A Map Is Not a Title Deed: The Myth of an Eternal “Greater Kurdistan”
Whenever someone tells me that “the Kurds are more than 5,000 years old”, I have to laugh.
Not because Kurdish people do not have a history. They do. I laugh because “5,000 years” is not an argument. It is a costume. Put enough antiquity on a modern political claim and apparently nobody is meant to ask for the receipt.
The same costume hangs from people’s necks.
Every time I see one of those oddly shaped “Greater Kurdistan” pendants, I wonder what exactly I am looking at. Is the wearer informed and knowingly displaying a territorial claim over the homelands of other peoples? Is the point to provoke those peoples? Or has somebody simply bought a piece of political merchandise without ever asking what the outline swallows?
None of the possibilities is particularly flattering.
Let us establish one thing before the usual theatre begins. The map cuts pieces from four internationally recognised states: Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran. Only Iraq constitutionally recognises a Kurdistan Region, and it recognises it as a federal region within Iraq, not as the southern quarter of a mystical country awaiting reunion. The same Iraqi constitution calls Iraq a country of multiple nationalities and explicitly protects Christians, Yazidis, Assyrians and other communities. It also distinguishes the recognised federal region from “disputed territories”. A necklace does not overrule a constitution.
And yes, whenever this is pointed out, somebody inevitably shouts: “But the Turks were invaders too.”
Perhaps. That is another article.
One historical injustice does not legalise another, and Turkey is not a fire exit from every discussion. Dragging Turks onto the stage whenever Kurdish territorial claims are questioned is not an answer. It is what happens when an argument arrives without trousers.
This article is not about proving that modern state borders are sacred, natural or innocent. They are not. It is about a very specific deception: presenting a disputed nationalist programme as if it were an ordinary map of an ancient, coherent and ethnically owned country.
Four directions, one political story
In Kurdish nationalist language, the supposed country is commonly divided into four parts:
- Bakur, “north”, for territories in Turkey;
- Başûr, “south”, for territories in Iraq;
- Rojhilat, “east”, literally associated with where the sun rises, for territories in Iran;
- Rojava, “west”, associated with where the sun sets, for territories in Syria.
The directional words themselves are real. The fraud is not linguistic. It is cartographic.
Ordinary words for north, south, east and west have been turned into the rooms of an imaginary ancestral house. Once repeated often enough, the construction begins to sound older than the states it seeks to dismantle. “Northern Kurdistan” quietly replaces southeastern Turkey. “Western Kurdistan” quietly replaces northern Syria. The political conclusion is smuggled into the vocabulary before the conversation has even begun.
But since when have these four names actually been used in this territorial sense?
That question alone punctures the performance of timelessness. There is no evidence that Bakur, Başûr, Rojhilat and Rojava formed an ancient four-part national geography — not 5,000 years ago, not in antiquity and not throughout the Middle Ages. The words for the directions are older than the political map, of course. So are the English words “north” and “west”. That does not make “North Korea” older than Korea’s partition. A familiar direction can be attached to a very new political claim.
The available evidence points to a gradual twentieth-century nationalist vocabulary, not an inherited map preserved unchanged across millennia. Thomas McGee’s study of the term Rojava is particularly revealing. Kurdish movements long focused primarily on territories in Turkey, Iraq and Iran. One well-known movement slogan named Bakur, Başûr and Rojhilat — and omitted the Syrian Kurds altogether. Kurdish areas in Syria were also called Başûrê biçûk, “Little South”, or Başûrê Rojavayê Kurdistan, “south-western Kurdistan”. McGee records that staff at the Kurdish satellite channel MED TV were instructed in the mid-1990s to use Rojavayê Kurdistan, “western Kurdistan”, instead of “Little South”. The shortened Rojava then gained extraordinary political and international currency only after the Syrian uprising of 2011 and the emergence of Kurdish-led self-rule.
So no: the neat four-room house was not waiting intact for 5,000 years until somebody finally found the keys. Even within modern Kurdish politics, the fourth room was still being renamed, repositioned and furnished in living memory. The precise first use of every directional label cannot currently be dated to one day or one author. What can be said with confidence is more damaging to the myth: the four-part system is a modern nationalist cartography whose terminology developed unevenly and was actively standardised by political movements and media.
That is clever branding. It is not proof.
Rojava is an especially revealing example. The Kurdish-led administration adopted the broader name Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria as the territory under its control expanded into heavily Arab and other non-Kurdish areas. Even the administration’s naming problem admitted what the pendant refuses to: the population does not fit neatly inside an ethnically exclusive map.
Before “Kurd” became a nation
The word “Kurd” is old. That does not mean it always meant what a Kurdish nationalist means by it today.
This is where online history usually performs its favourite magic trick: it finds an old word that looks familiar, removes the centuries of changing meaning, and produces a modern nation from the hat.
Iranist Garnik Asatrian’s philological study of the ethnonym argues that Middle Persian kurd/kwrt functioned as a social label for nomadic or tent-dwelling groups, not as the name of one clearly bounded ethnic nation. Martin van Bruinessen similarly notes that early Arabic usage appears to have referred to forms of pastoral nomadism and political or tribal groupings before the label gradually became more ethnically specific.
This distinction is not a footnote. It is the lock on the entire argument: a medieval author calling somebody kurd or al-Akrād does not prove that this person understood themselves as ethnically Kurdish in the modern sense. In many cases we possess an outsider’s category, not a statement of self-identification. The label may indicate tribe, origin, language, pastoral life, political affiliation or some unstable mixture of them. Unless a source establishes which meaning it carries, “the source calls them Kurds” is the end of the evidence — not permission to manufacture a modern nation backwards.
That does not mean that present-day Kurds are “not real”. Modern peoples do not require a Bronze Age birth certificate. It means something much less dramatic and much more inconvenient: identities develop.
The populations later identified as Kurdish emerged from heterogeneous West Iranian-speaking communities. Early Arabic and Persian texts apply kurd or al-Akrād to groups in and around the Zagros and the mountains south of Lakes Van and Urmia. That wording matters: the texts document the use of a label, usually by outside writers. They do not automatically document a shared Kurdish self-identification, one Kurdish language, or membership in a single people resembling the modern nation.
By the late tenth century, the Marwanids ruled in Diyār Bakr and parts of the zone around Lake Van. Modern scholarship usually classifies them as a Kurdish dynasty because medieval accounts connect their founders and tribal environment with groups called Akrād. But “usually classified as Kurdish by modern historians” is not the same statement as “proved to possess a modern Kurdish ethnic identity”. The Marwanids demonstrate the westward application of the label and the political power of groups placed beneath it. They do not demonstrate an ethnically homogeneous Kurdistan, a continuous national territory or a modern Kurdish title deed stretching back a thousand years.
Nor do the sources record one datable migration “from the Zagros to the Taurus”. They reveal centuries of tribal movement, political expansion, pastoral mobility, settlement and changing classification. Some communities were nomadic or semi-nomadic; others were settled. Language, allegiance, religion and tribal incorporation changed both whom outsiders counted as Akrād and how the affected communities may have understood themselves. Where self-identification is not recorded, this article will not invent it for them.
The academically defensible translation is therefore closer to “nomad” or “tent-dweller” than the popular slogan “mountain nomad”. The mountain is context, not a securely preserved dictionary entry from the dawn of civilisation. More importantly, a former social label is not a land registry.
The 5,000-year family tree assembled backwards
Where do the 5,000 years come from? Usually from collecting ancient peoples who once lived somewhere between Anatolia, Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau — Gutians, Hurrians, Medes, Carduchi and sometimes almost anyone wearing sandals near a mountain — and declaring them Kurdish.
The method is wonderfully efficient. Begin with the desired conclusion. Search backwards for ancient names. Select whatever resembles a modern ethnonym, occupied a desired location or spoke an Iranian language. Ignore the gaps. Add five millennia. Print the map.
But resemblance is not descent, geography is not ethnicity and descent is not exclusive ownership.
The Hurrian language was not an Iranian language. The Medes spoke an Iranian language, but there is no continuous documentary chain proving that modern Kurds are simply the Medes renamed. The Carduchi mentioned by Xenophon lived in a relevant region, but similarity between “Carduchi” and “Kurd” is not sufficient to establish direct ethnic continuity. Ancient populations certainly contributed biologically and culturally to later peoples of the region. That banal fact belongs to Armenians, Assyrians, Arameans, Yazidis, Persians, Arabs, Turks and Kurds alike. Genetic mixture and regional continuity cannot issue a modern nation an exclusive deed to land.
Even Asatrian must be handled critically. He writes from within an intensely politicised field and has been sharply rejected by Kurdish nationalist writers. That criticism matters. It does not, however, make the Middle Persian texts disappear. His narrow philological argument is useful where it is supported by the documented historical usage; it should not be treated as a divine revelation about every aspect of Kurdish origins.
That is the standard this article applies to every source: no scholar receives a throne, no activist receives a halo and no community receives five thousand years on credit.
When does a recognisably modern Kurdish nation appear?
There were communities, tribes, dynasties and emirates whose members were described as Kurds long before modern nationalism. But this does not prove the existence of a unified Kurdish people, a shared national consciousness or an ancient Kurdish state. The languages now grouped under the label “Kurdish” belong to the Indo-Iranian branch and comprise several distinct varieties.
Sharaf Khan Bidlisi’s Sharafnama, completed in 1597, documented ruling houses he classified as Kurdish. It was a dynastic chronicle, not evidence of a unified nation-state. Ehmedê Xanî’s seventeenth-century work is often interpreted as advocating Kurdish political unity. That interpretation demonstrates that ideas of broader unity existed among some intellectuals—not that a single Kurdish nation or a territorially defined “Greater Kurdistan” had existed for millennia.
Those texts matter. They show that Kurdish identification did not suddenly fall from the sky in 1880.
They do not show that a mass nation of fixed membership possessed the entire modern maximalist map. The Sharafnama is a courtly history of ruling families, not a democratic census, an ethnic atlas or a property deed. Its author also had political and religious reasons to present Kurdish ruling elites in a particular way. Van Bruinessen points out that Sharaf Khan emphasised Sunni loyalty and may have underreported Yazidis among the tribes he described. A source can be valuable and interested at the same time. In fact, most valuable sources are.
The decisive transformation came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when intellectuals, religious leaders and political organisations increasingly imagined the Kurds as a distinct nation entitled to self-rule. Sheikh Ubeydullah’s movement of 1880 is routinely treated in the scholarship as a major turning point. The first Kurdish newspaper, Kurdistan, appeared in Cairo in 1898. Kurdish organisations multiplied during the final years of the Ottoman Empire and after its collapse.
This chronology is not an insult. Italian, German, Turkish and Arab nationalisms were also modern formations assembled from older languages, memories and political communities. Nations routinely pretend to be ancient because “our intellectuals organised us during the age of print, empire and mass politics” looks less romantic on a flag.
Cambridge’s History of the Kurds is particularly useful here because it does not deny older Kurdish identities while locating recognisably modern nationalist boundary-making in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet even this collection must be read as a history of the Kurds: its organising subject naturally foregrounds Kurdish actors. It is excellent for studying Kurdish nation-building; it cannot by itself settle competing Yazidi, Assyrian, Aramean or Armenian claims to every territory placed beneath that heading.
Sèvres was not a divine promise
The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres is often treated as the cancelled birth certificate of Kurdistan. In reality, it was an unratified post-war treaty drafted by victorious imperial powers dividing the defeated Ottoman Empire. Its Articles 62–64 contemplated local autonomy and a possible path to independence for certain predominantly Kurdish areas.
That is historically significant. It is not the same as international recognition of the enormous four-part map sold today.
Sèvres did not grant an eternal Kurdish title to every place later coloured in by nationalist cartographers. It emerged from Allied imperial bargaining, contained conditional procedures and never entered into force. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne replaced it without establishing a Kurdish state.
Sèvres proves that Kurdish self-determination was a live political question after the First World War. It does not prove that every maximalist pendant is merely showing a country maliciously cut into four equal slices.
The lands hidden under the silver
Look closely at the map. Its clean outline depends upon dirty erasure.
Tur Abdin and Mardin
Tur Abdin is one of the oldest centres of Syriac Christian civilisation. Aramaic-speaking communities have lived there for millennia. Ottoman records and later accounts also show Yazidi, Kurdish, Mhallami and other communities in a complex regional mosaic.
This complexity destroys two nationalist fairy tales at once. Tur Abdin was neither an eternally homogeneous Turkish land nor an eternally homogeneous Kurdish one.
Van Bruinessen’s work is unusually useful because he is a major scholar of Kurdish society who explicitly describes abandoning his own earlier two-people model of eastern Turkey after confronting Tur Abdin’s diversity. His account also warns us against forcing modern ethnic labels mechanically onto sixteenth-century tax registers: Ottoman officials often classified populations for taxation, not to satisfy today’s identity arguments.
After Sayfo, the Armenian genocide, massacres, dispossession, pressure and later emigration, the demographic balance changed catastrophically. A map produced after removal cannot be projected backwards and called ancestral truth. When the missing are erased from the legend, the map becomes an accomplice.
Northern and north-eastern Syria
Groups and individuals described in later sources as Kurdish were present in parts of what is now Syria before the twentieth century. For the medieval period, however, the same warning applies: an author’s use of Akrād cannot simply be translated into modern national identity. Whatever label is used, the demographic history of the Jazira cannot honestly be reduced to “Western Kurdistan occupied by Syria”.
Large numbers of Kurdish refugees arrived from Turkey during the French Mandate, especially after failed rebellions and repression in the 1920s. Armenians and Assyrians also arrived or were resettled after genocide, expulsion and massacres. Arabs, Syriac Christians, Armenians, Yazidis and Kurds built and inhabited the region under conditions shaped by French colonial policy and a newly demarcated border.
Historian Benjamin Thomas White uses refugee history to show how migration helped define modern Syria between 1920 and 1939. His evidence is strong precisely because it complicates nationalist origin stories. But French Mandate records must not be worshipped either: colonial officials counted, labelled and settled populations according to administrative and strategic interests. Their figures are evidence, not sacred arithmetic.
Calling the entire area “Rojava” converts a twentieth-century demographic and political process into ancient ethnic geography. It is branding applied retroactively.
Şingal and the Nineveh region
Şingal is a Yazidi homeland. That statement does not require pretending that no other people ever lived nearby. It requires recognising the community for whom the mountain, villages, shrines, persecution and survival form a specific historical world.
The Iraqi constitution recognises a federal Kurdistan Region but separately refers to disputed territories. Şingal belongs to Nineveh Governorate and has been fought over by Baghdad, Kurdish parties, armed groups and local forces. To draw it unquestioningly inside a Kurdish national silhouette is not a neutral description of law or population. It is one party’s desired outcome printed as fact.
The 2014 genocide made the obscenity sharper. Many Yazidi survivors accused Peshmerga forces of withdrawing without warning before the attack; they were then attacked, displaced and repeatedly spoken for by larger powers. A people does not become Kurdish property because Kurdish forces later fought on its mountain. Rescue, alliance, rivalry and control are different words for a reason.
Yazidi organisations are essential sources for Yazidi self-identification and lived history. They are also advocacy organisations, not neutral census offices. Their testimony must be combined with legal documents, archival evidence and independent scholarship. The same rule applies to Kurdish institutes, Assyrian organisations and state agencies. Identity is not disproved by advocacy, but advocacy must be identified as advocacy.
Hakkâri, the Armenian Highlands and Assyrian lands
Other versions of the maximalist map absorb historic Armenian and Assyrian areas, including places transformed by nineteenth- and twentieth-century massacres, genocide and expulsion. Kurdish tribes were themselves diverse actors: some protected Christians, others participated in violence and dispossession, and many Kurdish civilians later suffered brutal state repression in turn.
Honesty requires the whole sentence.
The suffering of Kurds does not erase Kurdish participation in the suffering of others. The crimes of Ottoman or Turkish authorities do not convert Armenian churches, Assyrian villages or Yazidi sanctuaries into Kurdish inheritance. Victimhood is not a cadastral office.
A map is an argument wearing makeup
Every map selects. Every border tells a story. Nationalist maps simply pretend not to.
The “Greater Kurdistan” outline selects the widest desired territorial claim, smooths away mixed settlement, removes inconvenient peoples and presents the result as geography. Then it is miniaturised in steel, gold-plated, photographed against black velvet and sold as heritage.
How elegant. Colonial ambition, now with a lobster clasp.
Kurds have the right to preserve their languages, describe their history, resist persecution and argue for political rights. They may advocate autonomy or independence. But the moment an aspiration is drawn across the living and dead of other peoples and marketed as an existing ancestral country, it becomes open to challenge.
The issue is not whether Kurds “deserve” history. The issue is whether history may be edited until only Kurds remain visible.
It may not.
Şingal is not empty space between Kurdish parties. Tur Abdin is not a decorative corner of somebody else’s northern province. The Nineveh Plain is not awaiting a more fashionable owner. Armenian absence is not evidence that Armenians were never there. Assyrian and Aramean survival is not a footnote. Yazidis are not raw material from which another nation may manufacture antiquity.
So when somebody wears that pendant, I do not see an innocent map. I see a claim — one polished until the claim looks like a fact.
Wear it if you wish. But at least have the courage to name what you are wearing.
It is not a country recognised across four states. It is not a 5,000-year-old border. It is not neutral geography.
It is a political demand hanging from a chain.
Sources and source criticism
Garnik Asatrian, “Prolegomena to the Study of the Kurds”, Iran and the Caucasus 13 (2009). A detailed philological challenge to nationalist origin myths and a key source on the changing meaning of kurd. It is valuable for textual analysis but comes from a highly politicised field and should not be treated as the sole authority on Kurdish ethnogenesis. Brill record and DOI
Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Shaikh and State (1992). A foundational study of Kurdish tribal and political organisation. Strong on social structure and the modern period; less suited to proving remote ancient origins. Its use of “Kurdistan” is analytical and geographical, not evidence for one timeless border. Full text
Martin van Bruinessen, “The Ethnic Identity of the Kurds” (1989). Useful for tracing how the label “Kurd” changed from a broad association with pastoral nomadism towards a more specific linguistic and ethnic designation. Its reconstruction is based on uneven medieval references and therefore cannot supply an exact migration date. Author manuscript
Boris James, “Uses and Values of the Term Kurd in Arabic Medieval Literary Sources” (2006). Essential here because it tests the category Kurd/Akrād against contradictory medieval usages instead of assuming that the word always carried its present meaning. James shows why attribution by a chronicler, social classification and self-identification must not be collapsed into one claim. His paper proposes a method rather than a final definition, which makes it a warning against certainty, not a licence for a rival ethnic myth. Author manuscript, HAL
Martin van Bruinessen, “Reflections on Midyat and Tur Abdin” (2012). Particularly valuable because the author openly corrects his earlier simplified view of the region and foregrounds its Suryoye, Yazidi, Kurdish, Mhallami and other histories. It remains a scholarly reflection rather than a complete demographic census. Text
Hamit Bozarslan, Cengiz Gunes and Veli Yadirgi, eds., The Cambridge History of the Kurds (2021). A major scholarly collection showing older forms of Kurdish identification and the modern transformation of Kurdish politics and nationalism. Because its declared subject is Kurdish history, it must be supplemented by scholarship centred on neighbouring peoples. Cambridge University Press
Kamal Soleimani, “Religious Narrations of the Kurdish Nation during the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries” (2021). Useful for locating explicit nation-making and claims to self-rule in the modern period. It analyses nationalist imagination rather than claiming that Kurdish identity had no earlier forms. Cambridge University Press
Robert Olson, The Emergence of Kurdish Nationalism and the Sheikh Said Rebellion, 1880–1925 (1989). Influential for identifying the late nineteenth century as decisive. Its focus on political leadership should not be mistaken for a complete history of popular self-identification in every village. Publisher description
Benjamin Thomas White, “Refugees and the Definition of Syria, 1920–1939” (2017). Uses refugee history and Mandate-era evidence to reconstruct the making of modern Syria. Colonial records provide valuable contemporaneous data but reflect French administrative categories and interests. JSTOR
Reporting and scholarship on the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria. Useful for documenting why the administration moved beyond the ethnic label “Rojava” after governing Arab-majority areas. Contemporary political reporting remains dependent on access, terminology and the claims of armed or governing actors. Le Monde overview
Thomas McGee, “‘Rojava’: Evolving Public Discourse of Kurdish Identity and Governance in Syria” (2022). The strongest source used here for the modern genealogy of Rojava. McGee traces competing names for Kurdish-inhabited areas of Syria, the role of PKK-linked media in promoting Rojavayê Kurdistan during the 1990s, and the term’s dramatic rise after 2011. The article does not establish an exact first utterance of every directional term; it demonstrates that the supposedly timeless four-part vocabulary was politically developed, contested and standardised in the modern period. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication
Treaty of Sèvres (1920), Articles 62–64. A primary legal-diplomatic source showing what the Allied powers proposed after the First World War. It was never ratified and cannot be cited as proof of an existing four-part state or of ancient ethnic ownership. Treaty overview
Constitution of the Republic of Iraq (2005), Articles 3, 4, 117, 125 and 140. The strongest source for Iraq’s current constitutional structure: it recognises the Kurdistan Region as a federal region, protects multiple communities and acknowledges disputed territories. A constitution establishes legal arrangements; it does not settle every historical claim. Constitute Project
OHCHR, UN Commission of Inquiry statement on the Yazidi genocide (2024). Authoritative for the documented genocide and the centrality of Şingal to the attack on Yazidis. It is not a historical atlas and is therefore used here for the genocide, not for ancient territorial boundaries. United Nations Human Rights Office
