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Halgurd
05-15-2015, 07:38 PM
http://file.scirp.org/Html/8-1590228_49273.htm

The toponym “kar-daKI-ka” (“ma-da kar-daKI-ka”) means land of “Karda”, which derives most likely out of Akkadian “qarda” (“qurda”) for heroic, brave, valiant, and warlike (mountain) people. It was geographically located in ancient heartlands of the Guti(ans) in central Zagros east areas in Northwest Iran of today, and was documented in several late Sumerian UrIII sources at the end of the 3rd millennium B.C.E. from Girsu in south Mesopotamia. Origin and ethnic affiliations of the inhabitants of the land of “Karda” are not known. The term “kar-daKI-ka” was one of the oldest cuneiform expressions used by Mesopotamians to denote various indigenous Zagros hilly/mountain nomads of multi-ethnical origin in the North and the (North-)East, whom they regarded as warlike and also as uncivilized because they were at the time mainly not urban organized in contrast to lowland Mesopotamians. Available cuneiform sources indicated that Mesopotamians saw “kar-daKI-ka” in consecutive connection with Guti(ans): first, because of its location in the center of (former) dominating Guti power coalitions in areas of central Zagros (east); second, because of the image of its population as warlike, similar how Guti(ans) where portrayed by Mesopotamians; third, because of further suggesting that its society(ies) could have been militarily orsganized, were possibly migrating and temporarily prevailing inter-regionally (across the Zagros); and last but not least, because of its obvious geo-strategic importance even for far away late UrIII leaders of south Mesopotamia, regardless whether or not they effectively controlled the area which seems for the time in question unlikely. Mesopotamians used to describe the inter-connected ancestral habitat of various multi-ethnic Zagros mountain coalitions in a vague terminology, and in waxing and waning concepts who were influenced by changing policies. They did not see regions (lands) like “kar-daKI-ka” as isolated single ones in a far north-east but embedded in an inter-regionally connected habitat of mountain nomad coalitions stretching from the North to the North-East of Mesopotamia. They also used a good number of different terms in particular assumed Sumerian “kur”-stem expressions (who later prevailed) to characterize them accordingly. In linguistic terms, the presumed Semitic (Akkadian) word-stem “kard-” (ke in “kar-daKI-ka” is formally not identical with the presumably Sumerian rooted “kurd-” one (for Kurds, land of Kurds). However, the content of both terms denoting (warlike) Zagros-Taurus mountain populations of multi-ethnical origins seems to be strikingly similar. Therefore, the explanation attempt of “kar-daKI-ka” as land of heroic, valiant, and warlike indigenous central Zagros (east) inhabitants could indicate a local/regional militarily organized autochthonous pre-IE (proto-non-Iranian) population, and could even possibly point to ancient forefathers of Kurds in NW Iran of today, interpreted as Zagros-Taurus mountaineers.

Halgurd
05-15-2015, 07:59 PM
http://file.scirp.org/Html/htmlimages/8-1590228x/238b8b70-08ee-4d09-948a-77eecf909a66.png

http://file.scirp.org/Html/htmlimages/8-1590228x/77639898-dd1d-456b-8b4b-beaf5435c126.png

http://file.scirp.org/Html/htmlimages/8-1590228x/ba59d9b0-135e-4cb2-8129-f7fc6d9240b1.png

Halgurd
05-15-2015, 08:03 PM
It seems the city of Van is the origin of the Kurds:

“Not unlikely the earliest trace of the Kurds” in the 3rd me. B.C.E. The British orientalist, assyriologist and expert for Semitic languages, Godfrey Rolles Driver (1892-1975) from Oxford located 1923 the Su-people south of lake Van in south-eastern Anatolia15. The “land of Karda” existed “adjoined” to (that one of) the Su-people, Driver wrote and further assumed that, therefore, it would be “not unlikely, that thereby on a “Sumarian clay tablet” of the 3rd millennium B.C.E. “the earliest trace of the Kurds” could have been found. The toponym “land Karda” transliterated Driver not like the French archaeologist François Thureau-Dangin as “kar-da-ka” with uncertain reading but as “Kar-da” or “Qar-da” (indicating an Akkadian word-stem “qar-”). He also traced oldest linguistic roots of the term “Kurd” to Semitic Babylonian words like “qardu” or “gardu” (k > q > g), and noted terminological similarities in Persian of a much later time in expressions like “gurd” or “kurd”16. As for its geographic location, Godfrey Rolles Driver assumed that the land “Karda” could have been situated next to the Su-people south of the Van lake in south-eastern Anatolia, and he also suggested that it was most likely connected with the “Qur-tie” with whom the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I (1115-1076 B.C.E.) fought in mountain areas west of the Van lake, as documented on a cylinder inscription: “It is not unlikely that the earliest trace of the Kurds is to be found on a Sumerian claytablet, of the third millennium B.C., on which ‘the land Kar-da’ or ‘Qar-da’ is mentioned. This ‘land of Karda’ adjoined that of the people of Su, who dwelt on the south of Lake Wân, and seems in all probability to have been connected with the Qur-ti-e, who lived in the mountains to the west of the same lake, and with whom Tiglath-Pileser I fought; the philological identity of these two names is, however, uncertain, owing to the doubt about the precise value of the palatals and dentals in Sumerian”17. In a footnote Driver emphasized that this (his) interpretation of “Karda” as assumed oldest land of Kurds south of the Van lake in south-eastern Anatolia had been accepted among six cited orientalists of his time by five. Only one rejected this explanation attempt, Driver noted18. Among the scientists who supported Driver’s geographical allocation of the land “Karda” south of Van in south-eastern Anatolia was the Russian orientalist Vladimir Fedorovich Minorsky (1877-1966). Driver quoted Minorsky with the additional remark “there is an old fortress Sūy in the region of Bidlīs (S̲h̲araf-nāma, i. 146).” It would be “nothing really surprising in finding at the time of Xenophon an Iranian tribe settled to the north of the Tigris”, Minorsky wrote19. However, the geographic allocation of the toponym “karda” south of Van in eastern Anatolia seems to be based on an obvious mistake in the correct interpretation of the late Sumerian source, because it doesn’t place “the su-people and karda” according to the exact order and sequence of these combined termini as they are consecutively mentioned in the original sources (Figure 1). Its geographic embedding starts according to custom protocol with the king of Ur in south Mesopotamia, though, consequently continues from there acknowledging his global claim to power over the four parts of the ancient world, but then proceeds to a chain of toponyms who can be clearly appropriated at the latest with the established position of “Urbillu(m)”, keeps further on a significant chronological order of additional cited termini from North to South, out of which it becomes evident that the next following toponyms “Ḫamaşi and Karaḫar” could only been situated south (southeast) of “Urbillu(m)”, and that hence subsequently this must have been also true for the “Su-people and the land Karda” at the end of all quoted toponyms. In contrast to that, Driver discontinues the described order of the listed toponyms towards the end of the source, breaks the obvious north-south divide in the text unexpectedly off and leads after the quotations of “Urbillu(m)”, “Ḫamaşi and Karaḫar” suddenly back again in areas far away in the distant North in the direction of Hakkari without explaining why he did that, and finally locates the “Su-people” south of Van in south-eastern Anatolia adjoined by the land of “Karda”. By that he possibly followed interpretations at his time of various vague terms like “Su/Sutians/Subir/Subartu” in cuneiform sources who were often mentioned in connection with areas in the far North. Hence, his explanation attempt of the land “Karda” does not live up to the obvious consecutive terminological order in the original cuneiform sources: “Urbillu(m)”, “Ḫamaşi and Karaḫar”, “Su-people and land Karda”. As against, Driver interprets de facto contentual and geographically aberrant: […] “Su-people and land Karda” […] “Urbillu(m)”, “Ḫamaşi and Karaḫar”.

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Interestingly Mehrdad Izady has also said:


So far the victory cylinder of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser I (r. 1114-1076 BC) is the oldest record of the incidence of the ethnic name of the Kurds. It records the "Kurti" or "Qurtie" among the peoples whom the king conquered in his mountain campaigns south of the Lake Van region. The more exact location of these "Kurti" is given by the same document as Mt. Azu/Hazu. We are extraordinarily lucky that this "address" was still current until about sixty years ago—over 3100 years after Tiglath-pileser I. The town of Kurti in the Mt. Hizan region south of Lake Van is the same as the "Kurti in the Mt. Azu" of the Assyrians! The town of Kurti was still serving as a seat of a Kurdish princely house when the Kurdish historian Sharaf al-Din Bitlisi added the dynasty’s history into his celebrated history, the Sharafnâma, in 1597. This "birthplace" of the Kurds continued to be known with the archaic name until the Turkish government changed its name and that of its eponymous river to Bahçesaray in the 1930s. The oldest Kurdish place name—it "birth place" thus joined history, so recent in history.