His son, Fravartish, and his son after him, too, Uvakshatara, spent their days in organising an army, the younger man, when he succeeded his father, altering the formation of the army from that of a disconnected mass of small tribes fighting independently, to a homogeneous force. And as long as the Medes held thus together they carried all before them, to which fact there is no better evidence than the Bible itself.
But Mede and Persian fell again; the Persians were subdued, and the Medes, deprived of the support of these their kinsmen, retired to their fastnesses and commenced the later period of history of their race—under the name of Gordyene, or Kurd.
Xenophon found them—his Karduk—to his cost, as all who read the “Retreat of the Ten Thousand” may learn, and he found them there in Anti-Taurus, or as we call it to-day, Hakkiari, Central Kurdistan.
When it is remembered that this part of Western Asia has been subject to the most wholesale revolution, to invasions by the armies of every nation that ever acquired fame and name in the Eastern world’s history—Assyrian, Parthian, Greek, Roman, Persian, the Arabs under Muhammad, and the Mongols—the fine stability of the race stands out, for among all the people of these lands they alone have withstood every army, and retained pure their language and blood, and claim with a pride of race to which none can grudge admiration, that they are the pure Aryan, the “holders of the hills, and the possessors of the tongue.”
Within the last century the national spirit awoke four times and asserted itself in attempts to throw off the yoke of the Turks. The first occurred in 1806, when Abdurrahman Pasha, the Baban of Sulaimania, fought long and bravely against the Turks for the independence of southern Kurdistan, being defeated at Darband-i-Bazian in 1808 by the Bagdad Pasha, who, assisted by one of the Kurdish Pasha’s relations at feud with him, succeeded in taking him in flank.
A few years later, Muhammad Pasha, also of the Baban stock, at Rawanduz, acquired great power, and he too made a bid for national independence, and actually possessed himself of Upper Mesopotamia, Erbil, and Kirkuk. His rule was of so cruel and inflexible a nature as to subdue even the most turbulent, and his power such that, aided by his large army of irregular cavalry, he kept his provinces in absolute subjection and excellent order. He was eventually, at an advanced age, lured by the Turks into a snare, and after a journey to Constantinople, where he had been received with great honour, and a restitution, his murder was contrived on his return journey to his provinces.
Yet once again, one of the last of the Sulaimania pashas, Ahmad, attempted a revolution against the Turks, and went out to battle against them, marching on Bagdad, to fail.
The fourth event, which can be hardly termed quite a bid for independence, was the revolution under Badar Khan Bey in 1847, mention of which has been made in the chapter dealing with the history of the Chaldeans.
In recent times, commencing some five hundred years back, and as their surroundings have become accessible, as well as owing to the very gradual increase of their numbers, they have spread north and west. Their southern limit always was, and still is, the ancient road from Kermanshah to Qasr-i-Shirin, but in Turkish territory they have established themselves in Armenia, and have pushed their way west from Darsim and Kharput, so that now there are villages of the Milli Kurds a day out of Aleppo and away up in the mountains of the north-west.
So little is known of their history, that it is hardly realised that among them there are ancient tribes and noble families, some of whom it will not be out of place briefly to mention here. To attempt an adequate treatment of the history of the tribes, so far as it is possible to learn it, would be to write another volume.