562 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
plain between Kyrykhan and Marash, whom I could not measure, 
but who seemed to be in absolute conformity with the Kurds I had 
measured. So I may state that the western Kurds are dolichocephalic 
with an average index of 75, and with more than 50 per cent of fair 
adults—the heads becoming shorter and larger, and the hair and eyes 
darker, with the increasing admixture of ‘“‘Turkish” or Armenian 
blood. 
So much for the western Kurds. We are up to the present very 
ignorant as to the somatic qualities of the eastern Kurds. Ihave my- 
self only seen a very few Kurds from Persia, but the general impression 
of some of my scientific friends is that the eastern Kurds show a much 
higher percentage of darker and round-headed men than the western. 
The language of the Kurds is split into many dialects; yet two main 
groups are to be distinguished, a western and an eastern. Both are 
related to modern Persian and are typically Aryan. So, if we ask for 
the real native country of the Kurds, there can only be one answer. 
It must be the same as that of our own race, of the race of Northern 
Europe. Itis not my concern here in this paper to treat of the Aryan 
problem, and I feel myself utterly free from any Pan-Germanie aspir- 
ations in the style of Gobineau and Chamberlain, but still I believe in 
an old ‘blue-eyed, fair-haired, long-headed race as in an impregnable 
complex and not a synthetic accident.” 4 
And can it be mere accident that a few miles north of the actual 
frontier of modern Kurdish language there is Boghaz-K6i, the old 
metropolis of the Hittite Empire, where Hugo Winckler in 1908 found 
tablets with two political treaties of King Subbiluliuma with Matti- 
uaza, son of Tusratta, King of Mitanni, and in both these treaties 
Aryan divinities, Mithra, Varuna, Indra, and Nasatya, are invoked, 
together with Hittite divinities, as witnesses and protectors. 
And in the same inscriptions, which date from about 1380 B.C., the 
King of Mitanni and his people are called Harri, just as nine centuries 
later in the Achemenidian inscriptions Xerxes and Darius call them- 
selves Har-ri-ya, ‘Aryans of Aryan stock.” 
So the Kurds are the descendants of Aryan Invaders and have main- 
tained their type and their language for more than 3,300 years. 
L. TAHTADJI. 
In Lycia there are about 1,000 families, or 5,000 souls, of a people 
calling themselves Tahtadji or boardcutters—‘‘sawyers.” This is 
indeed their principal occupation. In Western Lycia their Mohamme- 
dan neighbors call them Allevi, a name that is perhaps connected 
= ; 
1 Verbally quoted from a paper of R. N. Salaman, ‘‘ Heredity and the Jew,’ in Journal of Genetics, vol. 1, 
p. 274. The author of this very interesting paper holds the opposite opinion and believes in a “synthetic 
accident.’” 
