Kurdish calendar

The Kurdish calendar was originally a lunisolar calendarrelated to the Babylonian calendar, but is now a solar calendar related to the Iranian calendar. On March 21, 2017, it will be the first new-day in the Kurdish calendar which is first of Cejnan 2629.

Some claim that the Kurdish calendar starts at 700 BC; this was the year Deioces united the Medes according to Herodotus. However, the claim of unification by Herodotus is proven wrong. The Medes still were vassals of the Assyrian Empire. The Median kingdom and the founding of its capital city at Ecbatana (modern Hamadan) was probably not before 625 BC when Cyaxares (grandson of Deioces) 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.

The Medes and other Indo-European tribes were only part of the Kurdish nation formation, the Hurrian tribes another part, but Medes entry in history, in 612 BC, must be considered as the initial stage of the Kurdish history, hence the year 612 BC is the initial year of the Kurdish calendar.

There are certain Kurds who count the years from the beginning of the reign of the first Medean king Dahyaku in year 726 BCE.

Also in the national anthem, Ey Reqib it is stated "Ême roley Mîdya û Keyxusrewîn" (We are the children of the Medes and Cyaxares), hence the empire of Cyaxares and not of Deioces.

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 Tepe Asiab (Asíyaw), Guran, Ganj Darra (Genjí Darra), 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.

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Wikipedia