EARLY INHABITANTS OF WESTERN ASIA—LUSCHAN. 561 
find legends and traditions, remains of the old language, or other 
material that would permit us to trace the Yuruks back to their real 
home. 
Meanwhile a sort of jealousy between them and the settled Moham- 
medans excludes intermarriage almost without exception. 
K. KURDS. 
Kurdistan, the land of the Kurds, is a vast mountainous territory, 
nearly twice as large as Greece, in the southeast of the Armenian 
mountains. Its frontiers are undefined and uncertain, changing 
with the scattering or gathering of a floating mass of chiefly nomadic 
inhabitants.1. The greater northwestern part is under Ottoman, the 
southeastern under Persian, control. We know of no political unity 
of the Kurds, and, as far as we can trace back their history, they were 
always forming many different tribes (ashirets) under independent 
chiefs, whose strength was only broken in the last century, in Turkey 
not without the aid of H.v. Moltke, then a young Prussian officer. 
The Kardouchoi and Gordyaeans of the old historians are most 
probably the direct ancestors of the modern Kurds, but we do not 
know when these tribes first set their foot upon the soil of their pres- 
ent home. The Assyrian annals and careful excavations on the 
upper Euphrates and Tigris will probably, at some future time, shed 
light upon this question. 
Meanwhile it is important to state two facts: The Kurds speak an 
Aryan language, and they have long heads and generally blue eyes and 
fair hair. 
I have studied three groups of Kurds, 115 men near Karakush, 26 
men on the Nimrud-Dagh, and 80 men from near Sendjirli—all adults. 
In the Karakush series 71 men were xanthochroic, on the Nimrud= 
Dagh 15, and in Sendjirli 31, this being 62, 58, and 39 per cent, respec- 
tively, and for the whole number of 221 aduit men, 53 per cent. The 
cephalic index oscillated, in the case of the 115 Karakush Kurds, 
between 713 and 785, with the Nimrud-Dagh men between 723 and 
783, and in Sendjirli between 744 and 809, the arithmetic mean being 
749, 752, and 769. Two good types are here reproduced. (PI. 1.) 
The Kurds from Karakush and from the Nimrud-Dagh live nearly 
isolated. I found only one or two small Armenian merchants with 
them. The Kurds from Sendjirli stay near “Turkish” and Armenian 
villages, and it is known that they sometimes steal and marry Armen- 
ian wives, and not seldom they intermarry with “Turks” so it is 
probable that the Kurds from Sendjirli are less typical than those 
from Karakush and Nimrud-Dagh.? I saw many other Kurds on the 
1 The best statistics on Kurds are due to Mark Sykes, Trans. Roy. Anthrop. Inst., vol. 37, 1908, p. 451 ss. 
2 The greater number of xanthochroic men on the Nimrud-Dagh and in Karakush compared with their 
smaller number in Sendjirli may be due partly to the splendid, cool climate of these mountain villages. 
73176°—sM 1914 36 
