Who are the Kurds?

Hushyar, i said that i did not believe the theory i presented. I only put it out to have another aspect to the discussion.

The explanations you gave make a lot more sense to me, personally.

Originally posted by ArmenianSurvival Hushyar, i said that i did not believe the theory i presented. I only put it out to have another aspect to the discussion. The explanations you gave make a lot more sense to me, personally.

Your welcome

Kurds are Iranian, their language is Indo-Iranian, they are aryan. Kurdistan is and shall be part of IRAN.

 

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurds
It's not any excellent article because political opinions seem to have affected its redaction, restricting much its scope, etc. Still it mentions, as I had heard before, that Xenophon the ancient Greek historian recorded the Kurds in the Anabasis as "Khardukhi" a fierce and protective mountain dwelling peoples who attacked his armies in 400 BC.

So guess that we can concede that Kurds have been there (quite silently) at least the last 2400 years. I can guess that could be well the Indo-Europeized descendants of some of the most ancient dwellers of the region but this is speculative. They could also be descendant of the Mitanni, a Hurrian (Caucasic speaking?) people whose elite spoke a IE language of the Indo-Iranian group.  But guess that they could also had been linguistically assimilated by any of the different successive Iranian empires that ruled the region  in Ancient times (Persian, Medes, Sassanids...).

What is clear is that they aren't Turk or Arabs and any relationship with Iranian or Caucasic peoples is diffuminated by milennia of separation and also surely by the different substratum on which the IE tongues stabilished on.

It's also clear that while Turks, for instance, only have a very small proportion of "true" Turk blood (genes), being basically descendants of the peoples that were dwelling in the region since early Neolithic times, the same reasoning can be applied for Kurds. These peoples haven't migrated but only their elites have. Peasants stay most of the time attached to the land and are almost impossible to be exterminated as can happen with nomadic tribes (the best examples of that are in Latin America, where agricultural natives still remain being the core of the population in places like Peru and Bolivia and others).

Wow, I havent known that east-central Anatolia was Kurdish speaking. Interesting paint job...

I am of the rather serious opinion that IE tongues come from Central Asia (Kurgan theory). There are no references of IEs living in the Near East in ancient times before the arrival of Hittites and Mittani. Sumer was... Sumerian, Elam Dravidic, Akkad, Assyria and others Semitic (Afroasian), Hurrians Caucasic most likely, Egypt Afroasian too (Hamitic), Hatti non-IE (we don't know exactly what they spoke)... where do you get those IEs suddenly springing from precisely Kurdistan?

At the spring of Neolithic Age the area was divided in two cultural groups: those of the Levant (Syria, Palestine, etc) and those of the North (Anatolia  and Kurdistan). The former seem to have been locally evolved, the latter could well have migrated from the North and even the West in earlier times (Paleolithic Gravetian culture). As I have no reason to think that IE was out of Central Asia at that time (see below), I tend to think that these, along with other groups of Eastern Gravetian background spoke maybe ancient tongues of the Caucasic families (as the Caucasus was also of Gravetian cultural background, as well as Ukraine and Russia). This is maybe too risky but at least makes some sense.

Recently several philologists seem to have concluded in separate but concordant studies (quoted by Cavalli-Sforza in Genes, Peoples and Tongues) that IE is clearly related in a linguistical superfamily with Altaic and Uralic families, well known to have sprang from Central Asia and Siberia. So I think this confirms pretty much the Kurgan theory of IE origins.

Also, please, show me the slightest proof of that map being real and just not a fancy imaginary artwork. IEs are not located in the Near East before 2000 BCE (Hittites), while they seem to have been (following the Kurgan theory) in Eastern Europe since 3500 BCE. This is not concordant with your funny map either.

Also, you can trace archaeologically the Jamnaja Kultura (original Kurgans) to the Scythes who were a IE speaking people, related with Persian and Medes (and probably directly with all the Eastern IE subfamily).  They dwelt basically in Central Asia, expanding at times to southern Russia and Ukraine.

Additionally, you can trace archaeologically a related group: the Culture of Catacombs (the Caucasian-Russian one, not the Italian one of the same name) to the Cymmerians, another IE-speaking people known historically.

You can also trace a branch of the early Kurgan related expansion  in Europe to early Germanic peoples (in Scandinavia and Lower Germany), another IE-speaking group well traced.

So everything points to the Kurgan theory having at least some serious weight and that means that IEs are originally from Central Asia, what also explains quite well their double expansion towards Iran-India (eastern branch) and towards Europe (western branch).

Originally posted by Maju I am of the rather serious opinion that IE tongues come from Central Asia (Kurgan theory). There are no references of IEs living in the Near East in ancient times before the arrival of Hittites and Mittani. Sumer was... Sumerian, Elam Dravidic, Akkad, Assyria and others Semitic (Afroasian), Hurrians Caucasic most likely, Egypt Afroasian too (Hamitic), Hatti non-IE (we don't know exactly what they spoke)... where do you get those IEs suddenly springing from precisely Kurdistan? At the spring of Neolithic Age the area was divided in two cultural groups: those of the Levant (Syria, Palestine, etc) and those of the North (Anatolia  and Kurdistan). The former seem to have been locally evolved, the latter could well have migrated from the North and even the West in earlier times (Paleolithic Gravetian culture). As I have no reason to think that IE was out of Central Asia at that time (see below), I tend to think that these, along with other groups of Eastern Gravetian background spoke maybe ancient tongues of the Caucasic families (as the Caucasus was also of Gravetian cultural background, as well as Ukraine and Russia). This is maybe too risky but at least makes some sense. Recently several philologists seem to have concluded in separate but concordant studies (quoted by Cavalli-Sforza in Genes, Peoples and Tongues) that IE is clearly related in a linguistical superfamily with Altaic and Uralic families, well known to have sprang from Central Asia and Siberia. So I think this confirms pretty much the Kurgan theory of IE origins. Also, please, show me the slightest proof of that map being real and just not a fancy imaginary artwork. IEs are not located in the Near East before 2000 BCE (Hittites), while they seem to have been (following the Kurgan theory) in Eastern Europe since 3500 BCE. This is not concordant with your funny map either. Also, you can trace archaeologically the Jamnaja Kultura (original Kurgans) to the Scythes who were a IE speaking people, related with Persian and Medes (and probably directly with all the Eastern IE subfamily).  They dwelt basically in Central Asia, expanding at times to southern Russia and Ukraine. Additionally, you can trace archaeologically a related group: the Culture of Catacombs (the Caucasian-Russian one, not the Italian one of the same name) to the Cymmerians, another IE-speaking people known historically. You can also trace a branch of the early Kurgan related expansion  in Europe to early Germanic peoples (in Scandinavia and Lower Germany), another IE-speaking group well traced. So everything points to the Kurgan theory having at least some serious weight and that means that IEs are originally from Central Asia, what also explains quite well their double expansion towards Iran-India (eastern branch) and towards Europe (western branch).

The Kurgan theory is an outdated Theory my Turk.Now,it has been proven that the PIE people's homland was in Western Asia and exactly in your own country: the Turkey,and probably in Eastern Turkey.

Read these links carefully:

http://www.indoeuro.bizland.com/archive/article14.html

In the above like,you will read:

"As it is easily seen in the Indo-European Chronology, the first documents written in single Indo-European languages, appear around 1900 BC (Hittite), 1600 BC (Aryan), 1400 BC (Mycenaean Greek). "

As you see,2 out of 3 of the first Indo-european written documents (Aryan and Hittite) have been written by those IE's who were living in Western Asia and not in Central Asia.Even the Greece is much closer to Westeran Asia than to Central Asia.

Also we read that:

" All that helped the research very much, but still the matter is under discussion. Still another discipline which studies the issue is the comparison of Indo-European and other language families. Linguists already in the previous century tried to find common roots in Indo-European and Semitic languages, and not just words of common origin, but the loanwords, to show that some contacts took place between Proto-IE and Proto-Semitic peoples. They were a success, and today more than 20 words are found which can be a proof of ancient close language contacts between ethnic groups before they moved from their homelands. Among them, linguistics name IE *tauro- and Semitic *tawr- (a bull), IE  *ghaid- (a goat) and Semitic *gadj- (a goat cub) etc. The same borrowed lexics were borrowed by Indo-Europeans from other Afroasiatic, Caucasian, Urartian, Hurrian, Sumerian  languages. Building on this, Gamkrelidze and Ivanov believe that the Indo-European homeland lay in Northern Mesopotamia, between the Caucasus and Anatolia, in what is now Kurdistan and Armenia. "l

I ask you! where the Semitic peoples were and are living? in the Central Asia or in the Western Asia?

http://www.indoeuro.bizland.com/archive/article17.html

In the link above,you will find a map like this:

The map is showing the Aryan (=Indo-Iranian) homeland.Now, Where is the place number 2? Isn't it Kurdistan?!

And now,my winner card,the well-known "nature" magazine,accept that the PIE's homaland was in Anatolia,which was the home of the Kurds for thousands of years:

http://www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/nature/jour nal/v426/n6965/abs/nature02029_fs.html&dynoptions=doi106 9902039

Next time,you must be more accurate and impolite either! later!

Edited by Ardashir

Ardashir: I'm not Turk, I'm Basque and I strongly support the Kurdish cause. Still I can't agree with those theories placing IE roots in SW Asia only because the first written texts come from that region. This is self evidently due to the fact that written language was still unexistent in any of the other regions populated by IEs (or by other peoples, like Basques too). Written proof is proof of the fact that there were IE-speaking peoples there at the times you give and possibly before but it is not any proof of origin. For instance, Latin was first written in Rome and nearby areas, still Latins and other Italic peoples (IEs) had came from Southern Germany as archaelogical evidence shows quite clearly; Germanic was first written in France maybe but Germans came from Scandinavia and nearby regions, etc.

I say that the original IEs were most likely the carriers of the Jamnaja Kultura east of Volga (it seems that I am coincident with that Mr. Jain, whose name is the first time I read, by the way) and these can be perfectly traced from 3500 BCE to the Scythians of historical times.

Here is my suggested scheme of IE chronological evolution traced through archaeology basically:



Naturally, I have some doubts and blanks (like the origin of Albanians, Greeks and Thracians, or how come Latin is so close to German while so diferent from Celtic? Or what's the precise origin or the Kurdish language?) but for the main part of the issue I think I did a pretty good synthetizing archaeological data. Hope you can make some use of it.



Edited by Maju

Originally posted by Maju Ardashir: I'm not Turk, I'm Basque and I strongly support the Kurdish cause. Still I can't agree with those theories placing IE roots in SW Asia only because the first written texts come from that region. This is self evidently due to the fact that written language was still unexistent in any of the other regions populated by IEs (or by other peoples, like Basques too). Written proof is proof of the fact that there were IE-speaking peoples there at the times you give and possibly before but it is not any proof of origin. For instance, Latin was first written in Rome and nearby areas, still Latins and other Italic peoples (IEs) had came from Southern Germany as archaelogical evidence shows quite clearly; Germanic was first written in France maybe but Germans came from Scandinavia and nearby regions, etc. I say that the original IEs were most likely the carriers of the Jamnaja Kultura east of Volga (it seems that I am coincident with that Mr. Jain, whose name is the first time I read, by the way) and these can be perfectly traced from 3500 BCE to the Scythians of historical times. Here is my suggested scheme of IE chronological evolution traced through archaeology basically: Naturally, I have some doubts and blanks (like the origin of Albanians, Greeks and Thracians, or how come Latin is so close to German while so diferent from Celtic? Or what's the precise origin or the Kurdish language?) but for the main part of the issue I think I did a pretty good synthetizing archaeological data. Hope you can make some use of it.

Your theories are outdated.

Edited by Ardashir

Originally posted by Maju Why? I made it myself only a few years ago based in the most modern and accurate archaeological research I could find. I'm not expressing the opinions of others... nor any fashion... but my own personal coclusions. If you have discrepances why don't you write about them? I will surely find them interesting, specially if they are as sound and well researched as your disqualification seems to imply. Yet, bring your "ultimate" theories and the facts behind to the forum, please.

My links are enough and more than enough for rejection of your outdated theories.

But once again I ask you:

What's your explanation for existance of several common words between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Semitic languages?