Kurdish Calendar - Background

Background

The Kurdish calendar starts at 612 BC. The Median kingdom and the founding of its capital city at Ecbatana (modern Hamadan) was probably not before 625 BC that Cyaxares succeeded in uniting the many Median tribes into a single kingdom. In 614 BC, he captured Ashur, and in 612, in an alliance with Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, his forces stormed Nineveh, putting an end to the Assyrian Empire.

Evidence of the area's prior history indicates that the Middle East in general had been one of the earliest areas to experience what the Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe called the Neolithic Revolution. That revolution witnessed the development of settled, village-based agricultural life. Kurdistan (Western Iran) has yielded much evidence on the history of these important developments. In the early Neolithic (sometimes called the Mesolithic) period, evidence of significant shifts in tool making, settlement patterns, and subsistence living including nascent domestication of both plants and animals, which comes from such important Kurdish sites as Asiab (Asíyaw), Guran, Ganj-e Dareh (Genjí Dara), and Ali Khosh (Elí xosh). Similar developments in the Zagros are also traceable at sites such as Karim Shahir and Zawi Chemi-Shanidar. This early experimentation with sedentary life and domestication was soon followed by a period of fully developed village farming, as is evident at important Zagros sites such as Jarmo, Sarab, upper Ali Kosh, and upper Guran. All of these sites date wholly or in part to the 8th and 7th millennia BC.

The transition from food-gathering to food-production began within the natural territorial ranges of the early domesticates' wild ancestors, in the general area of the Zagros Mountains. Additionally, the present evidence strongly points to the foothill valleys along the Kurdish mountain chains (with a spur stretching into Samaria) as being the main geographic setting of this transition. Agriculture necessitated domestication of flora and fauna. Earlier forms of modern-day wheat, barley, rye, oats, peas, lentils, alfalfa, and grapes were first domesticated by the ancestors of the Kurds shortly before the 9th millennium BC. Wild species of most common cereals and legumes still grow as weeds in the Zagros and eastern Taurus Mountains, and to a lesser degree in the Amanus Mountains.

By this time, such a historical agricultural society had developed forms of celebration and religious belief closely related to their way of life. Many names that today remain in the modern Kurdish calendar are derived from festivals, annual natural events, and from tasks usually performed in the given month, according to local needs.

Some ancient Kurdish religious calendars begin with major religious events. For instance, the Soltani calendar of the Yaresan has the birthday of Soltan Sahak in AD1294 as its starting year. Calendars may also begin in AD 380, the year that marks the fall of the last Kurdish kingdom of the classical era, the

House of Kayus (or the Kâvusakân dynasty). An enigmatic seven extra years are added, which may be connected to the veneration with which the number is held in native Kurdish religions and would be the time needed for the reincarnation of the souls of departed leaders. In this system, AD 2000 is the year 1613. This calendar has been variously called Kurdi (Kurdish) or Mây'I (Median).