page_title: Origin of the Kurds
section_title: Predecessor groups
hierarchical_section_title: Origin of the Kurds / Predecessor groups
caption_attribution_description: Map of Asia Minor. Historical Atlas
context_page_description: Scholars have suggested different theories for the origin of the name Kurd. According to the English Orientalist Godfrey Rolles Driver, the term Kurd is related to the Sumerian Karda which was found from Sumerian clay tablets of the third millennium B.C, while according to other scholars, it predates the Islamic period, as a Middle Persian word for "nomad", and may ultimately be derived from an ancient toponym or tribal name, either that of the Cyrtii or of Corduene.
context_section_description: The Kurdish people are believed to be of heterogeneous origins combining a number of earlier tribal or ethnic groups 
  including Lullubi, Guti, Cyrtians, Carduchi.
  Some of them have also absorbed some elements from Semitic, 
  Turkic 
  and Armenian people.
  Kurds are an Iranian people, and the first known Indo-Iranians in the region were the Mitanni, who established a kingdom in northern Syria five centuries after the fall of Gutium. The Mitanni are believed to have spoken an Indo-Aryan language, or perhaps a pre-split Indo-Iranian language. The current view is that the separation of Iranian peoples from Indo-Aryans occurred between 1800 and 1600 BCE, which makes it nearly impossible for the Gutians to have been linguistically or culturally Kurdish, although it is possible that they still contributed to the Kurdish ethnogenesis to an extent, if at the very least genetically.
  19th-century scholars, such as George Rawlinson, identified Corduene and Carduchi with the modern Kurds, considering that Carduchi was the ancient lexical equivalent of "Kurdistan".
  This view is supported by some recent academic sources which have considered Corduene as proto-Kurdish or as equivalent to modern-day Kurdistan. Some modern scholars, however, reject a Kurdish connection to the Carduchi.
  There were numerous forms of this name, partly due to the difficulty of representing kh in Latin. The spelling Karduchoi is itself probably borrowed from Armenian, since the termination -choi represents the Armenian language plural suffix -kh. It is speculated that Carduchi spoke an Old Iranian language. They also seem to have had Armenian elements. 
  Jewish sources trace origins of people of Corduene to marriage of Jinns of King Solomon with 500 beautiful Jewish women. The same legend was also used by the early Islamic authorities to explain origins of Kurds.
  The Medes have often been believed to be a starting point for Kurdish (as well as Baloch) ethnogesis. This would leave about a millennium of separate development between the collapse of the Median Empire and the first historical mention of the Kurds as an identifiable ethnic group.
  The Median hypothesis was advanced by   Vladimir Minorsky. 
  I. Gershevitch who provided first "a piece of linguistic confirmation" of Minorsky's identification and then another "sociolinguistic" argument. Gernot Windfuhr (1975) dentified Kurdish dialects as Parthian, albeit with a Median substratum.
  Median descent of the Kurds has found favour as a historical narrative among Kurds in the 20th century, so that identification of Kurds as Medes is now common in Kurdish nationalist sentiment, though some experts believe it is incorrect.
  The hypothesis is not without its detractors, among them  Martin van Bruinessen (2004).
  Asatrian (2009) stated that "The Central Iranian dialects, and primarily those of the Kashan area in the first place, as well as the Azari dialects (otherwise called Southern Tati) are probably the only Iranian dialects, which can pretend to be the direct offshoots of Median ... In general, the relationship between Kurdish and Median are not closer than the affinities between the latter and other North Western dialects — Baluchi, Talishi, South Caspian, Zaza, Gurani, etc."
  phonetic developments of Kurdish language with Persian and Baluchi language
caption: Map showing kingdoms of Corduene and Adiabene in the last centuries BC. The blue line shows the expedition and then retreat of the ten thousand through Corduene in 401 BC.
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