We Were Here First: A Journey Through the Ancient Kurdish Soul
By Mehrdad Halavi When people ask, "Who are the Kurds?" they usually get an answer pulled from a textbook: an ethnic group of 40–50 million people spread across Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria, with no country of their own. That’s not wrong—but it’s far from the full truth. The Kurdish people are not a recent phenomenon. We are not a border-created identity. We are older than most of the states that try to divide us. Our roots stretch back thousands of years—deep into the stone and soil of the Zagros Mountains and the Mesopotamian plains. Our real history lives beyond the pages of Western academia. It lives in song, myth, and memory. And it deserves to be told in full. Ancient Bloodlines Long before we were called Kurds, we were the Guti, the Lullubi, the Carduchi, and the Medes. These were the fierce mountain peoples who challenged empires and ruled kingdoms. - The Guti toppled the Akkadian Empire in 2150 BCE and ruled Sumer for a generation....