564 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1914. 
Their cranial index varies from 80 to 94, with a maximum at 85. 
(Compare plate 2.) 
O. KYZYLBASH. 
In Upper Mesopotamia and in small groups reaching in the west 
as far as the High Taurus, near Marash, there is a curious people, 
living in the midst of Arabs and Kurds, which calls itself ‘ Kyzyl- 
bash,’’ a word that means ‘‘redhead”’ in literal translation. But 
there are not more red-haired individuals among them than among 
their neighbors, and their head dress is not more red than that of 
any other Oriental group. So the word can not mean what it seems 
to mean, and had its origin perhaps in quite another word in another 
language; in the same way that popular etymology made “‘ridicule” 
from “‘reticula”’ or, in German, ‘‘mutter-seelenallein”’ from ‘‘moi 
tout seul.” Perhaps linguists will one day find out the real origin 
and meaning of Kyzylbash. 
In some places in western Kurdistan people that are exactly lke 
the Kyzylbash are called ‘Yezidi,” and protest that they have 
nothing at all to do with the Kyzylbash; in other places, so I was 
told one day at Kiakhta, on the Béilam River and again near Diarbekr, 
that Yezidi and Kyzylbash were two words for the same thing, 
the one being Arabic, the other Turkish. I do not know if this is 
correct, but, as far as I could ascertain, the creed and the social 
condition of both groups are fairly identical. Sir A. H. Layard’s 
classic report on this sect is so complete and exhaustive that I have 
nothing more to add than a few words on the physical characteristics. 
They are strangely homogeneous. J was able to measure 189 adult 
men; only three of them had grayish eyes, all the rest had dark 
brown eyes, dark hair, and tawny ‘‘white” skin. Their cranial 
index varies only from 83 to 92, with a well-defined maximum at 86. 
The index of the auricular height varies from 75 to 83, and the facial 
index from 80 to 90, with a pronounced maximum at 86. I could 
measure only a few noses; they were all very high and leptorrhine, 
and so seemed, with few exceptions, all the rest. 
So these Kyzylbash are excessively short and broad-headed in 
the midst of dolichocephalic Kurds and Arabs; their nose, too, is 
much narrower than that of their neighbors. On the other hand, 
the Kyzylbash [and the Yezidi] correspond absolutely with the 
Tahtadji, the Bektash, and the Ansariyeh, so that we find a small 
minority of groups possessing a similar creed and a remarkable 
uniformity of type, scattered over a vast part of western Asia. I 
see no other way to account for this fact than to assume that the 
members of all these sects are the remains of an old homogeneous 
population, which have preserved their religion and have therefore 
refrained from intermarriage with strangers and so preserved their 
old physical characteristics. 
