Pioneers of Kurdish Studies: The Birth of a Science

At a Glance

Kurdology, or Kurdish studies, is the field that studies the language, history, society, and culture of the Kurds. It got its name in the nineteenth century; the work itself is older.
The first known Kurdish grammar was printed in Rome in 1787. Its author was the Italian priest Maurizio Garzoni, who had lived seventeen years in the Kurdish lands.
The scholar Basile Nikitine called Garzoni "the father of Kurdology." The phrase appears in the entry on Şemdinan in the Encyclopédie de l'Islam.
In the nineteenth century the field's center became St. Petersburg. The consul Alexandre Jaba collected Kurdish texts; the first full printing of the Sharafnama was done there in 1860 to 1862.
Vladimir Minorsky wrote the entries on the Kurds and Kurdistan for the Encyclopaedia of Islam in the first half of the twentieth century. The Turkish translation of those entries is in the Bedel Boseli Collection.
In the Soviet period, Kurdology took root in Leningrad and Yerevan. Casimê Celîl and his children are the most recognized family of that school.
In Western academia the age of fieldwork was opened by Martin van Bruinessen; David McDowall wrote the general synthesis of the modern history.
With Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady, a generation of scholars of Kurdish origin, studying their own people from within, became visible.
Today Kurdish studies lives in university chairs and peer-reviewed journals. The balance of the outside view and the view from within is still the field's main question.

Rome, 1787. In the Vatican's mission press, the typesetters are wrestling with an unfamiliar job. In the draft before them, beside the Italian explanations, are words they have never seen. The words of a mountain language.

The manuscript belongs to a white-haired Dominican friar. His name is Maurizio Garzoni. He spent seventeen years of his life in Amêdî, a mountain town north of the Tigris. He had gone there to change people's religion. He came back carrying something else: the first printed map of a people's language.

The book appeared that year: a grammar and dictionary of the Kurdish language. No one counted it a great event. That same year, delegates in Philadelphia were signing a new constitution, and the world was watching Paris, not Amêdî. Yet that thin volume was the first stone of the science later called Kurdology. A science that studies a people begins with a book that takes that people's language seriously.

This article follows the chain set upon that stone: from missionary to consul, from consul to professor, from the children of exile to the lecterns of today.

What Is Kurdology, and Where Does It Begin?

The word is a simple sum: Kurd plus the suffix for science. It names the field that studies the language, history, literature, beliefs, and social structure of the Kurds, one of the largest stateless peoples in the Middle East, between 30 and 45 million people who speak an Iranic language, the Iranian branch of the Indo-European family. So where does this science begin? The answer depends on what you count.

Keeping records about the Kurds is old. Arab, Persian, and Ottoman sources spoke of them for centuries. The first great move from within the Kurds came early too: in 1597 Şerefxan, the ruler of Bitlis, wrote his people's dynastic history. We told the story of that Sharafnama in a separate article. But single records do not make a science. Science begins with method and continuity: writing a grammar, collecting manuscripts, comparing sources, founding a chair.

Measured that way, the birth of Kurdology falls at the end of the eighteenth century. And its birthplace is a surprise. Not Diyarbekir, not Süleymaniye. Rome.

The First Grammar Printed in Rome: Garzoni

Maurizio Garzoni was a priest of the Dominican mission based in Mosul. He spent long years in Amêdî, the center of the Behdinan region of the Kurdish lands. How many years? His contemporary Campanile says seventeen; Dr. Izady writes eighteen. The gap is trivial, the lesson is not: this book was the work not of a traveler but of a man who had lived there.

In 1787 Garzoni had his work, Grammatica e Vocabolario della Lingua Kurda, printed in Rome; the mission organization paid the cost. It was the first detailed Kurdish grammar and dictionary prepared in a European language. It showed Europe, with evidence, that Kurdish was a language separate from Persian, working by its own rules. In our article on whether Kurdish is a language or a dialect, we followed the trail of this document.

Was it flawless? No. Campanile, a missionary who wrote thirty years later, praises the book but counts its faults too: some sounds are written wrong, many necessary words are left out. The first steps of a science are always like this; those who come after walk by correcting the first.

The title came from a Russian. The scholar Basile Nikitine, in the entry he wrote on Şemdinan for the Encyclopédie de l'Islam, called Garzoni "the father of Kurdology." An Italian missionary's title was given by a Russian scholar. Even at its birth, Kurdology was international.

The Petersburg School: Consuls and Manuscripts

In the nineteenth century the field's center of gravity shifted north. Why Russia? The answer is on the map: the Tsardom bordered the Ottomans and Iran through the Caucasus, and was at war with both empires. Knowing the Kurds was, for Petersburg, a matter of state. But state curiosity produced real knowledge too. One should tell that doubleness without hiding it.

The links of the chain run like this. The linguist Peter Lerch published his studies on the Kurds in Petersburg in 1856. Russia's consul in Erzurum, Alexandre Jaba, turned his post into a center of collection: he worked with Kurdish scholars, gathered manuscripts, recorded texts. Jaba's collection, printed in Petersburg in 1860, introduced eight Kurmanc poets from the Hakkari region. It dated the oldest of them to the fifteenth century: the age of Elî Herîrî, Melayê Cizîrî, and Feqiyê Teyran. The writing of Kurdish literary history began with that list; later research corrected the dates but took its frame from him.

The same school produced dictionaries and grammars: the Kurdish-French dictionary of Jaba and Ferdinand Justi appeared in 1879, and Justi's Kurdish grammar in 1880, both in Petersburg. The crown was a history book. The orientalist Véliaminof-Zernof printed the full Persian text of the Sharafnama in Petersburg in 1860 to 1862. That was how European scholarship first read the Kurds, all together, from the pen of a Kurd. The story of that printing is detailed in our Sharafnama article.

Who Was Minorsky, and Why Does He Matter So Much?

The greatest fruit of the Petersburg school gathered in one man: Vladimir Minorsky (1877-1966). He was born in Russia, trained in oriental studies, and served as a Tsarist diplomat in Iran. He worked on the Ottoman-Iran border commission, which means he was a man who had crossed on horse and mule the very geography he wrote about. After the revolution of 1917 he did not return home. He went first to Paris, then to London, and finished his life at the lectern. He died in 1966.

Why does he matter? Because he ordered the memory of the field. The Encyclopaedia of Islam, the great reference of Western scholarship on Islam, entrusted the entries on the Kurds and Kurdistan to him. In those entries Minorsky turned scattered information into a single narrative: origins, dynasties, language, society. He wrote the city entries, such as Süleymaniye, as well. In 1938 he presented a paper titled "The origins of the Kurds"; in 1926 he wrote on the Mosul question. For decades, anyone who wrote something serious about the Kurds looked first to Minorsky.

One example shows his method. The Karduchoi, whom the Greek general Xenophon met in the mountains in 401 BC, had for a century been taken directly as the ancestors of the Kurds. The philology of Minorsky's generation put that identity on the table. Scholars are divided here: one line foregrounds the Karduchoi, the other follows the ancient name Kurtioi. Minorsky's entries matured that debate. Evidence in the scale instead of romantic identification: this is Kurdology leaving its adolescence.

The Turkish of these entries is within our reach. The text bearing the signatures of Minorsky, Thomas Bois, and D.N. MacKenzie was published under the title "Kürtler ve Kürdistan" by Doz Yayınları. That book is the base source of this article.

The Consul of Urmia: Basile Nikitine

The next link in the chain is again a Russian diplomat. Basile Nikitine was Russia's consul in Urmia during the years of the First World War. His posting was the eastern gate of the Kurdish world. Nikitine followed Jaba's path: he turned his office into a collector's desk. He gathered Kurdish texts, recorded folk narratives, worked with local teachers.

The revolution left him without a homeland too; he settled in Paris. But he did not let his material rot. He published Kurdish stories together with the English Kurdologist Ely Bannister Soane, the same Soane who traveled Kurdistan in disguise, whose story is in our article on Western travelers. Nikitine's lifelong labor was printed in Paris in 1956: "Les Kurdes," a sociological and historical study of the Kurds. The book is among the early syntheses that read Kurdish society not only through its dynasties but through the tribe, the village, and daily life.

The man who gave Garzoni the title "father of Kurdology" is himself counted among the fathers of the field. This is how the science advances: everyone writes his debt to the one before.

The Yerevan School: The Children of Exile at the Lectern

The Soviet Union took Kurdology into its state program. The aims were mixed: minority policy, propaganda, cross-border calculation. But part of the results became lasting science. That, too, must be written plainly.

The records give a clear start: in 1928 to 1929, twenty-three young Kurds were sent to the oriental studies institutions of Leningrad for their education. One of them was Qanatê Kurdo. In the decades that followed he took charge of Kurdish philology in Leningrad; his Kurdish-Russian dictionary, published in 1960, became one of the field's basic tools. From the same generation, Erebê Şemo, together with Ishak Marogulov, prepared a Latin-script Kurdish alphabet in 1929. On 1 March 1930 the Kurdish newspaper Reya Teze began publishing in Yerevan.

Yerevan became the home of this school. Most were the children of Êzidî Kurdish families, that is Yazidis, followers of an old Kurdish faith, who had taken refuge in the Caucasus after 1915. From among them one family came forward: the Celîl family. The father, Casimê Celîl, was raised in an orphanage and became a poet and publisher; in 1955, when Yerevan Radio's Kurdish broadcast was founded, he was there, and he laid the foundation of its music archive. How that radio's voice built a memory, we told in our Radio Yerevan article. His children took over the science: the "Zargotina Kurda," the Kurdish folklore compiled by Ordîxanê Celîl and Celîlê Celîl, came out in 1978 from Moscow's Nauka science press. Their sister Cemîla Celîl took charge of the music collections.

Consider it. The grandfathers were exiles who had lost their mountains. The grandchildren had the tales of those mountains printed in Moscow's scientific press. To my mind this is the most moving page of Kurdology.

The Age of Fieldwork: Bruinessen and Western Academia

In the second half of the twentieth century the flag passed to the universities of the West. The method of the new generation was new too: the archive is not enough, you go to the village.

The name that stands for this age is the Dutch anthropologist Martin van Bruinessen. For his doctorate he traveled the Kurdish regions in 1975 to 1976: Turkey, Syria, Iran. He could not enter Iraq because of war conditions, and he writes this honestly himself. He stayed in villages, learned Kurdish, and listened to the agha, the shaikh, and the peasant where they lived. His thesis was printed in Utrecht in 1978 and translated into Turkish as "Ağa, Şeyh ve Devlet," Agha, Shaikh and State. The book is still the first stop for anyone who wants to understand Kurdish social structure. Bruinessen also brought the Kurdistan pages of the Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi into scholarship; that story is in our Evliya Çelebi article.

The English researcher David McDowall, for his part, wrote the general synthesis of the modern period in the 1990s with "A Modern History of the Kurds." The book is counted the standard handbook of twentieth-century Kurdish political history. The works of both men stand in the Bedel Boseli Collection, in the originals and in translation.

A Science That Studies Its Own People: Izady and After

Most of the pioneers named so far were looking from outside: Italian, Russian, Dutch, English. At the end of the twentieth century the missing piece was set in place: scholars of Kurdish origin walked to the center of the field.

The most visible name of this generation is Dr. Izady. His "The Kurds: A Concise Handbook," published in 1992, became the reference that tells the Kurds in a single volume: history, language, religion, geography, culture. Dr. Izady also prepared the annotated English edition of the Sharafnama and wrote extensively on Kurdish family names. He held a line respectful of his predecessors but not surrendered to them; in his bibliographies he objects openly to some of Minorsky's theses on origins. In the Bedel Boseli Collection, beside his books, there is also the transcript of a video interview with him: the present voice of the view from within.

But is the view from within always the more correct one? No; the point is balance. The researcher who looks from outside gains distance but can miss the context; Campanile's prejudiced sentences are the proof. The one who looks from within gains depth but risks walking toward the answer he loves. Sound Kurdology holds both in the scale: the Kurdish researcher speaks with the document, the foreign researcher listens to the people.

Today that scale has been institutionalized. There are Kurdish studies chairs and centers at universities in Europe and America; the center at the University of Exeter is the best known of them. Peer-reviewed Kurdish studies journals are published. In 2021 Cambridge University Press brought out "The Cambridge History of the Kurds," gathering the giants of the field in one project. Garzoni's thin grammar in Rome had become, in two hundred and thirty years, a science that fills libraries.

The end of the chain is open. Perhaps the next link will be added by someone reading these lines.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does Kurdology mean? It is the name of the field that studies the language, history, literature, beliefs, and social structure of the Kurds. It was born within European oriental studies in the nineteenth century; today it is a field with its own chairs and journals.

Who is "the father of Kurdology"? The phrase is for the Italian missionary Maurizio Garzoni. He lived more than seventeen years in the Kurdish lands and published the first detailed Kurdish grammar and dictionary in Rome in 1787. The title was given to him by the scholar Basile Nikitine, in the entry on Şemdinan in the Encyclopédie de l'Islam.

What did Vladimir Minorsky add to Kurdish historiography? He wrote the Encyclopaedia of Islam entries on subjects such as the Kurds, Kurdistan, and Süleymaniye, turning scattered information into a methodical synthesis. He tied the debate on origins to philological evidence. The Turkish translation of his entries came out under the title "Kürtler ve Kürdistan" from Doz Yayınları.

Why did Soviet Kurdology develop in Yerevan? A Kurdish community that had taken refuge in the Caucasus lived there. The generation trained in Leningrad founded a newspaper, a radio, and an academy in Yerevan. Reya Teze began publishing in 1930; Yerevan Radio's Kurdish service opened in 1955. The Celîl family is the emblem of that school.

When did researchers of Kurdish origin come to the fore in the field? From the second half of the twentieth century. The most visible example is Dr. Izady, author of "The Kurds: A Concise Handbook" (1992). Today many scholars of Kurdish origin work at universities around the world.

Sources and Further Reading

Primary sources (from the Bedel Boseli Collection):

V. Minorsky, Th. Bois, D.N. MacKenzie, Kürtler ve Kürdistan (Doz Yayınları): the Turkish of the Encyclopaedia of Islam entries; the 1787 Garzoni details, the Jaba and Lerch references, and the debate on origins are from this text.
Dr. Mehrdad R. Izady, The Kurds: A Concise Handbook (4th edition): the chapters on Garzoni's years in Amêdî and missionary linguistics, and Izady's bibliographic compilations (the Minorsky and Nikitine references).
R.P. Giuseppe Campanile, Kürdistan Tarihi (Avesta Yayınları): Thomas Bois's presentation and the appraisal of Garzoni; the footnote that is the source of the phrase "the father of Kurdology."
Ordîxanê Celîl and Celîlê Celîl, Zargotina Kurda I (Moscow, Nauka, 1978): an example of Soviet Kurdology's folklore collecting.
Martin van Bruinessen, Ağa, Şeyh ve Devlet: the author's account of his 1975-76 fieldwork is in the book's introduction.
Ali Ağcakulu, Ortadoğu'da Kürtçe Radyo Yayınları: Erivan Radyosu Örneği 1955-1990 (master's thesis): on the 1928-29 generation sent to Leningrad and the Yerevan institutions.

Social Media Summaries

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The first stone of the science that studies the Kurds was laid in Rome in 1787: a Kurdish grammar written by a missionary. Trace the 230-year chain of Kurdish studies: bedelboseli.com/en/pioneers-of-kurdish-studies
Who called Garzoni "the father of Kurdology"? A Russian scholar, Basile Nikitine. In this field, everyone writes his debt to the one who came before: bedelboseli.com/en/pioneers-of-kurdish-studies
In Erzurum, the Russian consul Alexandre Jaba turned his office into a collection desk. The first list of Kurdish poets was printed in St. Petersburg in 1860: bedelboseli.com/en/pioneers-of-kurdish-studies
The grandfathers were exiles who had lost their mountains. Their grandchildren, the Celîl family, printed those mountains' folk tales in Moscow's scientific press: bedelboseli.com/en/pioneers-of-kurdish-studies
From Minorsky to Bruinessen, from Yerevan to Dr. Izady: the balance of the outside view and the view from within. This is the birth of Kurdish studies: bedelboseli.com/en/pioneers-of-kurdish-studies