642 Tlie Bight Hon. Earl Percy [May 17, 



Sennacherib, correspond, as there is good reason to believe, to the 

 mountains between the Upper Zab and the Tigris near Jezireh, it is 

 not improbable that the same race occupied the country from a period 

 anterior to the rise of the Assyrian Empire, and preserved their 

 autonomy long after its fall. Xenophon tells us how the Persians, 

 after the annihilation of the formidable force which they had 

 despatched for the purpose of reducing the mountaineers to subjection, 

 ended by reluctantly acquiescing in their independence ; and in 1139, 

 when the power of the Abbasside Caliphs was rapidly declining, the 

 famous Atabeg or Viceroy of Mosul, Imadeddin Zengy I., the friend 

 of Saladin's father, was compelled, before embarking on his campaign 

 against the Crusaders of Diarbekr and Urfah, to first of all guard 

 against a diversion in his rear by sending an expedition against the 

 Kurds of Ashib, the modern fortress of Amadiyah. The protracted 

 struggle between the Persians and the Ottoman Turks favoured the 

 interests of the Kurds and lent them additional importance in the 

 eyes of the rival combatants. At the beginning of the sixteenth 

 century their principal habitat seems to have been, as it is now, the 

 province of Diarbekr ; and Selim I., after getting rid of the most 

 troublesome element among them by the simple expedient of a whole- 

 sale massacre of the Shiah population, persuaded a number of the 

 remaining tribes to transfer their quarters to the Erzerum frontier, to 

 act as a buffer against invasion from the north. No doubt this 

 deliberate policy on the part of the earlier Sultans of encouraging 

 emigration contributed materially to the intermixture of the various 

 races and the obliteration of their original characteristics. 



Meanwhile the Kurds east of the Tigris consolidated their power 

 undisturbed, and when the nineteenth century opened, the greater 

 part of the country north and east of Mosul was parcelled out 

 between six or seven powerful hereditary chieftains, whose authority 

 was perforce recognised, however unwillingly, by the Turkish 

 Government. Thus the district of Rowanduz, on the frontier, was 

 governed by one Mehemet Pasha, a descendant of the Abbassides, who, 

 in 1834, enlisted a numerous army of Kurds, under the standard of 

 his brother Resul, seized Amadiyah, Kirkuk and Mosul, and was with 

 difficulty defeated by the Sultan's general, Reshed Pasha, who 

 marched his army of 20,000 across the whole length of the continent 

 from Sivas through Kharput and Diarbekr. Suleimaniyeh again was 

 under the rule of another hereditary chief, Ahmed Pasha, who made 

 a similar attempt to extend his authority at the expense of the Turks 

 in 1843. Jlahdinan, lying south of the Supna in the fork between 

 the Zab and the Tigris, formed a third principality under Ismail Beg ; 

 and Berwari, a little to the north, a fourth province under Abdul 

 Samed Beg : the raids and counter-raids between this tribe and the 

 Nestorians of Tiyari being a prime cause of the bad feeling which 

 led to the famous massacres four years later. Lastly, Bohtan, the 

 district watered by the Bohtan river, the chief affluent of the Tigris, 

 was under the jurisdiction of the infamous Bedr Khan Beg, the prin- 



