The Lost and Untold History of the Kurds—Interview with Soran Hamarash

The Washington Kurdish Institute (WKI) hosted Soran Hamarash, the author of The Lost and Untold History of the Kurds: Rediscovering the Beginning of the Western Civilization and the Origin of the Indo-European Languages.  

Soran Hamarash, a Kurdish writer, academic, historian, and linguist, has devoted almost 30 years of his life to studying the Kurds and their history. His book takes readers on a comprehensive journey through the beginnings of writing and agriculture, which are integral to the earliest civilizations and the history of the Kurds.

Hamarash argues that the modern foundation of our understanding of ancient history and civilization was not established for the purpose of knowing the past, but rather to serve ideological, religious, and political agendas. This has led to non-objective approaches among scholars, resulting in a selective and isolated treatment of people in historical records. As a consequence, the existing historiography does not reflect the organic nature of human society, leading to significant misunderstandings about ancient history and a lost and untold history for the Kurds.

Interview excerpt:

WKI: Soran, if you want to expand on what you studied, what you found, and the main gist of your book, I think that’d be great.

Soran: The history of the Kurds has been written by outsiders. Obviously that’s not entirely negative, but I mean that Kurds have not written their history properly until now. What you see currently in academia is that Kurds are stereotyped. For example, if you look at the Encyclopedia Britannica – one of the biggest encyclopedias in the world – it introduces the Kurds as being nomadic until the 20th century. It says they were herders in the mountains until they fell under the control of the colonial powers. And that forced the Kurds to have a settled life and start practicing agriculture. Prior to the 20th century, according to general academia, Kurds were nomads in these mountains.

But when you look at the evidence, you see an entirely different people. We have books written 1200 years ago that introduce Kurds entirely differently. I was a young man and I looked at myself before I looked to the Kurds because I had a parallel life at home. We were Kurds. My father told me, ‘We are Kurds and we should stay Kurds.’ But he didn’t give me more. When I was going to school, we would read in history books that we didn’t exist. There were two worlds where my existence was disputed: in the world of history books we didn’t exist, but at home we did exist. This contradiction made me read from an early age to start understanding why this happens.

For me, the history of humanity is connected in every way. To understand, I studied ancient religion, English people, French people, I wanted to understand them because all humanity somehow is connected. For example, there was a prophet called Mani. This prophet, prior to Islam, was well known around the world. His father and mother were from Hamdan. Those areas were part of Kurdish territory. He came from that family and his religion spread from China to Europe. He was influential.

We didn’t appreciate this connection. That’s why I didn’t focus on understanding the Kurds: because I studied all these different religions and nationalities that helped me to see the Kurds within the bigger picture of the history of the Middle East  and history of Europe as well. That the Middle East and Europe are very much connected is not visible. But when you dig deeper  you understand how words travel  for example  a Sumerian word like “grî” in Sumerian means cry. Grî means cry, and it changed in English to become cry. And in French something like that. I can’t remember all these words. And you can find in Italian different forms slightly the meaning changes. That’s understandable for words when spread around the world  they lose part of their meaning  but remain within the same circle of languages. This is the story of how I started understanding the Kurds.

WKI: The Kurdish people have struggled for centuries with acknowledgement as a separate identity. How does this struggle appear in this long view of the history out of Kurdistan?

Soran: Let’s go back to the first World War. After the First World War, the colonial powers were informed by their institutions. These institutions lacked a deep understanding of the Middle East because they were accessing mainly the Greek historiography and knowledge obtained from the Bible. The two main sources for understanding the Middle East were Biblical and Greek historiography. And these two are imbalanced. It doesn’t tell us the entire history of the region. Kurds in that imbalanced history didn’t exist. When they drew the map, Kurds were not acknowledged. We have to always understand that    policymakers and those who make decisions consult historians and history as part of that. When they came to the Middle East, these colonial powers had a very poor understanding of reality, and their policy and politic was based on that.

In everything you touch about the Kurds, you have to challenge established views. The current academic view says Kurds were nomadic until 800-900 years ago. But the Kurds wrote their history during the ninth century. Major books on science and mathematics were written by Kurds, but then those books disappeared. When I say disappeared, many sources were intentionally destroyed in the Middle East to mislead the people.

The academic perspective states that the Kurds did not know themselves as a distinct ethnicity until 300-400 years ago. They claim that Sorani dialect was not a written language until 300 years ago. This is something you can see in Cambridge, at Harvard. I will show a poem in Sorani written 900 years ago. And every day, new manuscripts appear which show everything about Kurdish history is wrong now because Kurds are the beginning. Kurdistan – historians agree and they call [this area] the cradle of mankind. Kurds live in the land that hosted the story of Abraham, of Noah… everything is on the land of the Kurds.

But Kurdistan is studied in isolation from this and history. This book is trying to address that. The good thing, though, is that this book is not just there to sit on a bookshelf. I’m a storyteller. I love talking about these stories. It’s a history of the Kurds, but it’s the history of humanity as well. Because through Sumerian, we can understand many things. For example, the crescent you see on the mosque – they call it an Islamic symbol, but that was a symbol of a Sumerian God, the star and the crescent. You can see that star and crescent on the emblem of cities in Europe. In the UK city of Portsmouth, on the emblem of cities in Germany, in Poland, and on Roman and Sassanid coins. This Sumerian symbol is currently called Islamic, but it’s not Islamic.

WKI: So the historical record and the historiography around this record has excluded or minimized Kurds, but when you mention connections between the modern Kurdish identity and the past, I wonder if you have a few examples of those throughlines?

Soran: Understanding the Kurds requires an open mind. If you follow the conventional method, you won’t understand it. For example, spitting happens in Kurdish culture, and I remember seeing my father spitting, but he always stamped on it immediately and I didn’t know why. And I read that it’s a Sumerian custom. You’re never allowed to spit without stamping on it. My father was doing it unconsciously. Even the bread – the kneading of the bread – the word for barley and other agricultural words – after 5,000 years – we still use them. When I speak here at home, 60% of the words are found in Sumerian and a few found in Hittite, the Median language. We don’t have many details of the Sumerian language, but we still have a reasonable number of words which can tell us aspects of grammar and especially horse-related vocabularies. They’re entirely Kurdish.

Everything we see now can be connected to the past. When you saw ISIS and the Kurds – that ultimate contradiction of woman fighting uncovered. And you see where women were forced to stay at home. I traced that back 5,000 years in laws and the Kurdish custom of not covering heads and the custom of covering heads by ISIS and those people who are linguistically and culturally connected to ISIS. Their law says do not go out without a veil. This is Akkadian. And as Syrian texts say married women cannot leave home without fail. While the Sumerian, Julian, and Median women never covered. And they were able to participate in business while women of Akkadian and Erian were not allowed to do any business.

They were controlled by men. I traced everything from the Kurdish female fighters through female fighting throughout history. There are 50 men counted in one village in Kurdistan holding their mother’s surname instead of their father’s. I have evidence of a Kurdish prince using his mother’s surname 1000 years ago, and again 200 years ago. Throughout history there are important figures in Kurdistan and nobody knows that the name they use is their mother’s name. Women had power in Kurdish society during the last hundred years. The attempts by the Iranian, Iraqi, Turkish, and Syrian governments to assimilate the Kurds changed part of that culture. Everything you see now is connected to the past.