Western Travellers Among the Kurds

At a Glance

From the late eighteenth century to the twentieth, missionaries, consuls, officers and adventurers travelled the Kurdish lands, the mountainous country spanning today's Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria, and wrote down what they saw.
The Neapolitan missionary Giuseppe Campanile, after years of living in the region, published a book in 1818: a history of the region of Kurdistan and of the religious communities in it.
Campanile's book divides Kurdistan into seven emirates, describes daily life, and ends with the translation of a Kurdish song. It holds both admiration and heavy prejudice.
Claudius James Rich, the East India Company's resident in Baghdad, stayed for months in 1820 in Sulaymaniyah, the capital of the Baban emirate. His notes are a foundational source today.
The Englishman Ely Bannister Soane, in 1909, disguised himself as a Persian and toured the region; at Halabja he became the secretary of the ruler Adela Khanum. His book is a classic of travel writing.
The British official C.J. Edmonds, in his book on the years 1919-1925, listed one by one the seventeen British travellers who had come before him.
The traveller's testimony is strong: it leaves dates, numbers, prices, portraits. But it also has a filter: the mission's goal, the empire's interest, orientalist prejudice.
These records are today among the sources that Kurdish historians draw on, on the condition that they are read critically.
Two centuries before the Western traveller, an Eastern traveller had written the same lands: Evliya Çelebi. To read the two views side by side is the soundest way.

The Tigris, spring 1909. A kelek, a raft riding on inflated goatskins, leaves Diyarbekir and slides south. One of the passengers looks like a Persian merchant: his clothes, his accent, his prayers all in order. No one knows that this man is English. His name is Ely Bannister Soane. At night, unseen, he writes notes in his notebook.

A hundred years before him, in 1802, another foreigner had come to Mosul: a priest from Naples. After him came officers, consuls, painters. Some stayed a week, some ten years. Their common trait was this: they wrote down what they saw, and those notebooks survived.

This article opens those notebooks. What is in them? How far can they be trusted? And when a people's history is read out of other people's notebooks, what does it gain, and what does it lose?

Who Is the Traveller, and Why Does He Come?

First an honest question. Why did these men come? Not to look at the scenery.

The missionary came; his aim was to bind the region's Christian communities to Rome. The company man came; his aim was the trade routes and political intelligence. The officer and the consul came; they drew maps and wrote reports for their empires. And there was the purely curious one; but even he, on his return, sold his book in London, to the reader of the empire. The travelogue is not an innocent genre. Let us know that from the start.

Then why are these records precious all the same? Because the Kurdish inner world of that age was poor in print and archives. Great exceptions like the Sharafnama aside, most of daily life was never written down. Prices, populations, clothing, roads: often we learn them from these foreign notebooks. The French Kurdologist Thomas Bois puts it plainly: setting aside Niebuhr, who passed through in 1766 for scholarly purposes, every traveller worth noting came after Campanile. So our starting point is fixed.

A Neapolitan Missionary: Campanile and His Book of 1818

Giuseppe Campanile was born in the village of Sant'Antimo, near Naples. He became a Dominican friar. In 1802 the mission organisation sent him to Mosul; in 1809 he was made head of the Mesopotamia and Kurdistan missions. He had two cards to play: his Arabic and his medicine. The medicine chest opened the doors of the governors of Mosul and Amêdî (Amadiya). By Bois's account he travelled these lands "inch by inch for some twelve years." In 1815 he went back to Naples, became a professor of Arabic at the university, and died in 1835.

His book was printed in Naples in 1818. The Italian title is a long one: "Storia della regione del Kurdistan e delle sette di religione ivi esistenti." That is: a history of the region of Kurdistan and of the religious sects that exist there. The title says history; the content is more description. It is a photograph of Kurdistan at the dawn of the nineteenth century. What did it catch?

The skeleton of the book runs like this. The first part describes the country, and even its unit of measure is the journey: fifteen days long, twelve days wide. The second part divides Kurdistan into seven emirates (mîrlik, a principality under a hereditary ruling family): Bitlis, Hakkâri (Şambo), Botan, Behdinan, Soran, Baban and Qelaçolan. By Campanile's reckoning these emirates are in effect independent of the sultan. The third part covers religion, custom, writing, produce, trade, food, dress and entertainment. The parts that follow treat the Yazidis, the nomadic Kurds, the Christian communities and other faiths. The last part weighs Kurdistan's military, political and commercial importance. The book closes with the translation of a Kurdish song. It is less a mission report than a nine-roomed album of a country.

Inside it are bright observations. His line about Kurdistan is not easily forgotten: "Kurdistan is a treasure unrecognised and little cared for." He writes that the horses of Baban and Soran leave Arab horses behind. He tells of the day he was shown Kurdish poems on sheets of paper, the alphabet like Persian, and of how he could never manage to get a copy. He both praises his predecessor Garzoni's Kurdish grammar of 1787 and lists its errors; the story of that grammar is in our article on the pioneers of Kurdish studies.

But there are other sentences in the same book, and we will come to them.

An English Guest in Sulaymaniyah: Claudius James Rich

The year is 1820. The Baban mîr Mahmud Pasha invites the British resident in Baghdad to his capital. The guest is Claudius James Rich, the East India Company's resident at Baghdad. Rich sets out in April with his wife and a large retinue; on 10 May he reaches Sulaymaniyah. In the heat of summer they climb into the mountains, toward Merîwan and Senne; in October they take their leave. They winter in Mosul and return to Baghdad.

What did these few months yield? A hoard of sources. Rich was classically schooled, keen on languages, a tireless recorder. He worked out Sulaymaniyah's population: about ten thousand in 1820. The city was young then; a local chronicle Rich had translated from Persian dates its founding to 1784-85. He wrote the Baban palace, the bazaar, the tribal balances, both banks of the Iranian border. Rich died of cholera at Shiraz in 1821; his widow gathered his notes, and "Narrative of a Residence in Koordistan" was published in London in 1836.

The value of this book is best told by a colleague. A century later, working in the same region, C.J. Edmonds called Rich's narrative "a gold mine." He made a sharper observation still: even the recent local historians, when they wrote of the period before 1800, leaned more on Rich and other European writers than on native documents. The notebook from outside had turned, in time, into the memory of the inside. Hold on to that sentence; we will come back to it at the end.

The Man in Disguise: Ely Bannister Soane

Soane's story reads like a novel. Where does it begin? He was a bank clerk in Iran, and he chose to leave his European life behind and live as a local. In 1905 he became a Muslim at Shiraz. In 1906, when he was made manager of the bank's Kirmanshah branch, he grew fascinated with the Kurdish language and its people. In 1907 he resigned. In 1909 he set out in Persian disguise: by kelek from Diyarbekir down to Mosul, then on to Erbil, Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah.

The heart of the journey is Halabja. Soane stayed there seven weeks, because Halabja had an out-of-the-ordinary ruler: Adela Khanum, the de facto ruler of the Caf tribe. She took on this mysterious, Persian-speaking "Persian" traveller as her secretary. Soane watched closely the woman from whom he hid his identity, and afterwards wrote (the translation is approximate): "Official power passed little by little into her hands. While the Pasha was in Halabja he spent his time smoking the water-pipe and having baths built; the country was ruled by his wife." It was Adela Khanum, Soane wrote, who had the new prison built, and she who presided over the court herself. We treated this testimony at greater length in our article on Kurdish women in history.

Soane returned and wrote his book: "To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in Disguise" (London, 1912). For Edmonds it became a classic of Kurdistan travel writing. What came next is telling too. In the First World War the British administration took his Kurdish and his knowledge of the region into service. Soane was sent as a political officer to Xaneqîn and to Sulaymaniyah. The traveller in disguise became an officer of the occupation. Two faces of one man: the loving recorder and the servant of empire. In Soane, the moral question of travel literature takes on flesh and bone.

Official or Recorder? C.J. Edmonds

Cecil John Edmonds was a British political officer in northeastern Iraq between 1919 and 1925; later, from 1935 to 1945, he was an adviser to Iraq's Ministry of the Interior. His book on those years came out in London in 1957: "Kurds, Turks and Arabs."

What brings Edmonds into this article? His method more than his profession. In his book he lists, one by one, the seventeen British travellers who had written the region before him: from Lieutenant Heude, who passed in 1817, to the painter Ker Porter, from Rich to Soane. His own confession is a fine one: what stirred him was not going where no one had gone, but the thought of "following in the steps of Rich, of Layard, or of Rawlinson." Travelling was now a chain, and each new traveller a footnote to the ones before. Edmonds later tied that chain to scholarship: he prepared bibliographies of Southern Kurdish, and, with Tewfîq Wehbî, published a Kurdish-English dictionary in 1966.

There is a human side too. Edmonds knew the country around Sulaymaniyah, the shaikh families, and Adela Khanum at close hand. It was he who called her "the uncrowned queen of Sharezor." In 1919, when Şêx Mehmûdê Berzencî (Shaikh Mahmud Barzanji) declared his own government at Sulaymaniyah and came into conflict with the British, one of the eyes reading the region's balances in the field was, again, Edmonds. His book is therefore both memoir and document: the notebook of an official of the occupation, but a careful and learned official.

The Power and the Flaw of the Traveller's Eye

Now the scales. What do these notebooks give, and where do they deceive?

First the power. The travellers leave dates and numbers: Sulaymaniyah's population in 1820, the name of a mountain pass, the prices in a bazaar, the border of an emirate. Where the inner sources fall silent, they speak. Campanile's book is, in Bois's phrase, a "general table" that would not otherwise have reached us from that period. And these records were often written with love as well; Soane's love of Kurdish, and Edmonds's care, are not counterfeit.

Now the flaw. That same Campanile, in his first part, also writes this of the Kurds: ignorant, lazy, stubborn, treacherous. The Italian opening of his third part is heavier still (the translation is approximate): "Since the Kurd is a stupid and headstrong people..." Two pages on, the same pen writes that the Kurds are brave and dashing in war and show respect to a person of sober bearing. How can both be true? Like this: the man is good when he observes and, when he judges, a European of his century. Even Bois, who gave the book its French translation, felt the need to warn the reader about this "harsh language."

The second filter is interest. The missionary puts the Christian communities at the centre, and on his page the Muslim Kurd is mostly the background. The company man and the officer write their reports for their empire, and the knowledge of Soane and of Edmonds became, when the day came, the capital of the occupation administration. The third filter is invisibility. In these notebooks the women, the poor, the villagers rarely speak. Rulers like Adela Khanum are visible; ordinary life stays quiet.

So what should be done? What the historian does: read comparatively. Take the traveller's date and his number; leave his adjectives at the door. And do not forget that finding of Edmonds's: even local historiography came, in time, to lean on these notebooks. To ignore the outside testimony is a loss of knowledge; to accept it without question is a loss of identity. The middle of the two is critical reading.

Eastern Traveller, Western Traveller

One last question. Were these lands looked at only from the West? No. A century and a half before Campanile, in 1655-56, the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi toured Kurdistan from end to end and wrote it into his Seyahatname. We told that view in a separate article. To set the two side by side is instructive. Evliya looks from the inside: slips of the tongue, palace gossip, forty-day feasts. Campanile and those after him look from the outside: measure, number, comparison. Evliya has his exaggeration, Campanile his prejudice. Where the two cross, solid ground begins.

Today these travelogues sit on the workbench of Kurdish historiography. They are read beside inner sources like the Sharafnama; the pioneers of Kurdish studies turned them into footnotes. The travellers died. The kelek rotted, the mission closed, the empires broke apart. The notebooks remain. Testimony outlives the witness, so long as the reader knows whose testimony is being read.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is Campanile's book, and why does it matter? It is "Storia della regione del Kurdistan," published in Naples in 1818 by the Neapolitan Dominican missionary Giuseppe Campanile. From the pen of a witness who had lived in the region for years, it describes the emirates, the faiths and the daily life of Kurdistan at the start of the nineteenth century. Campanile is among the first European writers to have lived a long time among the Kurds.

What did Claudius James Rich do in Sulaymaniyah? At the invitation of the Baban mîr Mahmud Pasha, he went to Sulaymaniyah in 1820 and stayed as a guest for months. He recorded the city's population, its palace, its bazaar and the surrounding districts. His notes, published in 1836 after his death, are among the foundational sources for the Baban period.

Who was Ely Bannister Soane? An Englishman who had worked in banking in Iran and had learned Kurdish and Persian. In 1909 he toured Kurdistan in Persian disguise and worked at Halabja as the secretary of Adela Khanum. His 1912 book about the journey is reckoned a classic. He later served in the British administration as a political officer.

Can we trust the travelogues? With measure. For dates, numbers, place names and the record of events they are of great value, and they light up periods when the inner sources are silent. But they carry the mission's goal, the empire's interest and orientalist prejudice. The right method is to read them against other sources.

What does C.J. Edmonds's book tell? "Kurds, Turks and Arabs" (1957) recounts the author's political posting in Iraqi Kurdistan between 1919 and 1925, along with his travels and his studies. Its section listing the seventeen British travellers before him reads like a small history of the travel literature itself.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary sources (from the Bedel Boseli Collection):

Giuseppe Campanile, Storia della regione del Kurdistan e delle sette di religione ivi esistenti (Naples, 1818): the Italian original; the chapter titles and the map of the contents come from this edition.
R.P. Giuseppe Campanile, Kürdistan Tarihi (History of Kurdistan, Avesta Publications): with Thomas Bois's introduction; the author's biography, the assessment of Garzoni and the quotations come from this translation.
C.J. Edmonds, Kurds, Turks and Arabs: Politics, Travel and Research in North-Eastern Iraq 1919-1925 (Avesta Publications; English original London, 1957): the list of seventeen travellers and the portraits of Rich and Soane.
Martin van Bruinessen, "From Adela Khanum to Leyla Zana": Soane's Halabja testimony and the Adela Khanum section.
Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (4th edition): the context of Garzoni and the missionary period.

Social Media Summaries

The following summaries are ready to share; copy and use them.

A kelek on the Tigris, 1909. One of the passengers is not a Persian merchant but an Englishman in disguise: Soane. The Kurdish notebooks of the Western travellers: bedelboseli.com/en/western-travellers-among-the-kurds
The Neapolitan missionary Campanile wrote in 1818: "Kurdistan is a treasure unrecognised." The same book carries heavy prejudice too. Here is the scale that weighs both: bedelboseli.com/en/western-travellers-among-the-kurds
The Baban mîr sent the invitation, the British resident came: in 1820 Rich recorded Sulaymaniyah line by line. His notes are a gold mine today: bedelboseli.com/en/western-travellers-among-the-kurds
At Halabja, Soane became the secretary of Adela Khanum and wrote down what he saw: the country was ruled by a woman. The testimony of the traveller in disguise: bedelboseli.com/en/western-travellers-among-the-kurds
A traveller's notebook gives dates and numbers; it carries prejudice too. To ignore the outside witness is a loss of knowledge; to accept it unquestioned is a loss of identity: bedelboseli.com/en/western-travellers-among-the-kurds