Soran Hamarash is a Kurdish writer, academic, historian and linguist who has spent nearly three decades studying the Kurds and their past. His major work, The Lost and Untold History of the Kurds: Rediscovering the Beginning of the Western Civilisation and the Origin of the Indo-European Languages (Silemanî, 2022), sets out a sweeping challenge to how the modern world understands the Kurds, their language and their place in human civilisation. Trained in ancient tongues such as Sumerian, Hurrian and Hittite, and fluent in Kurdish dialects, Arabic, Persian and several European languages, he operates not only as a scholar but as a public intellectual, presenting his ideas at Kurdish institutes in Washington and New York, at conferences from Mariwan to Graz, and through a YouTube channel followed by tens of thousands of Kurds and non‑Kurds.
His starting point is stark: the history of the Kurds has largely been written by outsiders, and those outsiders have carried their own agendas. In his view, the modern foundations of ancient history were never built simply to understand the past, but to serve ideological, religious and political purposes. Scholars, he argues, treated the peoples of the ancient Near East selectively and in isolation, breaking the organic connections between societies. For Kurds, the consequence has been a lost and untold history, one in which a people central to the development of civilisation is pushed to the margins. He points, for example, to the Encyclopedia Britannica’s description of Kurds as nomadic herders who did not truly settle or practise agriculture until the 20th century, under pressure from colonial powers. Against this image, he cites texts written more than 1,200 years ago that describe Kurds very differently, including major works in science and mathematics authored by Kurdish scholars, many of which he says were later destroyed or disappeared. Conventional academic narratives claim that Kurds did not recognise themselves as a distinct ethnicity until just a few centuries ago and that Sorani Kurdish only became a written language about 300 years back; in response, Hamarash produces a Sorani poem from 900 years ago and points to the steady stream of newly uncovered manuscripts that contradict these assumptions.
At the heart of his thesis lies geography. Kurdistan, he insists, is not a peripheral plateau but the core of what historians and archaeologists call “the cradle of mankind.” The Zagros Mountains, running through today’s Kurdistan, hosted some of the earliest agriculture, permanent settlements and written records. For Hamarash, the stories of Abraham and Noah unfolded on Kurdish lands, and the two signal inventions of human civilisation—writing and agriculture—were born in the Zagros. Yet modern scholarship, he contends, treats Kurds as if they emerged in the Middle Ages, disconnected from this deep past. His book assembles thousands of linguistic, historical and archaeological data points to argue that the Kurds are the indigenous people of Mesopotamia, the Zagros and Anatolia. On this basis he rejects the familiar labels that classify Kurdish simply as an “Iranian” or “Indo‑European” language, arguing that these categories were shaped in eras when Kurdish scholarship was marginalised or suppressed and reflect political and academic biases more than historical reality. He describes the Aryan theory—what he calls the “Aryan mythical theory”—as a 19th‑ and early 20th‑century invention by European nationalists seeking a glorious past of their own. By the time scholars began deciphering Sumerian cuneiform, he says, the Indo‑European framework was so entrenched that Sumerian and Kurdish were forced into ill‑fitting boxes.
When the evidence is examined on its own terms, Hamarash argues, Kurdish appears as an ancient indigenous tongue, a Zagrosian language belonging to a unique continuum that grew out of Zagros civilisation itself rather than arriving from somewhere else. Modern genomic research, he says, reinforces this picture. Ancient DNA from sites such as Ganj Dareh, Shanidar and Tepe Abdul Hosein in the Zagros reveals a distinct “Zagros Neolithic” or “Iran_N” ancestry cluster, one of the founding components of West Eurasian genetics. Today’s Kurds, particularly in the mountains, carry unusually high levels of continuity with these early farmers and hunter‑gatherers, a pattern he attributes to the protective isolation of highland communities acting as a “mountain refugium.” This, he argues, shows that Kurds are not latecomer migrants or an offshoot of some other group; they are the direct descendants of the Zagros civilisation.
In one of his boldest claims, Hamarash contends that Sumerian, long treated as a language isolate that died out four millennia ago, did not vanish but evolved into what we now know as Kurdish. In interviews and lectures he says that studying Sumerian is effectively studying Old Kurdish, because hundreds of words and phrases preserve both meaning and sound across 5,000 years. He estimates that roughly 60 percent of the everyday vocabulary he uses at home appears in Sumerian sources. He highlights examples ranging from the Sumerian “grî” for “cry”—which he links to Kurdish “grî” and even to similar English, French and Italian forms—to agricultural terms for barley and bread‑making that he says are preserved unchanged, as well as horse‑related vocabulary in Median and Hittite texts that he considers entirely Kurdish. He extends the argument beyond words to customs, citing practices such as stamping on spittle, attested in Sumerian times and still observed by older Kurds, often unconsciously.
Cultural continuities, in his reading, run even deeper. He points to the relative freedom of Kurdish women in traditional society—going unveiled, engaging in trade, fighting in combat—as an inheritance from Sumerian and Median norms, in contrast to Akkadian and Assyrian legal codes that restricted women’s movements. He notes cases of Kurdish men bearing their mother’s surname and traces this matrilineal pattern back a millennium, tying it to older Zagrosian social structures. Even symbols are pulled into this narrative: the crescent and star now widely associated with Islam, he argues, began as a Sumerian religious sign that later appeared on Roman and Sassanid coins and on European city emblems long before the rise of Islam. In his broader linguistic picture, Sumerian, via Kurdish, is linked to modern European languages including English, French, German and Russian, leading him to challenge the orthodox view that Indo‑European languages sprang from the Eurasian steppe. For Hamarash, the true point of origin lies not on the steppe but in the highlands of the Zagros.
This line of argument sets him against several pillars of conventional Middle Eastern historiography. Where standard accounts depict Kurds as nomads who only settled under 20th‑century pressure, he insists that Kurds were authors of major scientific and mathematical works more than a millennium ago. Where many linguists date written Sorani to the last 300 years, he brings forward a nine‑century‑old poem; where textbooks suggest Kurds became conscious of themselves as a distinct ethnicity only 300 to 400 years ago, he cites ninth‑century texts that describe Kurds as a civilised and distinct people. He rejects the idea of Sumerian as a dead, isolated language, recasting it as the ancestor of Kurdish, and dismisses the description of Kurdish as merely “Iranian” or “Indo‑European,” preferring the label “Zagrosian” for a language rooted in an indigenous continuum. The Aryan theory, in his telling, explains less about the past than it does about the nationalist fantasies of the European scholars who framed it.
For Hamarash, there is a clear political reason why this version of history was buried. After the First World War, colonial powers arrived in the Middle East guided by academic traditions that leaned heavily on Greek authors and the Bible, two sources that largely ignored or minimised Kurds. Policymakers relied on historians whose understanding of Kurdistan was poor, and drew borders based on that limited picture. The result was a partition of Kurdish lands among Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran, and decades of assimilationist policies that targeted not just Kurdish political aspirations but their language, culture and memory. Occupying states did not simply deny Kurds rights; they rewrote history to render them invisible. Hamarash describes his book as an attempt to rewrite that history, not through mythmaking but by gathering evidence that has long existed in scattered, neglected or censored forms and placing it back inside a Kurdish frame.
The response in the Kurdish world has been striking. His lectures at the Washington Kurdish Institute, the New York Kurdish Cultural Center and conferences in Kurdistan have drawn large, attentive crowds. Kurdish reviewers on platforms such as Goodreads call his work essential reading for young Kurds, and scholars who heard him in Mariwan have praised his extensive use of linguistic and historical data to push Kurdish origins back to the dawn of civilisation. At the same time, his most ambitious claims—especially the direct Sumerian‑Kurdish linguistic link—have provoked controversy. The political scientist Michael Gunter has raised questions about his methods, and linguists on academic forums insist that the established comparative evidence places Kurdish squarely within the Iranian branch of Indo‑European. Hamarash and his supporters respond that those classifications are themselves products of the very framework he criticises, one built by European scholars in the nationalist era who lacked knowledge of Kurdish realities and were uninterested in integrating Kurdish evidence.
The debate has widened to genetics. In a section of his work on “Zagrosian genetics and Kurdish uniqueness,” Hamarash argues that Kurds are not simply an “Iranian” or “Indo‑European” subgroup but a distinct Zagrosian people, a unique nation rooted in the mountains between Mesopotamia and what he calls Mesopotamian Iran. He acknowledges that mainstream population genetics situates Kurds within a broader Near Eastern and West Asian continuum, but he reads the same data differently, emphasising the strong continuity with ancient Zagros farmers. For him, this continuity shows that Kurds carry an ancestral signature that predates and underlies many of the populations later labelled Iranian or Indo‑European; their genetics are Zagrosian first, and only secondarily part of larger regional clusters.
Beneath the technical arguments lies a simple conclusion. Hamarash believes that so long as Kurdish history remains miswritten or unwritten, the origins of Western civilisation and of the Indo‑European languages will remain obscured. In his telling, the Kurds are not a peripheral, nomadic footnote in other peoples’ stories. They are the indigenous heirs of the Zagros, the land where writing emerged, where agriculture began and where the first cities rose. Their language, their genes and their culture, he says, carry the living memory of the world’s earliest civilisation. To recover that history, he argues, is not just to do justice to one people but to rewrite the story of humanity itself.