The Lost and Untold History of the Kurds

Soran Hamarash is a Kurdish writer, academic, historian and linguist who has dedicated nearly 30 years of his life to the study of the Kurds and their history. This book is a comprehensive journey into the beginning of writing and agriculture and, consequently, that of the history of the Kurds which is integral to these two foundational elements of the earliest civilisations.

In this book, Mr. Hamarash demonstrates that the modern foundation of our understanding of ancient history and the origin of civilisation was not set for the purpose of knowing the past; rather, it was to serve ideological, religious, and political agendas. This manifested non-objective approaches among scholars, which has resulted in dealing with the people in historical records selectively and in isolation from each other. Consequently, the organic nature of human society is not currently reflected in the existing historiography, and this has led to a significant misunderstanding about ancient history. For the Kurds, it has led to a lost and untold history.

A core argument stated here relates to the Sumerians who founded the first writing and one of the most advanced civilisations in human history. Their language is currently considered an isolated one, and allegedly died as a spoken language around 4000 years ago. Nevertheless, this book clearly demonstrates that Sumerian is not only still spoken in its newer form by the Kurds, but that the language is related to modern languages such as English, French, German, Russian and others.

This book strongly opposes the conventional understandings of the ancient history of Mesopotamia and Anatolia. It evidences that the key to understanding that history, is the Kurds, the Indigenous people of “the cradle of mankind”. It argues unequivocally that without understanding the history of the Kurds, the origin of the western civilisation and that of the Indo-European languages will remain unknown.