Kurdish folklore

The Kurds as an ethnicity within the Northwestern Iranian group enter the historical record at the end of the seventh century.

Scholars have suggested different theories for the origin of the name Kurd. According to the English Orientalist Godfrey Rolles Driver, the term Kurd is related to the Sumerian Karda which was found from Sumerian clay tablets of the third millennium B.C, while according to other scholars, it predates the Islamic period, as a Middle Persian word for "nomad", and may ultimately be derived from an ancient toponym or tribal name, either that of the Cyrtii or of Corduene. The name Kurds (Arabic Kurd, plural Akrad) is used throughout the medieval period, from the Islamic conquests, also as a generic term for Iranian nomadic tribes by the Arabs.

There are different theories about the origin of name Kurd. The ethnonym Kurd may ultimately derive from an ancient toponym in the upper Tigris basin. According to the English Orientalist Godfrey Rolles Driver, the term Kurd is related to the Sumerian Karda which was found from Sumerian clay tablets of the third millennium B.C. He believes the term Kurd was not used differently by different nations and by examining the philological variations of Karda in different languages, such as Cordueni, Gordyeni, Kordyoui, Karduchi, Kardueni, Qardu, Kardaye, Qardawaye, he finds that the similarities undoubtedly refer to a common descent.

According to other theories, it originates in Middle Persian as kwrt-, a term for "nomad; tent-dweller". After the Muslim conquest of Persia, this term is adopted into Arabic as kurd-, and was used specifically of nomadic tribes.

As for the Middle Persian noun kwrt- originating in an ancient toponym, it has been argued that it may ultimately reflect a Bronze Age toponym Qardu, Kar-da, which may also be reflected in the Arabic (Quranic) toponym Ǧūdī (re-adopted in Kurdish as Cûdî) The name would be continued in classical antiquity as the first element in the toponym Corduene, and its inhabitants, mentioned by Xenophon as the tribe of the Carduchoi who opposed the retreat of the Ten Thousand through the mountains north of Mesopotamia in the 4th century BC. This view is supported by some recent academic sources which have considered Corduene as proto-Kurdish region. Alternatively, kwrt- may be a derivation from the name of the Cyrtii tribe instead.

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