The Sharafnama (1597): The First Kurdish History, From the Pen of a Mîr

At a Glance

The Sharafnama (the Şerefname in Kurdish) is the history book that Şerefxan, the ruler of Bitlis, completed in 1597. It is the first comprehensive work known in which a Kurd set down, all together, the ruling families of his own people.
Şerefxan led an unusual life. He was born in 1543 in Safavid lands, was raised and schooled at court alongside royal children, then crossed to the Ottoman side and took over the governance of Bitlis, his ancestors' city.
The work was written in Persian, because in that age Persian was the language of history-writing in the East. About a hundred years later, Ehmedê Xanî's deliberate choice of Kurdish would begin to change that picture.
The introduction describes the Kurds' way of life, their customs, and their divisions. Şerefxan sorts the Kurds into four large branches: Kurmanc, Lor, Kelhur, and Goran.
The body of the book records dozens of governments, from Kurdish dynasties that held full sovereignty down to local mîr families, name by name and reign by reign. The answer to the prejudice that "the Kurds have no history" was written four hundred years ago.
The manuscripts scattered across the world. The first full printing was done in St. Petersburg in 1860 to 1862. French, Turkish, Sorani, and Kurmancî translations followed.
The work is not flawless. It is a history of mîrs and dynasties; the peasant, the woman, the shepherd stay at the margins. With that limit acknowledged, it is the founding stone of Kurdish historiography.
From the Kurdish historian Mestûre Erdelan to today's academy, every branch of Kurdish history-writing turns back to look at it.

Bitlis, the late 1590s. The stone city, built into the fold of a valley, sleeps in the shadow of its fortress. In one room of that fortress a lamp burns late into the night.

The man at the table governs this city by day. He hears cases, arranges the taxes, reconciles local balances with the decrees that arrive from Istanbul. He is a mîr, a Kurdish ruler, and he comes from the princely house of this land. But at night he pushes the seal and the decree aside and bends over other work. Before him are draft leaves: names, dates, family lines. He is writing a book.

What he is writing is not a ruler's ledger of self-praise. He carries a far larger concern: to gather the history of his own people, the Kurds, of all their ruling families, into a single book. Such a thing had never been done. Arab, Persian, and Ottoman chronicles had mentioned the Kurds here and there, but no one had written this people's history from the inside, all together.

The man sets the date on the last page in his own hand: the final day of the month of Zilhicce in the hijri year 1005. In the common calendar, 4 August 1597. In distant London that year, Shakespeare was writing for the stage. The man gives his book his own name: the Şerefname, known in international scholarship as the Sharafnama. From his own name: Şerefxan (Sharaf Khan).

Who Was Şerefxan? A Life Between Two Empires

First, a word for the reader meeting this people here for the first time. The Kurds are one of the largest stateless peoples in the Middle East, between 30 and 45 million, and they speak an Iranic language, the Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. In Şerefxan's century they had no single state of their own; they lived through local ruling houses, under larger empires.

Şerefxan's life story sums up, in one man, the fate of the Kurdish rulers of his era: living between two great powers, the Ottomans and the Safavids, the empire of Persia.

He was born on 25 February 1543, but not in Bitlis. He came into the world in the Safavid lands, in the town of Karahrud near Qom, because the ruling house of Bitlis had been driven from its city in the rivalries of the day. That we can know his birthplace and day with such precision is itself thanks to him: the historian recorded his own life as well. It was the year, far to the west, that Copernicus placed the sun at the center of the heavens. Young Şeref grew up around the Safavid court; the sources report that he was schooled together with the children of the shah's family. He received a fine court education: Persian literature, history, administration. In his youth he held governorships, charged within the Safavid order with the affairs of the Kurdish principalities.

In 1578 he made his great decision: he crossed to the Ottoman side. The government of Sultan Murad III returned his ancestors' homeland to him, and Şerefxan came back to the head of Bitlis. He governed the city for about twenty years. Then, toward the end of the 1590s, he handed the rule to his son and gave himself to his true passion: his book. His death is dated to the first years of the 1600s; the sources give the exact year with small differences.

Why does this life matter for the book? Because Şerefxan had seen the inside of both empires and known the archive and history culture of both courts. He knew the Persian tradition of the chronicle. He knew the Ottoman order of record-keeping. And he knew how each capital saw the Kurds. He wrote his book with all three kinds of knowledge.

What Is Inside the Book?

The Sharafnama is made of two great parts.

In the introduction, Şerefxan presents the Kurdish people: their way of life, their customs, their beliefs, their languages, and their branches. His most-quoted classification is here. He divides the Kurds into four large branches: Kurmanc, Lor, Kelhur, and Goran. Four centuries on, that division is still a frame that scholars reach for in debates over language and community. It does not map exactly onto the linguistics of today, but it shows how a Kurdish eye of the sixteenth century sorted its own people. In our article on the branches of the Kurdish language today, we trace the modern form of that map.

The body is a register of dynasties. Şerefxan begins with the great Kurdish dynasties that held full sovereignty. He then records the families that showed signs of independence, and after them the smaller mîr families, region by region. He gives the last great section of the book to his own family, the mîrs of Bitlis. For each family he writes the founding, the notable names, the relations with neighbors, and the course of events down to his own day. The book then closes with a chronology of the Ottoman and Safavid events of the period.

Do not miss the meaning of this structure. Şerefxan is not writing to praise each family one by one. He is writing them as parts of a whole. Each scattered principality was the ruler of its own valley, yet the Sharafnama makes them the volumes of one book. A people the sword had never united, he unites on paper. That is the book's quiet revolution.

Why Persian? Is That Something to Be Ashamed Of?

Here is a question that gets asked, and should be: why is the first Kurdish history not in Kurdish?

The answer lies in the rules of the age. In the sixteenth-century East, the language of prestige for history-writing was Persian; even the Ottoman court had its histories written in Persian for a long time. Şerefxan was a man of the court, and he wanted his book to be read and taken seriously. So he wrote it in the learned language of the era. It is much like a Kurdish scholar today writing in English for an international readership.

Not shame, then, but context. And yet it was also a lack, and the one who understood that best was, again, a Kurd. About a hundred years after the Sharafnama, Ehmedê Xanî wrote his own work deliberately in Kurdish, and said his reason plainly: so that the people should have their book in their own tongue too. Şerefxan recorded his people's history; Xanî recorded his people's language. Two men, two centuries, one cause. The meeting of those two pens would be completed only in 1898, when the first Kurdish newspaper serialized Xanî; that story is in a separate article of ours.

A Book's Journey Around the World

The Sharafnama never met the printing press in its own age. It was multiplied as a manuscript. Some of the earliest copies were made in the author's own lifetime, copied out by hand; one of these early copies is today in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The other manuscripts scattered over time: Istanbul, Petersburg, Paris, Cairo.

The book's modern life began in Russia. In 1860 to 1862 the full Persian text, prepared by the orientalist Véliaminof-Zernof, was printed in St. Petersburg. A French translation followed: Charmoy's version appeared between 1868 and 1875, again in Petersburg. And so the scholarly world of Europe read the Kurds, for the first time and all together, from the pen of a Kurd. The Kurdish studies of nineteenth-century orientalism leaned heavily on the Sharafnama.

The return to Kurdish came earlier than one might think. In 1858 to 1859, Mela Mehmûdê Bazîdî, a scholar from Bazîd in the far east of Anatolia, translated the work into Kurmancî. The Sharafnama had returned to its own people's language before it reached the languages of Europe, and that translation counts among the cornerstones of Kurdish prose. The Turkish came in the twentieth century; the most widely read is Mehmet Emin Bozarslan's edition of 1971. The Sorani translation was made by the great poet and lexicographer Hejar. New Kurmancî editions, and the annotated English edition prepared by Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady, followed these. This is how a book comes home: first to its own language, then to the shelves of the world.

The Limits of the Work: An Honest Look

Let us not go blind while we crown the Sharafnama. Source criticism is the honor of history-writing.

First: the Sharafnama is a history of dynasties. On its pages are mîrs, wars, family lines. The daily life of the peasant, the shepherd, the craftsman, and to a great degree of women, stays at the margins. This is not Şerefxan's fault but his age's idea of history; in that age, history was the ledger of those who ruled. The reader of today should read it knowing this: what we hold is the mirror not of the whole people, but of the governing layer.

Second: Şerefxan was also a party. In the sections on his own family, the tone of praise rises; in some accounts family honor gets ahead of the cold record. Historians use those sections by comparing them with other sources.

Third: not every genealogy and every founding story in the book stands on the same ground. Şerefxan sometimes relays oral traditions, and part of that is menkıbe, that is, an instructive legend. Scholars are divided here, and the good reader advances by separating record from legend. Şerefxan himself, in most places, is honest about it: he says "so it is told."

These limits do not lower the value of the work. They raise it. Flawless narration belongs to legends. Sources speak through their flaws.

A Four-Hundred-Year-Old Answer

What is the Sharafnama good for today? Give three answers.

For the researcher it is a base source. For the political map of the sixteenth-century Kurdish world, for its family structures and place names, it is the first stop. From the Cambridge volumes on Kurdish history to local monographs, the modern literature is written by reckoning with it.

For the Kurdish reader it is a mirror. In it one reads, from the pen of a witness from within, how one's ancestors were governed four hundred years ago, which families held which valleys. What that reading gives is not boasting. It is a sense of continuity. A people's present is left rootless if it knows nothing of its yesterday.

And for everyone it is an answer. The sentence "the Kurds have no history" is a prejudice that has been repeated for two centuries. The Sharafnama is four hundred years older than that sentence. Each time the prejudice is repeated, that night lamp in the fortress of Bitlis is lit once more: the lamp of the man who governed his city by day and wrote his people's history by night. Books, if they are well written, outlive their owners. For four hundred years the Sharafnama has been proving it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Sharafnama, and when was it written? It is the work in which Şerefxan, the ruler of Bitlis, gathered the history of the Kurdish dynasties and mîr families. The author set the date on the last line himself: the final day of Zilhicce in hijri 1005, which is 4 August 1597. It is the first comprehensive history known that a Kurd wrote about his own people.

Who was Şerefxan? He was born on 25 February 1543 in Karahrud, in the Safavid lands, and came from the ruling house of Bitlis. He was schooled at the Safavid court, crossed to the Ottoman side in 1578, and took over the governance of Bitlis. He completed his book after handing rule to his son, and died in the early 1600s.

Why was the Sharafnama written in Persian? Persian was the language of history-writing in the East in that age; a work that wished to be taken seriously was written in it. About a hundred years later, Ehmedê Xanî began to change that balance in literature with his deliberate choice of Kurdish.

How does the Sharafnama classify the Kurds? In the introduction Şerefxan divides the Kurds into four large branches: Kurmanc, Lor, Kelhur, and Goran. This is remembered today as one of the oldest divisions made from within the Kurdish world of the time.

Are there translations of the Sharafnama? Yes. The first translation into Kurmancî was made as early as 1858 to 1859 by Mela Mehmûdê Bazîdî. The first full printing, in Persian, was done in St. Petersburg in 1860 to 1862; the French translation appeared in 1868 to 1875. The Turkish is most widely read in M. Emin Bozarslan's translation (1971), and the Sorani in Hejar's; the annotated English edition by Dr. Izady is a reference for researchers.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary sources (from the Bedel Boseli Collection):

Şerefxan Bidlisi, Sharafnama: the English translation and annotated edition by Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady; the exact dates in this article (birth in Karahrud on 25 February 1543, completion on 4 August 1597, the four-branch classification) are from this edition.
Şerefxan Bidlisi, Şerefname, Kurmancî translation (Weşanxaneya Azad edition).
Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (4th edition), the chapters on historiography.
Hamit Bozarslan et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Kurds (2021), the early modern chapters.

Social Media Summaries

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By day he ruled a mountain city; by night he wrote his people's history. In 1597 the Bitlis mîr Şerefxan finished the Sharafnama, the first comprehensive Kurdish history known, written by a Kurd: bedelboseli.com/en/sharafnama-1597-first-kurdish-history
"The Kurds have no history" is a prejudice two centuries old. The Sharafnama is four hundred years older than the sentence. Written in 1597, it answers the charge in advance: bedelboseli.com/en/sharafnama-1597-first-kurdish-history
In 1597 Şerefxan sorted the Kurds into four branches: Kurmanc, Lor, Kelhur, Goran. One of the oldest maps a people ever drew of itself, from the inside: bedelboseli.com/en/sharafnama-1597-first-kurdish-history
He united on paper a people the sword had never united. Each scattered principality became a chapter of one book. That is the quiet revolution of the Sharafnama: bedelboseli.com/en/sharafnama-1597-first-kurdish-history
Written in Bitlis, printed in St. Petersburg, translated in Paris, and at last returned to Kurdish. The story of a book finding its way home: bedelboseli.com/en/sharafnama-1597-first-kurdish-history