At the outset, I would like to say that the goal of publishing this series of articles is not to delve deeply into ancient Kurdish history, but rather to introduce ancient Kurdish history briefly. In fact, I decided to write these articles for two main reasons: the first is to provide female and male readers with simple information about ancient Kurdish history, as there are many people who have not looked into ancient Kurdish history due to the blackout, distortion, and cancellation to which this history was subjected; and the second reason is the desperate attempts by the occupiers of Kurdistan and other parties to distort Kurdish history and claim that the Kurdish presence in Kurdistan is a modern presence that took place only a few centuries ago. Therefore, I thought of writing a brief summary of ancient Kurdish history in an objective and professional manner to expose the lies and deception of these parties. Given the great interest in ancient Kurdish history on the part of female and male readers through the wide reception and follow-up in reading this series of articles, and in response to the desire of some female and male readers, I will, starting from this article, expand slightly in narrating ancient Kurdish history.
All historians, archaeologists, and researchers say that the Sumerians were non-Semitic peoples. In the introduction to the book by historian Samuel Noah Kramer entitled “From the Tablets of Sumer,” translated into Arabic by Dr. Taha Baqir, the translator mentions on page 8 the following: Most of what can be said in this regard is that those whom we call the Sumerians in the history of Mesopotamia were a people who were not among the Semitic peoples (the Semitic peoples are those peoples who spoke one of the Semitic languages such as Akkadian and Babylonian in Iraq, and Amorite, Canaanite, Aramaic, and Hebrew in the regions of the Levant and the Arabian Peninsula); rather, their language is one of the non-Semitic languages.
Historian Taha Baqir elaborates in his discourse that the Irish researcher “Hincks” says that the cuneiform script was created by a non-Semitic people, and indeed that this people preceded the Semitic Babylonians in settling Mesopotamia. The famous English researcher “Henry Rawlinson” published research in 1855 in the journal of the “Royal Asiatic Society” mentioning that he discovered a new writing in a non-Semitic language that he found recorded on bricks and clay tablets in some ancient sites in Mesopotamia such as “Nippur,” “Larsa,” and “Uruk.” In 1856, the Irish researcher “Hincks” mentioned that this new language is of the agglutinative language type, and in 1869 the French researcher “Jules Oppert” named this new language the “Sumerian language” for the first time.
The era that preceded the Sumerian period began in the form of a village agricultural civilization brought into southern Iraq from the east by the Iranians (Samuel Kramer: From the Tablets of Sumer, translated by Dr. Taha Baqir, Al-Muthanna Library, Baghdad and Al-Khanji Institution in Cairo, 1970, page 356). This is confirmed by historian Professor “E. A. Speiser” on page 99 of his book entitled “Mesopotamian Origins,” where he says that the Gutian elements (the ancestors of the Kurds) were present in southern Iraq before the founding of Sumer and they later established the land of Sumer and formed governments there (note the source in English at the end of the article).
Both Dr. Taha Baqir and Dr. Amer Sulaiman mention that upon the migration of the Akkadians to northern Mesopotamia (present-day southern Kurdistan) in the late third millennium BC, the Sumerians and Subarians were living there and the region was called “Subartu.” The two mentioned historians add that mention of the Subarians came in cuneiform texts since the Early Dynastic period (Taha Baqir: Introduction to the History of Ancient Civilizations, Part One, Concise History of Mesopotamian Civilization, First Edition, Baghdad, 1973, page 120, 476; Amer Sulaiman: Iraq in Ancient History, Mosul, Dar Al-Hikma for Printing and Publishing, 1992, page 119). From here we see that the original homeland of the Sumerians is Kurdistan and that they are among the peoples of the Zagros Mountains, which are the original homeland of the Kurds, and that the Sumerians migrated from Kurdistan to southern Mesopotamia and built a refined civilization there.
Historian Dr. Bahnam Abu Al-Soof mentions in his thesis, for which he received a doctorate degree from Cambridge University in Britain in 1966, that the Sumerians did not come from outside Mesopotamia, but rather were in the Subartu region, and that this people moved at one point to the south and transferred their civilization with them. What supports the words of historian Bahnam Abu Al-Soof is that the establishment of an advanced agricultural civilization and the invention of writing by the Sumerians indicate that they possessed civilizational foundations before their move to southern Mesopotamia. This indicates that the Sumerians were part of the Zagrosian ancestors of the Kurds who moved from Kurdistan to present-day southern Iraq, as the Zagrosian ancestors of the Kurds were the first to build civilization in the region and the early signs of civilization appeared on the land of Kurdistan.
Some historians believe that the Subarians and Sumerians belong to a single origin and that they are connected to each other by kinship, or at least that they lived together in northern Mesopotamia before the Sumerians moved to southern Mesopotamia and settled there (Dr. Naim Farah: Landmarks of Ancient World Civilizations, Dar Al-Fikr, page 198). Dr. Naim Farah also mentions in his mentioned book that the Sumerians and Subarians descend from the Gutians (the ancestors of the Kurds) whose homeland was the Zagros Mountain range. Supporting the existence of a kinship connection between the Subarians and Sumerians is that the names of many Sumerian cities were not Sumerian names, but Subarian ones, such as the cities of Ur, Eridu, Uruk, Sippar, Larsa, Lagash, and the word “Batis – Batiz,” which means “king,” along with other vocabulary shared between the two languages, as many Sumerian words may be Subarian words. (Dr. Sami Said Al-Ahmed: The Sumerians and Their Cultural Heritage, Publications of the Iraqi Historical Association, Baghdad, 1975).
There is a great similarity between the structure of the Sumerian and Kurdish languages, as both are agglutinative languages in which compound words are formed from two or more simple words. For example, the name of the “city of Uruk” (the Sumerian Warka), whose ruins are located sixty kilometers from the city of Samawah, consists of two words: (Aur), which means (fire), and (Ga), which means (place); by joining the two words into one word, its meaning becomes (the hearth/fireplace). In the Kurdish language, this compound word gives the same Sumerian meaning. On the other hand, the Kurdish language still retains many Sumerian words despite the passage of thousands of years since the extinction of the Sumerian language, to the extent that the name of the land of Sumer still remains in the Kurdish language and gives the same meaning, as the name of the land of Sumer in the Sumerian language, which is written in cuneiform script, is (Ki-en-gi), which means “the master land” (Amer Sulaiman, and Ahmed Malik Al-Fitian: Lectures in Ancient History, 1978, page 25). This name in the Kurdish language means “land of the masters of the earth.”
The Sumerians built their temples on high places resembling a mountain (ziggurat) and drew mountain trees, and mountain animals such as the ibex and goats on the cylinder seals they crafted (Fadhil Abdul Wahid Ali: From Sumer to the Torah, page 22; Sami Said Al-Ahmed: The Sumerians and Their Cultural Heritage, page 42, 82). All of these are evidence of their mountainous origin, as the Zagros Mountains were their original homeland. Furthermore, there are many commonalities in beliefs between the Sumerians and the Kurds. I suffice here with this amount of evidence proving that the Kurds are the descendants of the Sumerians, as I have finished writing a draft for an in-depth study on the relationship between the Kurds and the Sumerians, which I will publish soon.
Dr. Taha Baqir says in his introduction to Samuel Kramer’s book, which he translated into Arabic, that the Sumerians, as is agreed upon, are the first founders of the elements of civilization and urbanism, from whom the Semites in Mesopotamia borrowed the origins of their civilization. Their cultural heritage is not limited to being the foundation of Mesopotamian civilization; rather, they influenced all the peoples of the Near East, and that is evident in many fields, as the Sumerians were the first to create and develop writing, which was later known as cuneiform script, the script borrowed by most peoples of the ancient Near East (Samuel Kramer: From the Tablets of Sumer, translated by Dr. Taha Baqir, Al-Muthanna Library, Baghdad and Al-Khanji Institution in Cairo, 1970, pages 9-13).
The Sumerians were distinguished by creativity in material civilization, such as the foundations of architecture, arts, social and political systems, and other components of civilization that significantly influenced the progress of the peoples of the Near East. The Sumerians also created views, concepts, and ideas in religion and in other spiritual and intellectual fields, many of which entered into the beliefs of the Jewish and Christian religions, and many of which moved into modern civilization. The Sumerians produced an original literary output, most of which was poetry, and its impact was profound on ancient peoples and its influence continued into present civilization.
The Sumerians invented writing in southern Mesopotamia in around 3000 BC, thereby beginning the era of documentation through which researchers were able to study Sumerian civilization and the civilizations that followed it.
The most important works accomplished by the Sumerians are their invention of writing and numbers, and their creation of cities. The Sumerians are the first to invent writing and numbers, which other peoples took from them, as if we browse Western books studying the history of the development of languages and numbers in the world, we see that they mention and confirm this. The Sumerians built an advanced civilization, as they developed agriculture and irrigation, and invented the plow, the wheel, the cart, the potter’s wheel, the sailboat, riveting, welding, paint, gold smithing, inlaying with precious stones, building with regular and baked bricks, constructing monuments, using gold and silver in evaluating commodities, inventing commercial contracts and the credit system, and codifying law books. They are the first to invent the brick as a manufactured architectural unit instead of stone.
History also tells us that the Sumerians adhered to truth, justice, and personal freedom, and hated injustice and violence, establishing laws to organize their lives in light of these human principles.
The Sumerians excelled in musical sciences, as archaeological excavations in the tomb of the wife of the king of Ur, Queen Shubad (Puabi), conducted by British archaeologists in 1918, led to the discovery of a group of musicians with 11 harps, in addition to a large harp consisting of 30 strings, which is the Sumerian harp. Subsequent civilizations took most of the sciences, including music, from ziggurats (places of worship), (the Ziggurat of Ur and the Ziggurat of Dur-Kurigalzu) located west of Baghdad. The ziggurats of Mesopotamia were the center of attention for people, and from them the Egyptians derived their pyramids and first structures (B. Lerch: Studies on the Kurds and Their Northern Chaldean Ancestors, translated by Dr. Abdi Haji, 1992).
Speisere, Ephraim A. (1930). Mesopotamian Origins. The basic population of the Near East. Philadelphia, USA.
2013 / 10 / 22
Note: This text is translated from the original Arabic version… Read the Arabic version:Click here
