents know little or no Kurdish, and nearly 60% of respondents report discrimination. Öcalan’s prescription leads to language death from the top down. He says that Kurdish can only be encouraged at primary level, and he treated Turkish as the sole official language. Öcalan opposes a Kurdish state, not the nation-state. His proposal asks Turkey to tolerate the physical existence of Kurds and to replace forced assimilation with voluntary assimilation, and in return he promises that Kurds will not seek federalism or official status for their language. The result is a “civil society of subjects” under colonial sovereignty.

The attested medieval Kurdish word here, gūmīz, colloquially meant urine, but etymologically it is a compound meaning cow’s urine. It's related to the infamous Zoroastrian custom of using consecrated bull’s urine (Avestan: gaomaēza) as a purifying agent in ritual practice, comparable to the Muslim use of drinking camel urine in medicinal healing. Kurds probably did not maintain the Zoroastrian custom after becoming Muslim, but the word from that custom was indeed maintained among some Kurds, which is quite interesting given how deep into the Islamic age that is. Modern Kurdish speakers simply just use mīz (urine). Cow urine among Zoroastrians was chiefly used as a preventative measure against pollution from corpses, which was blamed on the corpse demon Nasu, and was used in the nine night barašnūm purification. Worshippers rubbed a few drops on their hands and face during the morning for the 5 daily kustī prayers and some rites. The practice goes back to Indo-Iranian roots, as Vedic India showed the same reverence for cow urine (gomūtra).

MAJOR development. After several years of on and off attempts, I have finally solved the etymology of the ethnonym Kurd, which currently has no solution in academia. It comes from Proto-Indo-European *kr̥t-í- “cut” → Proto-Indo-Iranian *kr̥ti- → Proto-Iranian *kr̥ti- → *kur(ə)ti- (“cut”, but also an outer “garment”) → *Kurt(i)- (adopted as a tribal name) → *Kurt → *Kurd (by the 3rd c. CE) → Kurd (from a tribal identity to an ethnonym). The first image, an etymological tree, sets out and justifies each sound change, if you want to see how the derivation is linguistically proven. It also contains the historical details on each form where attested. X reduces image resolution, so to read it clearly, expand the image and open it in a new tab. The second image shows the garment in question: the thick, tent-like traditional shepherd’s cloak made of dense felted wool, or wool mixed with goat hair. Specifically, the name Kurd comes from this outer-garment sense, which was later adopted as a tribal name. Among Iranian languages, the garment word first appears in Avestan as kərəti-, in instructions on how Zoroastrians should wear it together with the sacred shirt and belt. In Parthian, kórt-ēn was the garment boys received as a coming-of-age gift when they reached manhood (which is linguistically a close match to the word Kurd, as the stem's predicted outcome of the Parthian would eventually become Kórd/Kurd since that gloss predates t > d). The word has cognates across the Iranian world, living and extinct, such as Khotanese, Ossetian, Sogdian and Bactrian. There is historical evidence that Kurd still carried a secondary garment meaning in the early Islamic period, as the word was borrowed into Classical Arabic for a type of garment: kurdī, from the narrator Ibn Abī al-Zinād (d. 790 CE in Baghdad), in Abū Dāwūd 915 (before 889 CE), and kurdiyya in Ibn al-ʿArabī (d. 1148 CE), among others. The hadith reads: “…from ʿĀʾisha, with this report. He said: and he took a kurdī that belonged to Abū Jahm. It was said: O Messenger of God, the khamīṣa was better than the kurdī.” This is important because it shows the t > d form unlike Kurt-(ek), and other forms that passed through west Iranian languages later on via Sogdian. They are still from the same root however. Tribal names and clans very often come from places, animals, objects and so on. The Kurdish tribe Sanjabi is named after the squirrel fur, Herki is named after a citadel, etc. Kurds are first attested in history specifically as a tribe by Eratosthenes, Strabo and others. The older reading of Kurd as “nomad” has no etymological basis in any Iranian language, and many Kurdologists/Iranologists today regard it as an anti-Kurdish narrative with no basis in the historical record (see Boris James). Some earlier academics unknowingly built on Arabic mistranslations and deliberate misreadings, which are now corrected. There were also at least 11 Iranian nomadic tribal organisations on the plateau before Islam with no Kurdish identification, and 5 Iranian tribal organisations on the plateau that never had a Kurdish tribal affiliation which completely contradicts this narrative. The main sound-change question left open in my tree is how r̥ became ur, since it normally gives ar or ər. There are several resolutions, but it is not yet clear which one it is. The u-form *kur(ə)ti- may have spread by borrowing, as a garment from the East Iranian lands: ur is the usual outcome in Parachi, Sanglechi-Ishkashmi and Shughni (Clayton 2022), and Sogdian kurθ- probably passed into Persian kurta. Or it may be a regular change in some western dialect, as in Balochi kurt “did” < *kr̥ta- (Korn 2003). Several scholars already tie the garment word to the root for “cut”. Abaev derives Ossetian kærc “fur coat” from Old Ossetian *karti-, which “corresponds perfectly” to Avestan kərəti- “garment” (that is, *kr̥ti-), perhaps from *(s)ker- “to cut”; he calls Ossetian kuræt a loan. Bailey derives Khotanese kīḍakyä “garment” from kart- “to cut, tailor”, comparing kərəti-. Henning took Sogdian kurθ- “garment” as the same word as kərəti-, and Benveniste linked Persian kurta to the Sogdian. Sims-Williams, publishing Bactrian kuratīg “shirt”, calls it “a word of unknown but probably non-Iranian origin”, which would leave room for a substrate source such as the BMAC (2007: 224). Although Sims-Williams did not gloss through the full extent of the Iranian forms, or look too deeply into it. I have opted otherwise, and agree with the other scholars who do derive it through Iranian, because of the following reasons. Avestan kərəti-, Ossetian kærc and Khotanese kīḍ- show the regular outcomes of *kr̥ti- at opposite ends of the Iranian world. The root has an Indo-European etymology, *(s)ker-t- “cut”, shared with Vedic kṛtí- “dagger”, and the Pahlavi commentary renders kərəti- as kirrēnīdag “cut”. The forms Sims-Williams compares are the u-forms, and they can all be accounted for within Iranian. The Sogdian θ comes from the regular change ty > θy. Persian kurta, Arabic qurṭaq, Pashto kurta and Ossetian kuræt are loans. A word with a regular Iranian etymology doesn’t need a substrate source. To clarify for anyone who doesn't know, the stem is important for derivation as it carries the evidence of descent, while the the suffixes don’t necessarily. A stem passes down through Iranian forms and goes through its regular sound changes, so kurt- with t, kurθ- with θ and kurd with d each show where a form sits on the tree. Suffixes are added afresh by each language and are often swapped or borrowed depending on the application and context. Given this etymology, the identification of the Cyrtians with the Kurds is even stronger than it already was, as the forms are an exact match. Identifications with the Carduchi, Qardu, among other folk proposals have become even more improbable, both linguistically and historically, than they already were.

Publication in the journal of Iranian Studies hosted by Cambridge University Press, Boris James debunks the long-held view that “Kurd” in early medieval Arabic sources simply meant “nomad”. He argues that this view was a “hyper-reaction” against pro-Kurdish essentialism. It was reinforced by a misreading of Minorsky, and by misappropriated historical data. He answers it by examining both modern scholarship and Arabic sources from the 9th to the 15th century. He shows that “Kurd” was already the name of a people in the earliest sources, first defined in relation to Arabs and non-Arabs, and that from the 11th century this Arab centric historicity dies down, and Kurds are defined independently from this categorisation. He states it remains impossible to know, for technical reasons, the precise moment when individuals from a specific territory began to see themselves as Kurds from a medieval point of view because the sources offer very little in that regard. The clearest historical evidence of that in the medieval age begins in the 1100s CE due to the Ayyubids. James concludes that in medieval Arabic sources “Kurd” was a genuine ethnonym. He builds this from medieval authors writing between the 9th and 15th centuries. For the early period he uses al-Jahiz, Ibn Durayd, al-Ya’qubi, al-Tabari, Hamza al-Isfahani, al-Mas’udi and Ibn Hawqal. For the later period he uses Ibn al-Sam’ani, al-Wahrani, ‘Imad al-Din al-Isfahani, Ibn Shaddad, Yaqut, Ibn al-Athir, Ibn Khallikan, Abu Shama, al-Khazraji, al-Dhahabi, al-‘Umari, Ibn Khaldun and al-Maqrizi. His target is a modern orthodoxy resting on Vladimir Minorsky. In response to some pro-Kurdish authors who treated Kurdishness as a fixed essence, a number of scholars accepted that “Kurd” eventually became an ethnonym but treated its early medieval meaning as simply “nomad”. James’s examples are Basil Nikitine, Wadie Jwaideh and Martin van Bruinessen. He also challenges Jean Aubin, who read “Kurd” as describing a pastoral, tribal way of life, and Hakan Özoğlu, who saw it as an outsiders’ term. In James’s account, three things drove the “nomad” reading. It was a “hyper-reaction” against pro-Kurdish essentialism. Fixing the term’s meaning resolved the puzzle of why groups such as the Lurs and Gouranis were called Kurds then but not now. And these scholars mixed early and late evidence, with Nikitine and Jwaideh stretching Minorsky’s narrow remark about 10th-century western Iran into a general rule. To correct this, James draws on Jan Retsö’s parallel work on the word “Arab”, Lakoff and Johnson’s view that concepts are defined through one another, Fredrik Barth’s theory of ethnic boundaries, Catherine Quiminal’s “contexts of meaning”, Ian Hacking on social construction, and Gabriel Martinez-Gros’s reading of Ibn Khaldun. He also uses Stephan Conermann’s study of Kurds in Mamluk eyes, while rejecting Conermann’s criticism of Ibn Khaldun. Historians such as Anne-Marie Eddé, Reuven Amitai, Jean-Michel Mouton and Percy Kemp supply further evidence. James separates two historical phases and shows that “Kurd” took its meaning from its shifting relationship with other ethnonyms (‘arab, ‘ajam, turk), not from any fixed trait. His starting point is how ethnonyms work. Unlike words such as “Muslim”, nothing in the word “Kurd” decides who belongs, and Mas’udi’s legend deriving it from “driven out” merely confirms an existing negative image. Being associated with nomadism no more makes “Kurd” mean “nomad” than calling the Laz “the Belgians of Turkey” makes “Laz” mean “stupid”. In the first phase (8th to 11th century), authors defined Kurds through two other categories. An Arab element, expressed through Bedouin genealogies and shared pastoralism, linked them to Arabs. A non-Arab (‘ajam) element, chiefly language, set them apart. This was a comparison between peoples, not an equation. In the second phase (11th to 14th century), “Kurd” stands on its own. Yaqut distinguishes Kurds from Bedouin, and Ibn Khallikan lists Kurdish origin separately from Arab and ‘ajam. Al-‘Umari describes Arabs who “adopted the lifestyle of the Kurds” and ‘ajam who “have Kurdified”. Maqrizi reverses Mas’udi’s weighting, rejecting the Arab genealogy and stressing the non-Arab element, which shows the term had its own dynamic. James suggests three causes for the change: new contacts with Turks, Kurdish and Daylamite dynasties, and the Turco-Mongol invasions; closer knowledge of Kurds once they joined the armies and cities of the great empires; and rivalry with the Turks. He then identifies six frames in which “Kurd” was used. Two continue from the first phase: Arab versus non-Arab, and Arab tribal genealogy. The third is Ibn Khaldun’s Bedouin cycle, in which Kurds rose with the Zangids and Ayyubids and returned to the margins under the Mamluks. The fourth is a civilisational stereotype of Kurds as violent, rebellious, heterodox and poor in Arabic. The fifth is geographical, tying Kurds to named territories such as Bilād al-Akrād (“land of the Kurds”) as their tribal territory shifted westward. The sixth casts the Turk as the Kurd’s “Other”. Finally, against Aubin and Özoğlu, whose views leave no room for Kurds’ own role in shaping the term, he finds evidence that Kurds identified as such themselves. ‘Isa al-Hakkari urged a rival to back Saladin as a fellow Kurd rather than leave power to the Turks. Abu al-Hayja’ wrote that Kurds and Turks would never obey each other. Al-Mashtub cut off his son’s Turkish-style braid because Kurds did not wear their hair that way. This rivalry peaked as Ayyubid rule ended, and the creation of a Mamluk “dynasty of the Turks” allowed later writers to depict the Ayyubids as the “dynasty of the Kurds”. Being identified as a Kurdish dynasty also weakened the Ayyubids’ claim to rule universally, beyond any single people.

This map plots every passage in which Ibn Miskawayh writes about Kurds in his history Taǧārib al-Umam. There are 35, describing events from 685 to 980 CE, coloured by period and placed at the towns and districts the text names. They stretch from Mosul, Šahrazūr and Āḏarbāyǧān across the Zagros to Ḫūzistān, Fārs and Kirmān. Most come from the 10th century: the Kurdish ruler Daysam in Āḏarbāyǧān, Ḥasanūya in the Ǧibāl, and Kurdish troops, raiders and chiefs dealing with the Buyid court. The later continuations printed with the book are left out, as they are by other authors. Abū ʿAlī Miskawayh (c. 932–1030) was an Iranian historian and philosopher from Rayy. He served as librarian to the Buyid vizier Ibn al-ʿAmīd and later worked for ʿAḍud al-Dawla. His Taǧārib al-Umam (“The Experiences of Nations”) is a universal history from the ancient Iranian kings to 979–980 CE. For the earlier centuries he abridges al-Ṭabarī. From the 950s on he writes as an insider, often from what he saw himself or heard from Ibn al-ʿAmīd. This makes the book one of the main contemporary sources for the Kurds of the 10th century. Open map in a new tab for better resolution.

I’ve tabulated the Iranian tribal groups of the plateau that historical sources describe as nomadic. Here you can see many examples of non-Kurdish Iranian nomads, which refutes the notion that “Kurd” was merely a generic term for Iranian nomads. The sources treat the Kurds as a distinct group and name other nomads separately. Take for example Sasanian-era Syriac texts distinguish the nomadic Kermanis (Qarmānāyē) from the Kurds, and Yāqūt describes the Baloch of Kerman as “a people like the Kurds” rather than calling them Kurds, which directly implies a distinction. The notion that “Kurd” means Iranian nomad stems from a misreading of cherry-picked comparative remarks in Arabic and Arabic-influenced historiography, such as “the Kurds are the Bedouin of Persia”. It projects the Arab division between the ʿarab (settled) and the aʿrāb (nomads) onto Iranian society. We know this not to be the case because Sassanian social structure is quite decently attested, and this isn't how society was divided up.

Interesting book on the languages of the Caspian region of Iran. I’ll focus on the Kurdish sections, since that is my focus on X, but there are a lot of other important details. Foremost is Habib Borjian’s finding that Sangesari is a language isolate within the Iranian family, being neither Northwest Iranian nor Persian. It possibly derives from an "East Iranian" tribe absorbed into the local population, with a Caspian layer from areal contact. Sangesari turns *θr, *fra- and *xr- into š (še ‘three’, pəšé ‘father’), and the only parallels are in Chorasmian, Sogdian, Parachi-Ormuri and Balochi. The book is important for the classification of the languages near the Caspian, such as Gilaki, Mazani and the various varieties of Semnan, which should not be dismissed as mere dialects, and can be classified in a few clusters. The Kurmanji passive research and the Kermanshah study are by Elham Mizban and Ali Alizadeh (ch. 9), and the Ilam attitudes and accent findings come from Hossein Davari and Saeed Nourzadeh (ch. 8), who summarise earlier studies. A note for my Kurdish readers: Garnik Asatrian, a controversial figure in Kurdish studies, wrote only the foreword and is not an author of any chapter. Mizban and Alizadeh’s main finding is that Persian is now changing the grammar of Kurmanji in Iran as well as its vocabulary, and the clearest example is the way speakers form the passive. Kurmanji has traditionally formed the passive with the verb hatin, “to come”, so that “the house was sold” becomes māl hāta feritene, literally “the house came sold”, a type of passive that is rare among the world’s languages. Interviewing 74 speakers, the authors collected 598 passive sentences and found that only 36% used hatin, while 64% used bûn, “to become”, which mirrors the Persian passive with šodan. Older speakers without schooling tended to keep the traditional form, whereas women and those educated through Iran’s Persian-only school system leaned towards the new one. The authors read this socially: men may hold on to the traditional passive as a way of asserting identity, while women and educated speakers adopt the Persian-style form because Persian carries prestige. The book also looks at how Kurds in Iran see their language more broadly. A study it cites from Ilam found that 73% of 360 Kurdish-Persian bilinguals viewed Kurdish positively and saw it as central to their identity. Many still regarded it as lower in status than Persian, which they saw as the language of social mobility, and felt institutional support for Kurdish was lacking. Another cited study found that Kurdish accents in Persian are heard as trustworthy but less dynamic. Research in Kermanshah links the shift from Kalhuri Kurdish to Persian mainly to economic pressure, a shift the book says has sparked debate within the Kurdish community. Sources: doi.org/10.1007/978-981-95-1…; doi.org/10.1007/978-981-95-1…

I mapped all historical accounts involving Kurds according to the Muslim scholar and historian Al-Tabari (839–923 CE). Born in Tabaristan, in present-day northern Iran, he became one of the most influential figures in early Islamic scholarship. He is best known for his major works, including The History of the Prophets and Kings, which documents events from the creation of the world to his own time, and his extensive commentary on the Qur’an, known as Tafsir al-Tabari. Open the map in a new tab, and zoom in for detailed and higher resolution view.

In light of the recent controversy, many Kurds have correctly pointed out that Dilin is a Kurdish name. However, many are incorrectly asserting that “dil”, meaning heart, is not a Persian loanword. The native Kurdish word for heart would be zill, which is now out of use and has been replaced by the Persian word dil. Ultimately, both come from the same Proto-Iranian root. Given the Kurdish sound change rd > ll and the Old Persian change *ĵ > d, one would chronologically expect Middle Persian or Classical Persian to be the source of the loan (since modern Persian renders it as Del, and Kurdish has evidently used it for a long time). In the chart, I have opted for a Middle Persian route because, generally speaking, that is when Kurdish contact with Persian was more extensive. The "în" in Dilin is the Kurdish suffix with which intransitive verbs are formed from certain simple nouns which derives from proto Iranian *-a- (thematic vowel) + *-iHnah.

I plotted every historical activity involving Kurds on a map, from classical antiquity to the aftermath of the Islamic conquests (c. 240 BCE–700 CE). On the right, I’ve tabulated the sources on which they are based. This does not include Corduene, Karduchoi, etc., as these are linguistically unrelated terms, and Kurds settled these lands later as foreigners to the region. The Kurds in this era were not a generic term for Iranian nomads or shepherds. They are explicitly mentioned as a specific tribal organisation among many other old Iranian tribal organisations. This era predates the ethnic character that Kurds acquired after the development of the Islamic age. I will be making many more exhaustive maps in the future, detailing all things related to Kurdology. A map of the Kurds of the early Islamic era is currently being completed and will be released in the coming month. Open the map in a new tab for higher resolution.

Does the Kurdish feature of ergativity come from Hurrian? No. Below, I have tabulated how alignment in past transitive clauses works across various Iranian languages. Ergativity appears across the Iranian language family, in Pashto, Balochi, Yaghnobi and the "Pamir" languages (in decayed forms). Modern Standard Persian has lost this feature, but Middle Persian still had it, and Achomi, a close relative of Persian, still does. Hurrian ergativity worked differently: it applied in every tense, and the verb agreed with the doer. Of course, no serious linguist has ever suggested this common folk belief that Kurdish got ergativity from Hurrian.

What defines Proto-Iranian as a single genealogical unit, rather than an areal grouping (a Sprachbund), is not fully understood. Sound changes such as *ćw > sp and *s > h are now considered problematic criteria for defining Proto-Iranian. If the reconstruction of Proto-Iranian ultimately collapses into Indo-Iranian, the term Proto-Iranian would become obsolete and would need to be revised. Interestingly, it is not the position of Scythian that complicates the classification of the Iranian languages, as much as Persian and Khotanese, which diverge sharply from the rest of the group in it's core. If Proto-Iranian is a genuine genealogical unit, the features shown in the screenshot could be considered its unifying features, albeit further investigation is required. The term Proto-Iranian is itself problematic in a linguistic sense, because "Iranian" is an ethno-religious label that ultimately derives from Zoroastrianism, and many of the languages descended from the "Proto-Iranian" category were never even in areal contact with Avestan, or belonging to the ethnic Iranian group. What linguists call Proto-Iranian can instead be linked archaeologically to the Alakul-derived dialects of the Andronovo culture. The fact that Alakul is itself a Turkic word is not ideal as a replacement.

Here is an Autosomal DNA comparison table of various Kurdish subgroups against other "West Iranic" ethnic groups at the Bronze and Iron Age level, including Azeris, who are "Turki" by their endonym. Avestan-age samples here are an average of published and unpublished Iron Age Iranians from Central Asia who model as BMAC/Sintashta/WSHG. The Avestan age is significant, as it is the stem from which Iranian ethnic identity is born. Excess BMAC and Hissar (IIa–IIIb) are samples used to capture "local" pre-Iranian plateau admixture, outside of the intrusive admixture seen in the Bronze and Iron Age central and northern Zagros regions. Anatolian BA samples used here are mainly a two-way mix between Shulaveri-Shomu culture (SSC) and Chaff-Faced Ware (CFW) upper Mesopotamia, among other minor ancestries like raw ANF. Armenia MBA is used to capture para-Armenic movement and ancestries, which mostly spread into Kurds via medieval Armenians, evident by the fact many lack it. Berel IA is an eastern Saka profile, which some Turkics would have partly assimilated into their ethnos while still on the steppe. The Xiongnu represent the core cluster of the proto-Turkic-speaking population. Dinkha 1 is used to capture intrusive Semitic-Hurrian mixed profiles that had been moving into the plateau from the Levant and Mesopotamia from at least the Middle Bronze Age, but continued to move there very late into the Iranian periods. Indus Valley is used to capture South Asian ancestry, which exists even within components like the BMAC, but the excess here is largely attributable to post-Islamic South Asian migrations from "Zutts," "Dom," "Gypsies," and so on. It peaks in Khorasanis, Balochis, and Bandaris. Pontus here is used to capture any possible Kartvelian-type ancestry. SSA is used to capture any type of African ancestry into the plateau, which is seen commonly along the Persian Gulf.