About

The Kurds, one of the autochthonous peoples of Iran and Mesopotamia, today live predominantly in the historical geography of Kurdistan, which encompasses parts of Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. A considerable Kurdish population also lives in the Caucasus, Asia Minor, Europe and America, as well as in other geographies of the globe. Estimated today to number close to fifty million, the Kurds — although, as a result of the international arrangements that took shape at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, they were unable to establish a political entity in their own name — have founded, from antiquity to the present, numerous dynasties and states of varying size and longevity. Owing to the geography they inhabit, the Kurds have embraced diversity in terms of religion and denomination through the adoption of different faiths, and have possessed great richness in the field of an oral and written literature based on the different variants of the Kurdish language. The nation-states that established sovereignty over the geography inhabited by the Kurds, on the one hand, pursued an assimilationist and homogenizing cultural policy, registering the folklore, music, architecture, and the literary, philosophical and cultural production and heritage of the Kurds as their own national culture. On the other hand, deprived of political status, the Kurds were subjected not only to physical and cultural violence carried out on various planes but also to a discursive violence aimed at distorting their self-perception.

Left stateless by the international political settlement, the Kurds were, on the basis of such an understanding, also sought to be rendered “history-less” through the historical theses of the nation-states; yet those attempts at political and historical denial were defeated by the work of Kurdish and international researchers. Thereupon, the “scholars” of the dominant states, instead of rejection and denial, developed a discursive strategy in which the historical and cultural constructions of the Kurds were represented in a pejorative language. In this colonial representation — compelled to renew itself the moment the represented began to speak in their own name — Kurdish history, while not ignored outright, was reconstructed within a vocabulary of “non-achievement”, “inadequacy” and a “savagery and malignancy” devoid of maturity.

For these reasons, it has until recently not been possible to treat “Kurdish history” — squeezed into the dichotomy of “denial” and “proof” while the primary sources were disregarded — in a holistic manner, with an academic perspective and method, chronologically and categorically. Within this framework, the works of the dominant nation-states based on rejection, denial, disregard and falsification of the Kurdish existence and history were answered by studies that some Kurdish researchers penned, for the most part, in a defensive frame of mind. It must also be acknowledged that, from the beginning of the 1990s onwards, in connection with the internationalization of the Kurdish question across different geographies, a considerable number of studies written with a scholarly perspective and method on Kurdish history were produced in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria as well as in Europe and America, and a more critical knowledge was generated. Yet, since these studies concentrate on a particular period, geographical region, state or dynasty, they fall short of expressing a holistic Kurdish history. This situation has made the writing of a holistic bibliography of Kurdish history a necessity.

We believe that the first and most important condition for bringing forth, with a scholarly, academic perspective and method, the journey of the Kurds through history from antiquity to the present day, is to identify the primary sources concerning the Kurds and to place them at the disposal of researchers. Such an undertaking must take into account the documents and records that the Kurds themselves created concerning their own history, as much as the archives and documents produced by the various political entities that brought the Kurds under their rule. These dominant-state archives, by their very nature, were composed in accordance with the needs of the states in question and reflect their own perspectives. Moreover, it is a fundamental reality that the archives of the dominant states, while very “talkative” about the Kurds and Kurdistan in certain periods and on certain subjects, remain “silent” in certain other periods and on other subjects. Proceeding from this reality, the necessity has emerged of treating the archives of the dominant states with a comparative and connected perspective.

The primary sources concerning the Kurds and Kurdistan were produced, in the course of history, in different countries, by different states, in different alphabets and in different languages. Proceeding from this reality, identifying the primary sources about the Kurds and Kurdistan emerges as a priority objective. Sources written from antiquity to the present that provide information about the Kurds and the geography of Kurdistan, set down in alphabets that differ from one another — in Greek, Latin, Pahlavi, Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, Turkish, Armenian, Syriac, English, German, French, Italian, Russian and other languages — are identified and analysed by historians who know the source alphabets and languages and are experts in their fields, and are incorporated into the project. This work, brought into being with the contribution of approximately forty researchers pursuing their work in different countries, will at the same time place at the service of researchers a list of the archives and libraries that hold the primary sources in different geographies of the globe.

It is precisely on the basis of these grounds and concerns that this project, prepared entirely by volunteer researchers, aims to identify and compile written sources of every kind — all books, chronicles/annals, travelogues, treatises, minutes/records, statistics, yearbooks (salnames), registers, newspapers, journals, reports, documents and the like — that provide information on the Kurds and Kurdistan from the 6th century BC to the year 1980. Among the objectives is also the publication, with the data obtained at the end of the project, of the book series entitled The Written Primary Sources of Kurdish History: An Analytical and Annotated Bibliography. It is hoped that the project, following its identification and compilation of the archives, libraries and primary sources concerning the Kurds and Kurdistan, will further facilitate the writing of a holistic Kurdish history.