The Early History of Kurdish Studies (1787-1901)

The Early History OfDie
Kurdish Studies
Welt des Islams(1787–1901)
56 (2016) 55-88 55
brill.com/wdi
The Early History of Kurdish Studies (1787–1901)
Sacha Alsancakli
Université La Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3 / Mondes iranien et indien
[email protected]
Abstract
The history of Kurdish studies in the period before the 20th century has been neglected.
In the few instances where it has been discussed, it was treated as a mere opening act
paving the way for later developments. This has led to anachronistic projections of the
contemporary state of the field onto the past. Furthermore, the uncontextualized
approach generally adopted has not allowed for a critical account of the field’s develop-
ment and the way it reflected global trends and evolutions. By doing this work of contex-
tualization, this article wishes to provide a better understanding of the way the field
developed before the 20th century and to identify the specific characteristics that emer-
ged through this development.
Keywords
Kurdish studies – Orientalism – philology – linguistics – history of science – 19th

century
Introduction
Any attempt at writing the history of Kurdish studies is bound to be reflexive to

a certain extent. This is not just because only researchers in Kurdish studies
have so far studied its history. Like in many fields, the history of Kurdish studies
is part and parcel of Kurdish studies themselves. It is one of the many cases
* A preliminary draft of this article was presented at the conference “New Perspectives on
Writing the History of the Kurds”, held at Oxford University on 17 May 2013. I wish to thank
here the conference organizers, as well as the anonymous reviewers who helped improve the
content of the article.
ISSN 0043-2539 (print version) ISSN 1570-0607 (online version) WDI 1
Die
© Welt des brill
koninklijke Islams
nv,56leiden,
(2016) 2016
55-88| doi 10.1163/15700607-00561p05
56 Alsancakli
where, as Wolf Lepenies and Peter Weingart put it, “the reconstruction of a
disciplinary past inextricably belongs to the core of the discipline”.1 As a result,
the history of Kurdish studies shares with the broader field of Kurdish studies
a 20th-century tropism, meaning that studies on the Kurds written before
World War I are mostly seen in the retrospective light of future developments.
They are but an opening act before the big show.
This has resulted in a narrative that focuses on some aspects of the story
whilst leaving others in the shadow. This narrative tells the story of a Domini-
can father, Maurizio Garzoni (1734–1804), who spent a good deal of time in
Kurdistan and wrote a Kurdish grammar and vocabulary (Grammatica e vocab-
olario della lingua kurda, 1787), for which he came to be regarded as “the father
of kurdology”.2 A few additional names are thrown in as the century moves
on – Giuseppe Campanile, Peter Lerch and Auguste Jaba are amongst the usual
suspects – , and the narrative is then wrapped up in a few pages.3
The institutional history of Kurdish studies actually starts during World War
I. Kurdish was first taught as a university course by Yusuf Orbeli (1887–1961) in
St. Petersburg in 1916. The term “kurdology” started gaining currency after 1934
and the first pan-Soviet Kurdological congress held in Yerevan, Armenia.4 In
the 19th century, Kurdish studies thus developed in the grey areas of broader
and more institutionalized fields or disciplines (oriental studies, comparative
linguistics, etc.). This lack of clearly defined institutional boundaries has made
it all the easier for 20th-century authors to project onto the past their own
contemporary visions of the field.
The authors of these narratives frequently lumped together missionary
writings, travel stories and academic scholarship in uncritical catch-all
1 Lepenies, Wolf and Weingart, Peter. “Introduction”, xv. In Functions and Uses of Disciplinary
Histories, edited by L. Graham and W. Lepenies and P. Weingart, ix–xx. Dordrecht: D. Reidel,
1983.
2 Minorsky, Vladimir. “Le plus ancien texte en kurde”, 8f. Bulletin mensuel du Centre d‘études
kurdes 10 (1950), 8ff.; Nikitine, Basile. Les Kurdes. Étude sociologique et historique, 294. Paris:
Imprimerie nationale, 1956; Bois, Thomas. “Les Dominicains à l‘avant-garde de la kurdologie”,
174. Archivum fratrum predicatorum 35 (1965): 265–92; Alakom, Rohat. Kürdoloji biliminin 200
yıllık geçmişi, 10. Istanbul: Deng, 1991.
3 In more colourful accounts, the silsila of “kurdologists” might also extend way into the past
to include various historical figures such as Xenophon, Herodotus, Marco Polo or Alexander
the Great . See Pirbal, Ferhad. The Emergence of Kurdology. The Kurdish Globe 8/8/2007 (1997),
http://www.kurdishglobe.net/article/DDF08CE3A95370ABF3185484BDE66B38/The-emergence-
of-Kurdology.html. Date of accessing: 22/4/2015.
4 Leezenberg, Michel. “Soviet Kurdology and Kurdish Orientalism”, 89f. In The Heritage of Soviet
Oriental Studies, edited by M. Kemper & S. Conermann, 86–102. Oxon: Routledge, 2011.
Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

The Early History Of Kurdish Studies (1787–1901) 57
accounts, without regard for the actual content of the texts and the diversity of
their producers and addressees. Lacking institutional or critical boundaries,
the literature thus produced has tended to focus on a few ‘’heroic’’ figures, re-
sulting in what Lepenies and Weingart have called an “idealized picture of the
scientific enterprise”, reduced to a few “great men” and a “linear […] sequence
of discoveries”.5
In view of this argument, there seems to be a need for a more balanced and
contextualized narrative. This is what this article purports to provide. Accord-
ingly, it is divided into three chronological phases: the sketchy beginnings of
studies on Kurdish, under the umbrella of a general interest in the world’s lin-
guistic diversity; the advent of comparative linguistics in Germany as a
breaking point which would allow for the development of much more specia-
lized studies on the topic; and, finally, the important momentum provided by
the emergence of St. Petersburg as a worldwide center for Oriental studies,
where Kurdish studies could thrive, diversify and develop.
Sketchy Beginnings
In her monograph studying the advent of Sanskrit studies and modern philol-
ogy in 19th-century Germany, Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn remarks that
the diversity of languages had long been a topic of interest for scholars,
but in a way which had not evolved much. From the Renaissance on, the
expansion and grammaticalization of vernacular languages in Europe,
the development of print press and the identification of new languages
thanks to the great discoveries, led scholars to describe all known
languages by using grammatical categories inherited from Greek and
Latin. […] At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth
century, this project resulted in ever larger collections of known lan-
guages being developed […]. The approach, however, remained largely
unchanged [...]. This endeavour of sequencing and rationalizing over-
came diversity by bringing it down to categories belonging to a single
immutable and essential linguistic order. This is how the historical
dimension vanished […].6
5 Lepenies and Weingart, “Introduction”, x.

6 Rabault-Feuerhahn, Pascale. L’Archive des origines. Sanskrit, philologie, anthropologie dans
l‘Allemagne du XIXe siècle, 68. Paris: Le Cerf, 2008. All translations are my own unless indicated
otherwise.

58 Alsancakli
In agreement with the previous statement, Suzanne Marchand comments that

“the great social, political, and especially the cultural revolution that we call
the Enlightenment [marked] an enormous increase in Europe’s pursuit of
knowledge about the East. While older traditions continued, the eighteenth
century witnessed data collection on a new scale […].»7 It is in the framework
of these collection processes that the Kurdish language was first introduced to
a European audience. In the 1780s, two separate encyclopædic projects of the
sort described above were published almost at the same time, Peter Simon Pal-
las’ Comparative Vocabulary of All the World’s Languages (Linguarum totius or-
bis vocabularia comparativa, published in two parts in St. Petersburg, 1786–9)
and Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro’s Polyglot Vocabulary (Vocabolario poligloto,
published in Rome in 1787).
Similar in nature, the projects had their differences: Pallas’ work, undertak-
en at the request of Empress Catherine II of Russia (r. 1762–96), was secular in
nature, while Hervás y Panduro’s had a more clerical tone but was also a more
personal project for its author, a Spanish Jesuit established in Italy after the
expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain and its American colonies in 1767. And if
Kurdish was featured in both works, Pallas and Hervás y Panduro made use of
two different source materials, respectively Johann Anton Güldenstädt’s travel
notes and Maurizio Garzoni’s grammar. Some twenty years later, another simi-
lar project was taken up by the German librarian Johann Adelung. Called the
Mithridates (1806), it combined the two previous works and their sources, ar-
guably representing the apex of this type of undertaking. To the contrary, when
Julius Klaproth’s Asia Polyglotta (concerned only with “Asian” languages, as per
his title) came out in 1823, it already seemed to belong to the past: by then, the
advent of comparative linguistics had rendered obsolete this type of data col-
lections. We will now examine these works in more details, as they are repre-
sentative of the sketchy beginnings of the study of the Kurdish language in
Europe.
Peter Simon Pallas & Johann Anton Güldenstädt
As an auxiliary to the processes of data collection undertaken, Marchand goes

on to note “the upswing in state-financed expeditions to the East”, especially
mentioning several Russian expeditions undertaken throughout the 18th cen-
tury.8 It seems to be during one of these expeditions that the first samples of
7 Marchand, Suzanne. German Orientalism in the Age of Empire. Religion, Race and Scholarship,
15. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
8 Ibid., 18.

the Kurdish language were collected by European travellers to be published in

printed form. The Orenburg-Astrakhan series of expeditions took place be-
tween 1768 and 1774 under the auspices of the Russian Imperial Academy of
Sciences, led by the German botanist and zoologist Peter Simon Pallas (1741–
1811). Aimed at exploring the Southern frontiers of the Russian empire, three of
these expeditions went in the direction of Orenburg, while two headed to-
wards Astrakhan.
One of these two detachments was led by Johann Anton Güldenstädt (1745–
81), a Baltic German naturalist from Riga educated in Berlin and Frankfurt. Like
the other Astrakhan detachment, Güldenstädt’s party
travelled down the Don, but crossed directly from Kalachinskaia on the
Don to Tsaritsyn on the Volga (near the route of the modern Volga-Don
canal). The detachment crossed the Caucasus mountains to Georgia,
where it spent a year. The return journey took Güldenstädt back over the
mountains and across the steppes of the north Caucasus to Cherkassk,
Azov and Taganrog. The Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74 prevented him
from visiting the Crimea, but he travelled instead across ‘New Russia’
(southern Ukraine), before returning to Moscow and St. Petersburg.9
The Academy’s expeditions had mainly practical purposes. David Moon notes
that “the Academy of Sciences gave the leaders of the detachments detailed
instructions”, which “had been prepared with the advice of the Free Economic
Society, […] established with Catherine’s encouragement in 1765 to promote
economic, in particular agricultural, development.” This meant investigating
mostly
the nature of the land and water; any uncultivated or unpopulated land
which could be used for growing grain or other crops, or for hay meadows
or forests; the economic activities of populated places, and how they
could be improved; livestock husbandry; fishing; useful minerals; manu-
facturing; diseases and medicines.
It is only as an “addition” that the expedition members “were to note the

weather, the customs of the population and remnants of ancient peoples”.10
Ethnolinguistic study thus did not constitute a primary objective for the ex-
pedition leaders, who were all trained natural scientists. However, J.A. Gülden-
9 Moon, David. “The Russian Academy of Sciences Expeditions to the Steppes in the Late
Eighteenth Century”, 211. The Slavonic and East European Review 88, 1/2 (2010): 204–36.
10 Ibid., 211f.

60 Alsancakli
städt did take time to collect words from the languages spoken by the peoples
he encountered. To this effect, he apparently used a wordlist of about 250 items
which, in addition to basic vocabulary, demonstrated an important focus on
nature, wildlife and agriculture, in keeping with the expedition’s main pur-
poses.
J.A. Güldenstädt’s travel notes were published posthumously by P.S. Pallas
in two volumes in 1787–91, the second volume ending with a “Collected vo-
cabulary from the languages spoken in the Caucasus”.11 This vocabulary includ-
ed samples from some 22 languages divided into 10 categories which seem to
have corresponded to either areas of data collection or perceived genetic affili-
ation – the absence of any commentary whatsoever on the vocabulary lists
does not allow to assert this with certainty. J.A. Güldenstädt held the Kurds to
be Tatar Turkmens, and Kurdish is thus to be found in the tenth and last list
grouped with both Persian and Tatar.12 Collected among Kurds in Georgia,
these samples of Kurmanji Kurdish are written in a Latin script based on Ger-
man orthography (e.g. Chudi for Xudê, “God”), and even though the given terms
are globally correct, some of the translations plainly indicate misunderstand-
ings between Güldenstädt and his informants.13
As mentioned in the introductory paragraphs of this section, J.A. Gülden-
städt’s Kurdish wordlist was also used by P.S. Pallas in his Comparative Vocabu-
lary.14 Written at the request of Catherine II of Russia, this work was divided
into more than 200 vocabulary entries in Russian, each of these featuring the
corresponding word in around 200 languages (Kurdish was listed as number
77, after Persian and before Afghan and Ossetic). The work, in which foreign
words were written phonetically in Cyrillic script, was published in St. Peters-
burg in two volumes in 1786 and 1789. It was however merely a compilation of
11 Güldenstädt, Johann Anton. Reisen durch Russland und im Caucasischen geburge, heraus-
gegeben von P.S. Pallas, vol. 2, 496–552. St. Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences,
1787–91.
12 Ibid., vol. 2, 545–52. At this time, Tatar was also used to refer to the Mongolian Ilkhanid
rulers of Persia (1260–1335), and “Turkmen” could simply indicate “Muslim nomads”.
However, the samples of the Tatar language given in the collected vocabulary are indeed
samples of Tatar, the Turkic language.
13 For example “husband” is given as “shinamin” (jina min, “my wife”) while “wife” becomes
“meremin” (mêrê min, “my husband”); “son” becomes “kuramin” (kurê min, “my son”), etc.
14 Even though P.S. Pallas does not mention the provenance of his source material for Kurd-
ish, a quick look at the entries reveals in an unmistakable fashion that they were provided
by Güldenstädt’s travel notes. For example, entry n° 5 for the word “son” also has for Kurd-
ish “kuramen”. Pallas, Peter Simon. Linguarum totius orbis vocabularia comparativa, 14. St.
Petersburg: Johannis Caroli Schnoor, 1786–9.

lists, with little to offer in terms of actual commentary or contextualization.

A year later, a very similar work appeared in Italy, the Polyglot Vocabulary of
Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro. However, the Spanish Jesuit did not draw on
J.A. Güldenstädt’s list for his Kurdish words; instead, he used as a source the
work of a fellow missionary, Maurizio Garzoni.
Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro & Maurizio Garzoni
Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro (1735–1809) already had a good deal of writing expe-
rience under his belt when he published the twentieth volume of his Italian-
language cosmographic treatise Ideas of the Universe (Idea dell’Universo),
entitled Polyglot Vocabulary. Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro, a Spanish Jesuit and
former missionary based in Rome, had already devoted both volumes se-
venteen and eighteen of his treatise to languages. In volume seventeen, pub-
lished in 1784 and named Catalogue of Known Languages (Catalogo delle lingue
conosciute), he asserted that “modern Persian is a corrupted dialect of Mongo-
lian Tatar with a lot of Arabic and Indian words”.15 In this book, Kurdish is also
mentioned alongside Bakhtiyari, Daylami or Baluch as a Persian dialect, of
which it is said:
Kurdish [is] spoken in Persian Kurdistan by the Kurds, who are believed
to be descendents of the ancient Chaldeans, but seem more closely linked
to the Arabs, because their language is filled with numerous Arabic
words. There are also Kurds in Syria; these speak Turkish.16
Kurds are not mentioned in volume eighteen of the series, entitled Origins,
Formation, Mechanism and Harmony of the Languages (Origine, formazione,
15 Here, “Mongolian Tatar” does seem to refer to the Persian as language as it was spoken in
the Ilkhanid era (see above, note 12). Judging by the author’s description, however, it is
more likely that he had in mind Middle Persian, the language spoken in the Sassanid era.
Hervás y Panduro, Lorenzo. Catalogo delle lingue conosciute, 124. Cesena: Gregorio Biasini,
1784.
16 Ibid. The presence of Turkish-speaking Kurds in Syria could refer to the ruling houses of
Kurdish dynasties established in Ottoman Syria, which probably used Ottoman Turkish as
their court language, as was also the case in other Kurdish principalities under Ottoman
suzerainty. See for example the part of Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatname devoted to his travels
in Bidlīs for evidence of the use of Turkish as the court language of that principality in the
mid-17th century. Çelebi, Evliya. Evliya Çelebi in Bitlis: The Relevant Section of the Seyahat-
name. Edition and translation by Robert Dankoff. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990.

62 Alsancakli
meccanismo ed’armonia dell’idiomi, published in 1785), but it does contain

some considerations on Median, which the author claims to be the language
spoken in contemporary Persia and differing much from “ancient Persian”, i.e.
Pahlavi.17
By the time the Polyglot Vocabulary was published in 1787, however, Lorenzo
Hervás y Panduro could make use of Maurizio Garzoni’s Grammar and most
notably of the attached vocabulary, which had been communicated to him by
Stefano Borgia (1731–1804) shortly before publication, which meant it was not
even included in the summary of the book. Maurizio Garzoni is never nomi-
nally quoted as a source, Hervás y Panduro only stating that
the Kurdistani (il Curdistano) is more akin to Persian than Turkish; so

much so that among a hundred Kurdistani words (parole Curdistane)
only fifteen bear similarity to their Turkish counterpart, and thirty-five to
the Persian; it seems to me that the Kurdistani words are closer than both
Turkish and Persian to the primitive Tatar idiom.18
Later in the same year 1787, Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro published the final vol-
ume of his series of books on the universe, a book called Wise Practice of the
Languages (Saggio pratico delle lingue), which was a collection of Christian
prayers in many different languages. The section on Kurdish is a word-for-word
copy of the Pater Noster in Kurdish concluding M. Garzoni’s Grammar. This
time, however, Garzoni is mentioned by Hervás y Panduro, who adds that
the prelate Father Garzoni has told me that in Kurdistan, the Kurdish lan-
guage is spoken and some understand Arabic. The Kurdish language is a
mix of Arabic and Persian, to which it is more closely related. […] The
Kurdish language, whose true origins lay with Persian, is filled with Ara-
bic words and phrases in a somewhat alterated form and also still has
some Chaldean words. Persian and Kurdish differ little more than do
Spanish and Portuguese.19
17 Hervás y Panduro, Lorenzo. Origine, formazione, meccanismo ed’armonia dell’idiomi, 96f.

Cesena: Gregorio Biasini, 1785.
18 Hervás y Panduro, Lorenzo. Vocabolario poligloto, Saggio pratico delle lingue. Estudio intro-
ductorio y edición facsímil, Manuel Breva-Claramonte, Ramón Sarmiento, 115f. Madrid:
Sociedad general española de librería, 1992. Again, “Tatar” here apparently refers to the
Persian language spoken before the arrival of Islam in the lands inhabited by the Iranian
peoples. L. Hervás y Panduro thus correctly hinted at the more conservative character of
the Kurdish language compared to Persian.
19 Ibid., 442f.

Many of the wordlists used by L. Hervás y Panduro, whether for languages of

the Americas, Asia or Africa, were taken from data collected by missionaries.20
Indeed, alongside the more practical goals pursued by Russian expeditioners
and scientists, missionaries had their own reasons for collecting linguistic data
on the peoples they wished to convert. There was of course also a practical
purpose, openly stated by M. Garzoni in the Preface to his Grammar. Ponder-
ing on his own troubles learning Kurdish without the help of a single book, he
writes that
considering these difficulties, and mastering the Kurdish language as well

as an European could learn […], I resolved to compose for the sake of new
missionaries a grammar and a vocabulary. […] I must confess that no part
of this grammar will be perfect: I ask for the cautious men’s forgiveness,
because I am the first who tried, without the help of a single person and
no books in this language, to shed a light on a language so far unknown
with the sole purpose of helping future missionaries. […] Furthermore,
Kurdistan is a country located at the frontiers of Persia and the Ottoman
empire, subject to various revolutions and it might be the case that mis-
sionaries will have to leave it and a few centuries might pass before any-
one could enter it again; in such a case, this work of mine will be needed
and it will be of help to acquire the basics of the language we are con-
cerned with […]. Such was my intent, then, in working to produce a gram-
mar and a Kurdish-Italian vocabulary.21
Maurizio Garzoni thus appears to have been guided by a desire to help future
missionaries bound to come to Kurdistan and save them the troublesome pro-
cess of language learning that he himself had had to go through. He probably
specifically had in mind his direct successors at the Dominican mission, and
this is the reasoning behind his rendering of Kurdish words in a Latin script
based on Italian pronunciation rather than in Arabic-Persian characters.22
However, efforts such as those of Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro clearly show
that for clergymen, the collection of linguistic data had another more abstract
20 The suppression of the Jesuit order in Portugal (1759) and Spain (1767), and subsequent
expulsion of many Jesuits from these countries and their colonies to Italy, allowed Hervás
y Panduro to gain a direct access to new sources on many languages, including oral testi-
monies by missionaries when no published material was available. As mentioned,
L. Hervás y Panduro himself was a missionary in America when the order was abolished
in 1767, after which he went to Italy.
21 Garzoni, Maurizio. Grammatica e vocabolario della lingua kurda, 8ff. Rome: Sacra Con-
gregazione di Propaganda Fide, 1787.
22 Ibid., 11.

64 Alsancakli
purpose, namely to “find Oneness in Multiplicity and explain the diversity of

linguistic categories by attaching it to the unity of the human mind”.23 As we
can see from Hervás y Panduro’s hypothesis of deriving Persian from “Tatar”,
i.e., Middle Persian, and identifying Kurdish, albeit a bit hastily, as a dialect of
Persian, “the genetic dimension, the search for relationships did constitute a
central element of languages’ comparison since the Renaissance”, however,
“neither similarities nor dissimilarities between languages were thought of in
terms of diachronic transformation and the study of the origin of languages
remained in keeping with Biblical monogenist orthodoxy, as with William
Jones.”24
Again, Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro provides a prime example of this, as he
concludes his Origins volume by a demonstration intended to prove the truth-
fulness of the story of Babel.25 He then adds that “before the confusion of lan-
guages, only one tongue was spoken as is written in the sacred text, and it was
certainly the tongue spoken by Adam, because there is no reason whatsoever
to doubt that until Noah’s time, it was not the only idiom in the world”, before
wondering if “this idiom has perished in the confusion of languages, or was
preserved in Seth’s family, which did not partake in the construction of the
tower of Babel”.26
Hervás y Panduro adds that the reasons produced to consider Hebrew as the
original language are “mere conjectures” and states:
The effect of the confusion of languages would have been the same
whether the ancient language had perished or not; since it does not seem
natural that the Lord would make perish without reason in all men the
ancient language, this reflexion alone leads me to believe that it has not
perished; and we can presume that it was preserved in the family that
executed the divine command and did not mix with those who recklessly
undertook the construction of the tower of Babel.27
The goal of the project to which Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro devoted a good part
of his life then becomes clear: in the diversity of languages, he wished to dis-
23 Auroux, Sylvain. Histoire des idées linguistiques, vol. 2: Le développement de la grammaire

occidentale, 115–22. Liège: Mardaga, 1991, quoted in Rabault-Feuerhahn, L’Archive des orig-
ines, 68.
24 Rabault-Feuerhahn, L’Archive des origines, 69.
25 Hervás y Panduro, Origine, 160–70.
26 Ibid., 170.
27 Ibid., 171.

cover remnants of the original language which he believed was still being spo-
ken somewhere by Seth’s remote descendents.
While primarily serving, in its author’s mind, the practical goal of helping
missionaries to come, Maurizio Garzoni’s work was thus part and parcel of a
new mindset which gained momentum towards the end of the 18th century
and encouraged all kinds of data collection projects. It is also in this context
that very different people such as Johann Anton Güldenstädt, a botanist from
Riga, indulged in ethnolinguistic work as a side-task to their main duties. The
specificity of Maurizio Garzoni’s work is of course its size: it is a monograph
comprising both a grammar and a vocabulary, which for a little-known lan-
guage like Kurdish was rather unusual at the time. As with most of his peers,
Garzoni used Greek and Latin grammatical categories in describing Kurdish,
an approach which proved especially detrimental as it distorted the author’s
view of the language and led him to consider it deficient and label it a “simple”
language.28
Maurizio Garzoni thus was no “father of kurdology”, but he certainly was a
man of his time, reflecting on the Kurds and their language much in the same
way that other missionaries reflected on other languages spoken by the peo-
ples they encountered in various parts of the world. These missionaries’ mind-
set is embodied in Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro’s vast undertaking, aimed at
demonstrating the truthfulness of Scripture and discovering remnants of the
original language of human kind. However, these collections of data still of-
fered nothing more than a taxinomic view of linguistic diversity, lacking in the
historicity that the rise of comparative linguistics would provide it from the
beginnings of the 19th century onwards. But before the advent of this new
science, Germany would see the publication of two further encyclopædic
collections of linguistic diversity, even larger in scope than P.S. Pallas’ and
L. Hervás y Panduro’s had been.
Johann Adelung & Julius Klaproth
It is indeed in Germany that the largest project of this kind, representing the
apex of the premodern vision of linguistic diversity, came into being. This was
28 Because his approach was modeled on Latin grammatical categories, Garzoni’s table of
conjugations is indeed extremely simplified as he failed to find equivalents for a lot of the
tenses. He somehow gets around this issue by declaring a series of “missing tenses”,
namely the imperfect, past perfect, future, subjunctive and past conditional. Garzoni,
Grammatica, 29–33.

66 Alsancakli
Johann Adelung’s Mithridates. Johann Christoph Adelung (1732–1806) was a li-

brarian in Dresden and had already penned the first dictionary of the German
language in five volumes (published in Leipzig, 1774–86), as well as a History
of Civilisation (1782–8), a History of Philosophy (1786) and other encyclopædic
projects. It is then no surprise that his final project was this Mithridates or
Universal Table of Languages (Mithridates oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde),
supposed to include around five hundred languages divided by geographical
areas. He could not see this last project to completion: he died in 1806, af-
ter only the first volume had been published; however, Johann Severin Vater
(1771–1826) continued his project, completing the second (1809), third (1812)
and fourth volume (1817).
Asiatic languages, among which Kurdish is to be found, are discussed in the
first volume of the Mithridates and divided into two classes, “monosyllabic lan-
guages” (27–97) and “polysyllabic languages” (97–640). The second class is fur-
ther divided into languages of South Asia (99–299), West Asia (299–449),
Middle Asia (449–533), North Asia (533–67), East Asian islands (567–84), South
Asian or East Indian islands (584–614) and Islands of the Southern Sea (614–
40). The Kurdish language is to be found in the fifth part of the first section on
South Asian languages, devoted to “Persian languages” (273–99) and including
Parsi (referring to Old Persian, 274ff.), Persian (276–94) and Kurdish (294–9).
J. Adelung mentions his sources as Güldenstädts’ travel notes, Garzoni’s
grammar, Hervás y Panduro’s Polyglot Vocabulary and Peter Simon Pallas’
Comparative Vocabulary.29 In his introductory remarks on the Kurds, Adelung
rejects Güldenstädt’s claim of the Kurds as Turkmens and mentions the hy-
pothesis of their being descendents of the Cardouquian from the Gordiene
province, an opinion based on Xenophon’s Retreat of the Ten Thousand.30 He
also makes them originate from Northern Chaldeans, a view which still held
currency half a century later when Peter Lerch wrote his Research on the Kurds
and the Iranian Northern Chaldeans (first published in Russian in 1856, then
translated into German as Forschungen über die Kurden und die iranischen Nor-
dchaldäer in 1857).
On the language itself, Adelung takes most of his information from Garzoni,
the most complete source, calling Kurdish a “Persian dialect but rude, poor and
uneducated, as you would expect from such a rough mountainous people”, and
29 Adelung, Johann. Mithridates, oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde, 297f. Berlin: Vossischen

Buchhandlung, 1806.
30 Upheld by most of the later researchers on the question of the Kurds’ origins, this opinion
is still to be found in modern editions and translations of the Retreat. See for example
Xénophon. L’Anabase. Le Banquet. Traduction, notices et notes par Pierre Chambry, 113, 301,
note 81. Paris: Flammarion, 1996.

mentioning that their verbal system is “extremely simple” and “only knows of
two tenses […] and four conjugations”.31 Like all articles in the Mithridates, the
article on Kurdish closes with the Pater Noster that had concluded Garzoni’s
work and had also been included in Hervás y Panduro’s Wise Practice. The link
between these various encyclopædic projects thus becomes as evident as the
frontier between religious and secular activities remained ambiguous.
At about the same time came around a man whose career bears some inter-
esting similarities with Johann Anton Güldenstädt’s. Julius Klaproth (1783–
1835) was born in Berlin, son of the chemist Martin Klaproth (1743–1817), and
he was quickly drawn to the study of Asiatic languages. In 1802–3, he produced
his first publication on the subject and in 1804, the Polish count Jan Potocki
(1761–1815) recommended him for appointment as an associate professor at
the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. He then went on to partake in two
expeditions, the first one with count Golovkin’s embassy to China in 1805, after
which he was made an associate member of the Academy, and the second one
to Georgia and the Caucasus (1807–9) where he walked in the footsteps of
J.A. Güldenstädt.32 In 1812 he moved to Berlin and in 1815 to Paris, where he
remained and lived comfortably through to the end of his life, thanks to Wil-
helm von Humboldt (1767–1835) who in 1816 had convinced the King of Prussia
to endow him with the title and salary of Professor of Asiatic languages, in
recognition of his scientific achievements.33
In the spring of 1808, during his trip to the Caucasus and Georgia, Julius
Klaproth had had the opportunity of meeting a Kurdish-speaking Christian
from Muş named Oannes b. Dawud in the town of Awlabari, east of Tbilisi.
From this encounter, he produced an article of 9 pages which was published in
1814, in the fourth volume of Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall’s journal Fundgru-
ben des Orients. Entitled “Kurdish Wordlist, compared with Persian and other
related languages” (“Kurdisches Wörterverzeichnis, mit dem Persischen und
anderen verwandten Sprachen verglichen”), the article mentions J.A. Gülden-
städt’s previous wordlist, but not M. Garzoni’s Grammar, of which J. Klaproth
might not have been aware.
Like J. Adelung, J. Klaproth rejects Güldenstädt’s view of the Kurds as Turk-
men Tatars, explaining that this opinion “is contradicted by their language,
31 Ibid.
32 J. Klaproth was so drawn to the path of the one who had preceded him in these countries
that, taking an interest in his travel notes, he provided a new edition of them in two vol-
umes in 1815 (Reisen durch Georgien und Imerethi) and 1834 (Beschreibung der Kaukasi-
schen Länder).
33 On Julius Klaproth’s life and works, see Walravens, Hartmut. Julius Klaproth (1783–1835):
Leben und Werk. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999.

68 Alsancakli
originating from a Perso-Median dialect with Semitic borrowings”.34 He also

adds that the Kurds “are probably the ancient Cardouques, who lived on the
mountains of Gordyene”. There follows 9 pages of vocabulary including both
verbs and nouns and which, according to the author, “prove the Median origin
of the Kurdish language”.35 The Kurdish forms are regularly compared with
Persian, Pahlavi and Avestic equivalents, and occasionnally with Ossetic, Tatar
or Arabic. The transcription system is, like Güldenstädt’s, based on the German
orthography of the Latin script.
In his opus magnum called Asia Polyglotta (published in Frankfurt, 1823),
which purported to be a general outline of all Asiatic languages, Klaproth
finally saw the need for developing a unified phonetic transcription system
applied to all the languages under discussion. This transcription was still,
however, heavily based on German. In the book, the languages are grouped ac-
cording to genetic affiliation and it is in this work that Klaproth popularized
the German term “Indogermanisch” (Indo-German) for Indo-European lan-
guages, a term which is still in use today.36 Indo-European languages spoken in
Asia are described in general terms pages 42–5, while pages 75–81 are devoted
more specifically to Kurdish. In these pages, the author basically reiterates the
content of his earlier article, with a few adaptations and additions.
Klaproth’s endeavour represented a first fragmentation of earlier collections
of linguistic diversity like Peter Simon Pallas’, Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro’s and
J. Adelung’s. However, this delimitation was still done on a geographical basis
rather than a genetic one, and if similarities between languages were noted,
the concept of language families as systems of relationships still lacked the
historicity grounded in empiric rules for evolution and change which compar-
ative linguistics would provide it with. Indeed, even as Klaproth’s Asia Poly-
glotta was being published, it seemingly belonged to the past. A few years
earlier, with the publication of Franz Bopp’s first works on Sanskrit and Indo-
European conjugation, the age of encyclopædic collections of linguistic diver-
sity had already started to come to a close.
34 Klaproth, Julius. “Kurdisches Wörterverzeichnis, mit dem Persischen und anderen ver-
wandten Sprachen verglichen”, 312. Fundgruben des Orients vol. 4 (1814): 312–21.
35 Ibid., 313.
36 The term had been coined by Conrad Malte-Brun in 1810; see Rabault-Feuerhahn,
L’ Archive des origines, 88.

Breaking Point
The real breaking point in the study of languages and linguistic diversity came
from the 1810s onwards with Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) and his older broth-
er August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845), and most importantly Franz Bopp
(1791–1867). P. Rabault-Feuerhahn notes that
contrary [to William Jones], Schlegel places the historical dimension […]
at the centre of his reflections on languages and peoples, developed
around his study of Sanskrit. In the first paragraph of the Essay [On the
Language and Wisdom of India, published in 1808], he endorses Jones’
assumptions, meaning the existence of a kinship between Sanskrit, Latin,
Greek, Persian and German which would not be attributable to mixing
but to a common ancestry. However, he goes a step further and inscribes
his genealogy in a chronology, (incorrectly) describing Sanskrit as having
engendered the other languages of the group.37
Friedrich Schlegel’s book had a formative influence on the mind of many

young Germans including Franz Bopp, whom the book inspired to take up the
study of Sanskrit which he pursued in Paris (1812–6) and London (1816–20).
These two sojourns of study and his own progresses in Sanskrit led him to fol-
low a different path than had been pursued by F. Schlegel, while his “growing
distanciation from Catholicism” also pushed him further in that direction.38 In
London, Bopp had met the German statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt and
given him Sanskrit lessons, and Humboldt “would later play a decisive role in
Bopp’s career”.39 Discussions with Humboldt also “comforted Bopp in his ques-
tioning” of Schlegel’s theories, and he “rejected not only [his] linguistic typol-
ogy, but also the subservience of linguistics to philosophy”. While Schlegel and
Humboldt’s attitudes were not so different from the approach of the likes of
Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro, in that they wished to “go back to the sources of the
original Revelation” and “fit particular cases in the common framework of a
general philosophy of language”, Bopp “renounced to resolve the question of
the origins of all languages and, focusing on a single linguistic family, reduced
the historical approach to the parallel display on a temporal axis of morpho-
logical segments, distinguishing between new and constant elements”.40
37 Ibid., 69.
38 Ibid., 82.
39 Ibid., 84.
40 Ibid., 85.

70 Alsancakli
As pointed out by Michel Foucault, this marked the advent of a “new defini-
tion of the systems of kinship between languages”, a definition which “presup-
poses that languages are divided into broad groups which are discontinuous in
relation to one another”.41 While general or universal grammar “excluded com-
parison in so far as […] all languages had as their task the analysis, decomposi-
tion, and recomposition of representations, which, within fairly broad limits,
were the same for the entire human race”, works such as those of Jacob Grimm
(1785–1863) and Bopp rendered possible “the direct and lateral comparison of
two or more languages”. This is how
historicity was introduced into the domain of languages. Indeed, for the
history of languages to be conceived, they had to be detached from the
broad chronological continuity that had linked them without interrup-
tion as far back as their origin; they also had to be freed from the common
expanse of representations in which they were caught; by means of this
double break, the heterogeneity of the various grammatical systems
emerged with its peculiar patternings, the laws prescribing change within
each one, and the paths fixing possible lines of development. […] The
arrangements into chronological series had to be broken up, and their
elements redistributed, then a new history was constituted, one that does
not merely express the mode of succession of beings and their connec-
tion in time, but the modality of their formation. Empiricity […] is hence-
forth traversed by History, through the whole density of its being. The
order of time is beginning.42
It is, then, nothing short of a revolution, and this revolution would be contin-
ued by Bopp’s students at the university of Berlin, one of the most brilliant of
which was August Friedrich Pott, to whom we will now turn our attention.
August Friedrich Pott
Pondering on the consequences of Bopp’s revolutionary new approach, Fou-

cault writes that
41 Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archæology of Human Sciences, 290ff. New York:
Vintage, 1994.
42 Ibid., 292

language is no longer linked to civilizations by the level of learning to

which they have attained […], but by the mind of the peoples who have
given rise to it, […]. This means that the conditions of historicity of lan-
guage are changed at once: its mutations no longer come from above […],
but take their being obscurely from below, for language is neither an
instrument nor a product […] but a ceaseless activity […]. In any lan-
guage, the speaker, who never ceases to speak in a murmur that is not
heard although it provides all the vividness of the language, is the peo-
ple.43
Mentioning Grimm’s study of German lyrical poets of the medieval era as

representative of this trend, Foucault asserts that
language is no longer linked to the knowing of things, but to men’s free-

dom […]. By defining the internal laws of grammar, one is simultaneously
linking language and the free destiny of men in a profound kinship.
Throughout the nineteenth century, philology was to have profound
political reverberations.44
This analysis is important, because it enables us to get a clearer understanding

of the life and career path of one of the most successful students of Franz
Bopp, A.F. Pott.
Son of a preacher, August Friedrich Pott (1802–87) was born near Hanover
and had studied philology at the university of Göttingen, where he received his
doctorate on 17 October 1827, for a dissertation entitled On the Relationship of
Prepositions in Languages.45 Having studied Greek, Latin and Hebrew at Göt-
tingen, he then went on to study Sanskrit at the university of Berlin with Franz
Bopp from 1827 to 1833. There, he was habilitated on 1 May 1830 under the rec-
torship of Hegel, “after having presented a lecture […] on ‘Wortbildung der
Griechischen und Lateinischen Sprache’ [‘Morphology of Greek and Latin lan-
guages’] and having been questioned by Bopp on the relation of the Classical
languages to Sanskrit”.46 Once habilitated, he taught in Berlin for three years a
number of various courses on Latin, Greek and comparative linguistics.
43 Ibid., 289.
44 Ibid.
45 Leopold, Joan. The Letter Liveth: The Life, Work and Library of August Friedrich Pott (1802–
1887), xliv. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1983.
46 Ibid., xlv.

72 Alsancakli
Joan Leopold notes that
Pott spent a very long time at Berlin […], very unusual in the Germany
of his day. This interval allowed him to become knowledgeable in a
number of Indo-European languages [...] and to derive full benefit from
contemporary linguistic luminaries, especially Franz Bopp, his teacher,
and Wilhelm von Humboldt. He also had the opportunity to prepare the
first volume of his first major work, Etymologische Forschungen [Etymo-
logical Researches], which helped gain him on 31 August 1833 an extraor-
dinary professorship at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, also in
Prussia.47
Having published the second volume of his Etymological Researches in 1836,

A.F. Pott acceded to full professorship in Halle in 1838 and remained there until
his death.
In Halle, August F. Pott met Emil Rödiger, with whom he would remain close
friends until the latter’s death. Emil Rödiger (1801–74), son of an organist, was
born in Sangerhausen before being placed in an orphanage in Halle. In 1821, he
was sent to study theology at Halle university, where he got his doctorate in
theology in 1826. In 1830, he became extraordinarius for Oriental languages at
Halle university and in 1835 he acceded to full professorship. In 1860, he went
on to take the same position at the university of Berlin and became a member
of the Academy of Sciences shortly thereafter.48
M. Foucault’s assertion that philology had “political reverberations” through-
out the 19th century certainly rings true with the career of A.F. Pott. While in
Halle in the 1830s and 1840s, August F. Pott strongly associated with the “op-
positional group” inside the university, a group made up of Young Hegelians,
radical or libertarian professors such as Rudolf Haym (1821–1901) and Arnold
Ruge (1802–80). During these years, A.F. Pott wrote most of his articles in the
Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung (Journal of General Literature) and the Hallische
Jahrbücher (Annals of Halle), both of which were centres fostering Young
Hegelian thought.49 After the 1840s however, very few of the Young Hegelians
still remained in Halle. As J. Leopold writes, “except for Pott, most of
47 Ibid., xlvi–xlvii.
48 See Siegfried, C. “Roediger, Emil R.” Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 29. Leipzig: Duncker
& Humblot, 1889.
49 Facing censorship and subscriber issues, both publications remained short-lived:
A. Ruge’s Hallische Jahrbücher was shut down in 1843, and the Allgemeine Literatur Zei-
tung closed in 1849.

the oppositional group became involved in active political campaigning and

representative office-holding. Most subsequently left Halle […]. Pott, whom
Ruge once described as not a dogmatic adherent of any ‘party’ or of rational-
ism, remained.”50
A.F. Pott always felt that his political opinions cost him dearly in terms of
career and salary, an opinion which he was probably justified in holding. In
1844, he was denied a position as head librarian of the university’s library, and
according to Leopold, compared to other Halle professors, “Pott’s salary was
almost 27 % below average in 1844–45 and almost 16 % below average in 1854–
55”. She adds that “although he was Dean of the Philosophical Faculty on
several occasions, he never became Rector of the University, a position usually
held by senior professors as the culmination of their university services. He
was, however, named Geheimer Regierungs-Rat, an honorific title, by the King
in 1880.”51
Emil Rödiger was not a member of the “oppositional group” at Halle. He
was however a close friend of A.F. Pott, and both men played a major role
in the establishment of the German Oriental Society (Deutsche Morgenlän-
dische Gesellschaft, thereafter DMG) in 1845. They had already been among the
twenty-seven founding members of the Association of German philologists and
Educators (Verein deutscher Philologen und Schulmänner) in 1837, and with
Heinrich Fleischer (1801–88) and Herrmann Brockhaus (1806–77) from Leipzig,
they were both members of the first board of directors of the DMG, where
“E. Rödiger managed the general direction of the organization and corres-
pondence” and “Pott was given charge of the library and other collections”.52
August Pott was the DMG’s librarian from 1845 to 1849, and he also was co-
editor of the DMG’s organ, the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen
Gesellschaft (ZDMG, Journal of the German Oriental Society), with Emil Rödiger
and others for the first four volumes. He kept contributing to the publication
up to its thirty-fifth volume in 1881.
Inside the Association of German philologists, Orientalists and comparative
linguists had from the outset wished to form their own association. This led to
the foundation by Heinrich Ewald (1803–75) and Christian Lassen (1800–76) of
the Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes (ZKM, Journal for Knowledge on
the Orient) in 1837. Precursor to the ZDMG, the journal was published in 7 vol-
umes from 1837 to 1850, and its first two issues were edited by Heinrich Ewald
himself, while Christian Lassen edited volumes 3 to 7. It is in the ZKM that the
50 Leopold, The Letter Liveth, li–lii.

51 Ibid., lv–lvi.
52 Ibid., lxiii–lxv.

74 Alsancakli
four parts of the “Kurdische Studien” (“Kurdish Studies”) series were published,
in volumes 3 (published in 1840, pp. 1–63), 4 (1842, pp. 1–42), 5 (1844, pp. 57–83)
and 7 (1850, pp. 91–167).
It is here worth mentioning that both the ZKM and the ZDMG were in the
beginning somewhat dominated by Indianists, reflecting their general prepon-
derance in the fields of orientalism and comparative linguistics in the middle
of the 19th century.53 The fact that the ZKM was edited by Christian Lassen at
the time of publication of the “Kurdish Studies” series is also of importance.
C. Lassen was a student of A.W. Schlegel and, as such, a representative of the
Bonn school of Sanskrit studies, while A.F. Pott was a student of F. Bopp, leader
of the Berlin school. Both schools differed in their approach of Indian and San-
skrit studies and their relations had been tense up to this point: while Bopp
was a partisan of a strictly linguistic approach, wishing to understand language
in and for itself and not paying much attention to the general cultural context,
A.W. Schlegel championed an attitude much more open to classical philology
and literature, modeled on the German Altertumwissenschaft, or Sciences of
Antiquity.54
P. Rabault-Feuerhahn writes that “this rejection of the principally linguistic
and etymological perspective led him [C. Lassen] to push even farther than
A.W. Schlegel had the perspective inherited from the Sciences of Antiquity and
he devoted all his energy to shedding a global light on ancient Indian civilisa-
tion”, commenting that “this ambition is already being felt in the [ZKM].” She
further notes that “methodologically speaking, [Lassen] was as strongly hostile
to the Boppian school as his master […]. Lassen still stigmatized this ‘school of
Berlin’ in a letter addressed to Sanskritist Heinrich Ewald in 1841, criticizing the
tendency to explain texts only by etymology or a grammatical bias.”55
These details are relevant, because they might serve to explain a curious fact
about the “Kurdish Studies” series of articles. The authors of the series are sys-
tematically presented as E. Rödiger und A.F. Pott, despite the fact that of the 255
pages of the article, Emil Rödiger only authored the first 25 pages, comprising
the first part devoted to a “General approach of the Kurdish language, Statistics
and Literature”, while the 230 pages of actual linguistic research on Kurdish,
comprising part 2 on “Phonetics” and part 3 on “Natural history of Kurdish and
other West Asian languages” were authored by A.F. Pott. It is well possible that
53 See Rabault-Feuerhahn, L’Archive des origines, 136.

54 Ibid., 124–9.
55 Ibid., 127ff. Indeed, the more global approach of the Bonn school would be taken to its
apex by C. Lassen with his four-volume opus magnum entitled Indian Sciences of Antiquity
(Indische Alterthumskunde), published 1847–61.

C. Lassen had not wished to publish A.F. Pott’s linguistic account at all unless
preceded by E. Rödiger’s general introduction on the Kurds, in keeping with
C. Lassen’s criticism of the purely linguistic approach of the Berlin school.
In fact, the “Kurdish Studies” series of articles is mainly the product of
A.F. Pott’s researches. Between 1840 and 1850, he thus authored the equivalent
of a 230-pages essay which can be considered the first serious linguistic study
of Kurdish in the modern era. It is surprising to notice that this study has been
mostly overlooked in the literature on the subject. This series of articles also
demonstrates that the “political reverberations” of philology highlighted by
M. Foucault were not limited to A.F. Pott’s friendships and extracurricular ac-
tivities at Halle university: they most likely had a direct impact on his choice of
research topics. While he was trained in languages endowed with a vast literary
tradition such as Greek, Latin or Sanskrit, he specifically chose to work on peo-
ples who seemingly lacked such a rich body of written literature and were con-
sidered, by the time’s standards, “uncivilized” (or a “rough mountainous
people”, to quote J. Adelung about the Kurds). It is in fact for his work on the
language of another such people, the Romani, that A.F. Pott is nowadays chief-
ly remembered.56
Heavily indebted to Grimm and Bopp’s studies, A.F. Pott’s approach of lan-
guage as speech (an “ensemble of phonetic elements”, to quote Foucault57)
rather than writing in turn allowed him to recognize that predominantly oral
languages could still be languages, and not merely dialects of established and
more prestigious written vernaculars.58 Thus, in the “Kurdish Studies” series,
August Pott and Emil Rödiger were the first to present Kurdish not as a dialect
of Persian but as a language in its own right, albeit one in a close kindred rela-
tionship with Persian, which is compared to the relationship between the spo-
ken dialects of Milan and the written Tuscan language in Italy.59 A.F. Pott
would remain interested in Kurdish to the end of his life, as is shown by the list
56 At the same time he was working on the “Kurdish Studies” series, A.F. Pott published his
work The Gypsies in Europe and Asia (Die Zigeuner in Europa und Asien, published in two
volumes in 1844–5), and also contributed a series of articles on the subject.
57 “With Rask, Grimm and Bopp, language is treated […] as a totality of phonetic elements.
Whereas, for general grammar, language arose when the noise produced by the mouth or
the lips had become a letter, it is accepted from now on that language exists when noises
have been articulated and divided into a series of distinct sounds.” Foucault, The Order of
Things, 286.
58 It is worth noting that J. Grimm’s work on orality would later also influence two other
linguists working on Kurdish, Eugen Prym and Albert Socin.
59 Rödiger, Emil and August F. Pott. “Kurdische Studien”, 1–2. Zeitschrift für die Kunde des
Morgenlandes 3 (1840): 1–63.

76 Alsancakli
of books in his library, among which we find the grammars of Garzoni, Rhea
and Justi, as well as Lerch’s book, Jaba’s dictionary and several articles on Kurd-
ish linguistics.60
Ilya Berezine & Alexandre Chodzko
Even at the time of its publication, Rödiger and Pott’s series of articles does not
seem to have been widely circulated. In 1853, three years after the publication
of the last article in the series, Ilya Berezine (1818–96) added to his own series
of Research on Persian dialects (Recherche sur les dialectes persans) a piece on
Kurdish dialects, divided into two articles of about 15 pages each, the first one
being on the Kurmanji Kurdish spoken in Khorasan and the second one on
Kurmanji Kurdish in general. However, I. Berezine does not seem to have been
aware of the “Kurdish Studies” of Pott and Rödiger, as he makes no mention of
them and still seems to consider Kurdish as a dialect of Persian.
After completing his gymnasium studies in Perm, Berezine had enrolled in
1834 at the Oriental Faculty of the University of Kazan, where he studied with
the Arabist F. Erdmann and the Turcologist and Iranist A.K. Kazem-Beg. After
obtaining his master’s degree in 1841, he was sent by the university on a schol-
arly voyage (1842–5) to Transcaucasia, Persia, Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, Con-
stantinople and the Crimea.61 It is during this trip that he collected the
material which would form the basis of his two volumes of Researches on Mus-
lim dialects (Recherches sur les dialectes musulmans), devoted respectively to
Turkish (published in 1848) and Persian “dialects” (1853). In 1846, he became
associate professor of Turkish in Kazan and was promoted to professorship in
1854 before moving, with the rest of Kazan University’s Oriental Faculty, to St.
Petersburg in 1855. He went on to have a respectable though comparatively
undistinguished career as an Orientalist, but never wrote on Kurdish again.
Still a few years later in 1857, the Polish-born Orientalist Alexandre Chodźko
(1804–91), former student at the Oriental faculty in St. Petersburg (1824–30)
and interpreter and consul of Russia in Persia (1830–41), published his “Philo-
logical Studies on Kurdish” (“Études philologiques de la langue kurde”) in the
Journal Asiatique.62 Aware of both the “Kurdish Studies” series and I. Berezine’s
work, he admitted still not being convinced by A. Pott’s argument regarding
60 Leopold, The Letter Liveth, 309.

61 See Calmard, Jean. “Il’ya Nikolaevich Berezin”. EIr (1989), http://www.iranicaonline.org/
articles/berezin-ilya-nikolaevich. Date of accession: 22/4/2015.
62 For an account of A. Chodzko’s eventful life and career, see Calmard, Jean. “Aleksander

Kurdish.63 Giving his own view of the language, he writes that Kurdish “is made
up of two different elements: 1) its grammar is almost identical to that of Fârsî,
modern Persian, and about a third of the language’s words have been borrowed
either from the Persians, the Turks or the Arabs […]; 2) about two-thirds of the
remaining words belong to an unknown language that is older than Islam,
modern Persian and Turkish: it is the Kurdish language per se, and it might as
well be the language in which the cuneiform inscriptions of Ninive, Khors-
abad, etc., were written.”64 As we can see then, these views are, like Berezine’s,
still strongly reminiscent of early 19th-century views on Kurdish.65
A. Chodźko’s study was mainly realized through the help of Ehmed Xan,
ruler of the Baban Kurds of Silêmanî, who stayed in Paris in 1853–4.66 The main
body of the article is made up of a grammatical sketch, followed by a phraseol-
ogy (47–59) and a short notice on poetry (59f.), containing two quatrains from
Bābā Ṭāhir ʿUryān, which the author finds “more Persian than Kurdish”,67 later
adding that he has “never seen Dabel’s [Ehmedê Xanî’s] poetry; however, if he
hasn’t done more justice to Kurdish than his countryman Baba Tahiri, we
should rather look for it [Kurdish poetry] in Kurdistan, among the illiterate
shepherds and farmers of the country”.68
A. Chodźko’s study is also remarkable for the insights it gives on a major
development taking place in the later part of the 19th century, that is, the de-
velopment of Kurdish studies in Russia. Writing in 1857, Chodźko remarks that
in the last few years, Russia’s orientalists have taken up Kurdish literature
with more zeal than anywhere else in Europe. We already know about the
samples of Kurdish given by Mr. Berezine in his interesting publication.
The Kurdish chronicle Târîx Akrâd by Cheref Chah [i.e. Sharaf Khān’s
Borejko Chodźko”. EIr (1991), http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/chodzko-aleksander-

borejko. Date of accession: 22/4/2015.
63 “I still don’t know if I should accept Mr. Pott’s opinion, considering Kurdish as a language
sui generis. It seems to me that we do not, as of yet, possess enough material to say the last
word on such an important matter […].” Chodźko, Alexandre. “Études philologiques sur la
langue kurde (dialecte de Soléimanié)”, 4. Journal asiatique série 5, vol. 9 (1857): 297–356.
64 Ibid.
65 We can for example quote Klaproth who saw Kurdish as “originating from a Perso-Median
dialect with Semitic borrowings”, or L. Hervás y Panduro who helds the Kurds to be
“descendents of the ancient Chaldeans”, speaking a “language […] filled with numerous
Arabic words”.
66 Chodźko, “Études philologiques”, 1f.
67 Ibid., 59.
68 Ibid., 60.

78 Alsancakli
Sharafnāmeh] is in print, and a Kurdish translation of Séadi’s Gulistan is

in the works, under the supervision of the learned professor Von Dorn.
Mr. Lerch, his student, will soon publish twenty-five national hymns, and
some other samples from the various dialects of Kurdistan, which he col-
lected during a few weeks’ stay with Kurdish prisoners of war sent to Rus-
sia during the last war in the East.69
A. Chodźko could have added Auguste Jaba’s name to the list, as the Russian
consul in Erzurum was then busy working with Mela Mehmûdê Bayezîdî to
produce material on the history, language and customs of the Kurds. Indeed,
the publication, that same year, of the German version of Peter Lerch’s Re-
searches on the Kurds and the Iranian Northern Chaldeans, quickly followed by
the Persian edition of the Sharafnāmeh by Vladimir Veliaminov-Zernov (pub-
lished in 1860–2), marked a turning point in the history of Kurdish studies: the
beginning of Russia’s undisputed control over the field which would progres-
sively turn into modern Kurdish studies. In the following years, monographs
dealing with the Kurds were exclusively published in St. Petersburg, a trend
that did not change until well into the 20th century.
Momentum
It was indeed around that same time, in the mid-1850s, that a centre for Orien-
tal studies emerged in Russia. Until the middle of the 19th century, Oriental
studies in that country had mainly revolved around Kazan University, even
though chairs in Persian and Arabic were already active in St. Petersburg since
1818, and there was also a chair of Oriental letters at the university of Kharkov.
However, “Kazan’s primacy came to a sudden end in 1854, when Nicholas I
(r. 1825–55) ordered the transfer of most of its relevant faculty, students and
library to the University of St. Petersburg, whose new Faculty of Oriental Lan-
guages would centralize all teaching of Eastern languages in the empire.”70
Thus, “St. Petersburg University’s [Faculty of Oriental Languages] was formally
inaugurated at noon on August 27, 1855. […] The new faculty boasted fourteen
instructors in five sections […].”71
69 Ibid., 3f.
70 Schimmelpenninck van der Oye, David. “The Imperial Roots of Soviet Orientology”, 33. In
The Heritage of Soviet Oriental Studies, edited by M. Kemper & S. Conermann, 29–46.
Oxon: Routledge, 2011.
71 Ibid., 36.

In a related development, two international events also contributed to the

strengthening of Russia’s position as a nascent centre of Oriental studies in
Europe. The first of these events was the university crisis that occurred in Ger-
many from the mid-1850s onwards, meaning that the development of Oriental
studies was put on hold there for about two decades.72 The second of these
phenomena is the continued decline of Ottoman power in the second part of
the 19th century, even after the costly victory achieved against the Russians in
the Crimean war (1853–6). Russia’s interests in the Ottoman empire then be-
came the driving force behind the sudden desire to study peoples such as
Kurds and Armenians. This situation is best described in a review of Peter
Lerch’s Researches in the Journal des savants of May 1858, where it is noted that
“given its position, Russia is bound to give a new impetus to several sections of
Oriental studies: it cannot be more worthy of praise from scientists in Europe
than if it allows us to get acquainted with some Asiatic literatures and idioms
which only it can really study.”73
At the time the review was published, this new impetus had already been
given a couple of years back, right after the end of the war in 1856, and it was
already starting to bear fruits. The man behind the academic dimension of this
project was a German orientalist named Bernhard Dorn. Graduating from
Leipzig in 1825 and teaching in Russia from 1829 onwards (first in Kharkov, then
in St. Petersburg), Johannes Albrecht Bernhard Dorn (1805–81) was also, since
1842, director of the Asiatic Museum and head of the Oriental section of the
Imperial public library. Especially interested in Pashto and the Pashtuns – even
though he never visited Afghanistan – , Dorn was the one who asked Auguste
Jaba (1801–94), Polish-born consul of Russia in Erzurum and an Orientalist
trainee, to collect materials on the Kurds.74 The ensuing fruitful collaboration
with Mela Mehmûdê Bayezîdî is well-known.75
With the publication and translation of the Sharafnāmeh in the 1860s and
1870s, the definite peak of the Russian school of Kurdish studies in the 19th
century was undoubtedly the publication of Jaba’s materials and among those,
the Kurdish-French Dictionary (Dictionnaire kurde-français, 1879) edited by
F. Justi. An impressive work for the time, the dictionary’s definitions are
72 Wokoeck, Ursula. German Orientalism, 118. Oxon: Routledge, 2009.

73 Anonymous. “Livres nouveaux – Russie”. Journal des savants (May 1858): 328.
74 Jaba, Auguste. Recueil de notices et récits kourdes, v. St.-Petersburg: Imperial Academy of
Sciences, 1860.
75 As we have seen, Bernhard Dorn was also the one who had sent Peter Lerch to work with
Kurdish prisoners of war in Smolensk.

80 Alsancakli
“remarkably thorough and reliable”, according to Michael Chyet.76 Today,

Auguste Jaba is generally considered as a great scholar of the Kurdish language
and folklore, counted among the ranks of so-called “Orientalists”. However, it
can be argued that in his time, he really belonged to neither of these categories,
as I will try to demonstrate.
Auguste Jaba
Pondering on the method of “discourse analysis” as applied to the study of ori-

entalism by Edward Said, among others, S. Marchand remarks that:
This method is particularly pernicious, delivering a definition of identity

which presumes a primordial, binary distinction between ‘Europe’ and
‘the Orient’. […] Surely at least some Europeans defined themselves by
means of other sets of distinctions […]. Some lived their lives in border-
lands like Sweden, Estonia or Croatia were they themselves felt ‘oriental-
ized’ – and believed the ultimate ‘other’ sat in Rome, St. Petersburg, or
Vienna, not Istanbul, Cairo, or Delhi.77
I believe this is a good introduction to A. Jaba’s life and career. Auguste Jaba
(1801–94) was a Pole born in Vilnius (now capital of Lithuania) in 1801. Enrolled
in the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs as an interpreter in 1824, he studied
Oriental languages in St. Petersburg (1825–8) before completing various mis-
sions in Ottoman lands. In 1838, he was named chancellor of the Russian con-
sulate in Izmir and in 1848, Russian consul in Erzurum. He participated fully in
the Crimean war (1853–6), after which he was returned to his position as Con-
sul in Erzurum.78 This is when he was asked by Bernhard Dorn, then head of
the Asiatic Museum, to collect Kurdish materials as a side-task to his diplo-
matic duties.
As Suzanne Marchand has noticed, “it had long been the case that the exca-
vators or procurers of material objects [in Jaba’s case, manuscripts] were not
considered ‘real’ scholars – real scholars were the ones who […] sat at home
76 Chyet, Michael. Kurdish-English Dictionary. Yale: Yale University Press, 2003.

77 Marchand, German Orientalism, xx–xxii.
78 For a detailed biographical sketch, see de Testa, Marie & Antoine Gautier. Drogmans et
diplomates européens auprès de la porte ottomane, 441–50. Istanbul: Isis, 2003.

and made sense of the material.”79 This seems to have been true for A. Jaba.80
Thus, in a preliminary footnote to the “Kurdish Ballad” (“Ballade kurde”) pub-
lished in the August-September 1859 issue of the Journal asiatique, Jules Mohl
(1800–76), editor of the journal, remarks:
I have received this ballad in quite an imperfect state. I find the cutting of
lines very dubious; the text was difficult to read, and the transcription
sometimes did not match; however, as it is a curious subject, I did not
want to deprive the readers of it […].81
Like the Kurdish ballad, A. Jaba never got to edit any of his own works for pub-
lication, as the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg consistently
entrusted this job to people who were considered actual academic specialists
of the Kurds. Thus, the texts composing his Collection of Kurdish Stories and
Notes (Recueil de notices et de récits kourdes, published in 1860) were chosen by
a four-men Commission (B. Dorn, V. Veliaminov-Zernov, O. Bohtlingk and E.
Wiedemann) on the recommendation of Peter Lerch, who carried on with the
edition of the work and gave it its title.82 When Jaba’s Dictionary was published,
79 Marchand, German Orientalism, 221f.

80 The divide between “armchair” and “field” orientalists was indeed a defining feature of
19th-century orientalism. Marchand comments that “nineteenth-century academics […]
evinced little interest in the East’s modern economic, military, or political conditions”,
and that “to assess or address any of these topics was a job for the journalist, official, or
businessman, none of whom had the same sort of cultural responsibility as did the aca-
demic.” The Frenchman Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1838) is one early and famous
example of this type of scholars, Henri Déhérain thus stating that a research visit made to
the archives of Genoa in 1805 was “the only time he left Paris for a foreign country”. Things
had not changed so much even a century later. Thus Theodor Nöldeke (1836–1930), who
was “for nearly half a century Germany’s most eminent semitist” and wrote his major
works in the 1860s, “never got farther East than the manuscript collections in Vienna.” It is
only from the 1880s onwards that it increasingly became a requirement for career orien-
talists to make at least one research trip to “the Orient”. See Marchand, German Oriental-
ism, xxvi–xxvii and 174; Déhérain, Henri. Silvestre de Sacy, ses contemporains et ses
disciples, XX. Paris: Paul Geuthner, 1938.
81 The naturalist P.A. Tchihatcheff (1812–90), who had sent the ballad to the journal, had
quite a different appreciation of A. Jaba and his work. Jaba, Auguste. “Ballade kurde”, 153ff.
Journal asiatique série 5, vol. XIV (1859): 153–66.
82 Jaba, Notices et récits kourdes, v–x. Incidentally, this is also the origin of the confusion on
Jaba’s first name. In the Collection, he is called Alexandre, rather than Auguste Jaba, a
mistake that has endured to this day. de Testa & Gautier, Drogmans et diplomates, 446f.

82 Alsancakli
almost 20 years later (Dictionnaire kurde-français, 1879), it had been thoroughly

edited by the reknowned Iranist Ferdinand Justi, who published his own Kurd-
ish Grammar the following year (Kurdische Grammatik, 1880).
A. Jaba’s situation was by no means an exception. Whether in the service of
France, Russia or other powers, the diplomats and interpreters who were work-
ing in “the Orient” were cut off from the main centres of academic orientalism
in Europe, and this essential contradiction could sometimes be “felt in a con-
scious and painful way”. Discussing Silvestre de Sacy’s correspondence with
French drogmans in Istanbul at the beginning of the 19th century, M. Espagne
and P. Rabault-Feuerhahn write that “the letters coming from Constantinople
betray a real nostalgia for [the study of orientalism practised in Paris], as well
as a clear awareness of still being at the root of the knowledge of the Orient”.83
Reading Jaba’s letters to Justi, one does get a real sense of this “nostalgia”,
sometimes bordering on melancholy.84 It is indeed the case that people like
Jaba were always tributary of external help, in the form of the support of schol-
arly institutions and people considered “real” academics. Auguste Jaba was es-
pecially distressed at the thought of not being able to publish the second part
of his dictionary, that is the French-Kurdish-Russian section. The Imperial
Academy did not wish to publish it and A. Jaba remained stuck with his dic-
tionary, apparently spending the better part of his last years trying in vain to
get it published – it remains unpublished to this day. At some point, he even
considered trying to publish it in Tbilisi, where already “several Turkish books
had been printed”.85
As much as he might have felt estranged from orientalists in Europe, then,
A. Jaba also appears to have been unusually close to his main collaborator in
Erzurum, the Kurdish mullah Mehmûdê Bayezîdî, close enough indeed to proj-
ect writing his biography. A. Jaba seems to have taken up a genuine interest in
the Kurds, going way beyond a simple academic career choice. His relentless
efforts to get his dictionary published, even at the advanced age of eighty
years-old, are also an indication of this. In any case, it seems that he definitely
felt he belonged more in the Orient than in Paris or St. Petersburg. Even after
he retired in 1866, he never went back to Russia, choosing to live in Izmir with
83 Espagne, Michel and Rabault-Feuerhahn, Pascale. “Le réseau stambouliote de Silvestre de

Sacy”, 45. In L’orientalisme, les orientalistes et l’empire ottoman de la fin du XVIIIème à la fin
du XXème siècle, edited by S. Basch, N. Cheni, P. Chuvin, M. Espagne & J. Leclant, 39–60.
Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 2011.
84 Published in de Testa & Gautier, Drogmans et diplomates, 456–61.
85 Ibid., 460.

his second wife, Hélène Giraud (1821–96), inside the city’s Latin community
with people who stood, like him, between “Europe” and “the Orient”.
Ferdinand Justi
For actual scholars like Justi, things were rather different. Coming from “an old
Marburg family of theologians, pastors, and scholars”, Ferdinand Justi (1837–
1907) had started his studies in linguistics and Oriental studies in Marburg in
1856, also spending a year in Göttingen.86 Among his teachers, we can mention
Heinrich Ewald and the Indo-Europeanist Theodor Benfey, people to whom
Justi owed “his most exact philological method”.87 F. Justi graduated and was
habilitated in Marburg in 1861, with a doctoral thesis about the formation of
nominal compounds in Indo-European languages. In 1865, he was appointed
extraordinary professor of comparative grammar and German philology and
from 1869 he was made a full professor. Member of the Prussian and the Göt-
tingen Academy of Sciences, F. Justi went on to hold the office of the Rector of
Marburg University in the year 1887–8.88
By the time he edited Jaba’s dictionary, followed by the publication of his
own grammar, F. Justi was already a well-established scholar in the nascent
field of Iranian studies, which had emerged in the 1870s and 1880s from the
branching out of Oriental studies into Iranian and Semitic studies. After two
decades of disarray, the war of 1870–1 had led to a new rise in student numbers
and, in turn, to a new period of expansion for German universities. As Ursula
Wokoeck describes it, “for the discipline of Oriental philology, this entailed the
continuation of the process of institutionalization of the differentiation be-
tween Semitic languages, and Sanskrit and comparative linguistics. […]”89 This
institutional differentiation between Indian and Iranian studies on the one
hand, and Semitic studies on the other, meant that, for the first time, separate
chairs for these subjects were created at an increasing number of universities.90
This is in stark contrast with an earlier period when single scholars used to
cover a very large array of languages and areas. Marchand exemplifies this by
mentioning two of the most prominent German orientalists of the period
86 Schmitt, Rüdiger. “Ferdinand Justi”. EIr (2009) http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/justi-

ferdinand-wilhelm-jakob-german-scholar. Date of accession: 22/4/2015.
87 Ibid.
88 For more details on Justi’s life and career, see Schmitt, “Ferdinand Justi”.
89 Wokoeck, German Orientalism, 144f.
90 Ibid., 142ff.

84 Alsancakli
1820s–1860s, Heinrich Fleischer and Heinrich Ewald, respectively professors at

Göttingen and Tübingen universities. “Ewald”, she says, “taught not only classi-
cal Hebrew […] and Arabic but also Sanskrit, Persian, Coptic, Turkish, and Ar-
menian. Fleischer […] would doctor-father leading scholars in Old Testament
criticism, Arabic literature, Islamic law, Assyriology, Ethiopian linguistics, In-
dology, and ancient history.” She rightly concludes that “under such conditions,
it was hard to claim any one of the orientalists’ subfields had become fully
‘scientific’.”91
From the 1880s onwards, however, things were different. One would either
be an Iranist or a Semiticist, even though the boundaries of the nascent fields
remained rather vague to say the least. Can we, then, turn Marchand’s reason-
ing upside down and conclude that by this date, Iranian studies in Germany
had become scientific? By the look of Justi’s highly complex studies, it cer-
tainly was not possible for a single scholar to achieve such a degree of special-
ization in many different languages and areas any more. This increased
specialization also applied to Kurdish linguistics, and F. Justi’s grammar of
Kurdish is considered by V. Minorsky to be, with A. Socin’s later grammatical
essay, the only scientific grammar of Kurdish published until the epoch when
he wrote his article on “Kurds” in the Encyclopædia of Islam, in 1927.92
It is also at the turn of the 1880s that the Imperial Academy of Sciences in St.
Petersburg started publishing linguistic works on the Kurds, a development in
which F. Justi played a major role. As we have seen, he was already by then a
well-established scholar in Iranian studies, his most influential works being a
handbook of the Zend language (1864), an edition of the Bundahishn (1868)
and a study on Iranian onomastics (1895).93 As can be gathered, F. Justi is main-
ly remembered for his study of ancient Iranian languages. However, Kurdish
language was another object of study of his and before Jaba’s Dictionary (1879)
and his own Kurdische Grammatik (1880), he had already published several ar-
ticles on Kurdish in various journals in the 1870s.94
Both Jaba’s dictionary and Justi’s grammar were published by the Imperial
Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, and it is worth noting that of all of Jus-
ti’s monographs, his Kurdish grammar is the only one to have been published
91 Marchand, German Orientalism, 82f.

92 Minorsky, Vladimir. “Kurds”. EI1, vol. 2, 1152ff. Leiden: Brill, 1927.
93 Such was the degree of specialization of Justi’s researches that this latter work, the Book
of Iranian Personal Names (Iranisches Namenbuch) remains “a thorough and indispens-
able manual even today”. Schmitt, “Ferdinand Justi”.
94 We can mention “Notice on Foreign Words in Kurdish” (“Note sur les mots étrangers en
kurde”, 1873), “On Kurdish Spirants” (“Über die kurdischen Spiranten”, 1873) and “Animal
Names in Kurdish” (“Les noms d’animaux en kurde”, 1878).

there, or indeed outside Germany. This means that in contrast with works on
other Iranian-related topics, the study of Kurds had in the 1880s already settled
in St. Petersburg. Naturally, it is also there that at the very end of the decade,
Albert Socin’s collection of Kurdish Stories would be published.
Albert Socin
Ferdinand Justi was not the only Iranist to produce works on the Kurds, as oc-
casional articles by other Iranists such as Albert Houtum-Schindler (two Kur-
dish wordlists in 1884 and 1888) and Clément Huart (1895) demonstrate. For
many specialists in Iranian languages to this day, the Kurdish language of
course constitutes a natural extension of their areas of study. Converging to-
wards the study of the Kurds from another and more unexpected direction,
however, were specialists of Semitic languages and peoples and, especially, of
Syriac. While the Iranists had mostly a linguistic connection to the study of
Kurds, for scholars of Syriac the link to Kurdish was geographic and grounded
in fieldwork. As early as 1868, Theodor Nöldeke’s grammar of the Syriac dialect
spoken in Urmiye hinted to this fact, being entitled Grammar of the New Syrian
Language Spoken in the Lake of Urmia and in Kurdistan (Grammatik der neusy-
rischen Sprache am Urmia-See und in Kurdistan).95
Two students of Nöldeke, Eugen Prym (1843–1913) and Albert Socin (1844–
99), followed in his footsteps. Right after graduating in 1867, respectively from
Bonn and Halle, they wished to travel to the Middle East and gather material
on contemporary Syriac. Like A.F. Pott before them, they were heavily influ-
enced by J. Grimm’s ideas on language. In his article dedicated to their journey
and collection work, Michel Tardieu writes that
they [left] for the Ottoman empire driven by Nöldeke’s 1868 grammar but
also […] in order to escape from it. Their goal was to discover and hear
witnesses of living Aramaic. The peculiar character of their research
compared to the academical orientalism of Nöldeke’s school, lies in the
choice of studying a non-clerical and non-Westernized social back-
95 On a side-note, T. Nöldeke was also the first to contest the link between Xenophon’s Car-
douques and the Kurds, which he associated rather with the Kyrtioi of Greek sources. See
Nöldeke, Theodor. “Kardū und Kurden”. In Beiträge zur Alten Geschichte und Geographie.
Festschrift für Heinrich Kiepert, 73–81. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1898.

86 Alsancakli
ground, through […] a unique informant and the collective shaping of a

“text”.96
This informant was a Syriac man named Cano, hailing from the Tor Abidîn in
Midyat, whom they first met in Damascus, where they stayed from February to
December 1869. A. Socin, travelling alone since the departure of E. Prym for
Germany, met him a second time in Autumn 1870.97 From this fieldwork,
E. Prym and A. Socin, whom Michel Tardieu calls the “Grimm brothers of the
Orient”,98 published a volume of Syriac stories (1881) and a volume of Kurdish
stories, Kurdische Sammlungen, published in St. Petersburg between 1887–90.
The folkloristic perspective adopted by Prym and Socin, including the wish to
work with an illiterate informant, both echoed A. Chodzko’s earlier call in his
Philological Studies, and also served as a model for the heavily folkloristic ten-
dencies of future research on the Kurds in Soviet Russia.99
Towards the end of the 19th century, we thus find converging towards the
study of Kurds different individuals with different backgrounds and trajecto-
ries. This situation is of course typical of a field in the making, which does not
yet possess any formal institutional delineation nor any standardized training
and career path. On some occasions, it even led the newly differentiated fields
of Semitic and Iranian studies to overlap, as can best be seen in Albert Socin’s
contribution to the Outlines of Iranian Philology (Grundriss der iranischen Phi-
lologie), a turning point in Iranian studies at the outbreak of the twentieth cen-
tury, entitled “The Kurds’ language” (“Die Sprache der Kurden”, 1898–1901).
Thanks to his study of the Kurds, a Semiticist by training and career could thus
still end up authoring a chapter in a monograph exclusively dedicated to Ira-
nian languages.
Conclusion
In light of what we have seen, how can we define the history of Kurdish studies
from the end of the 18th to the beginning of the 20th century? So far, this
96 Tardieu, Michel. “Le collectage de la tradition orale du Ṭūr ‘Abdīn par Prym et Socin
(1869)”, 13. In L’orientalisme, les orientalistes et l’empire ottoman de la fin du XVIIIème à la fin
du XXème siècle, edited by S. Basch, N. Cheni, P. Chuvin, M. Espagne & J. Leclant, 11–28.
Paris: Académie des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, 2011.
97 Ibid., 15.
98 Ibid., 25.
99 What Michiel Leezenberg has called the “folklorization of Kurds”. Leezenberg, “Soviet
Kurdology”, 88.

history has mostly been studied in and of itself, with minimal reference to ex-
ternal developments. These uncontextualized narratives lead to the belief that
Kurdish studies developed along a unique path. Without reference to evolu-
tions occurring in the global social space and their reflections in various scien-
tific fields and disciplines, works of Kurdish studies are bound to remain
impenetrable, because the motivations and perspectives of their authors are
left unexplained.100
However, when put into context, we see that Kurdish studies followed evol-
utions in the human and social sciences in a closely-knit fashion. More specifi-
cally, a useful model for Kurdish studies is to be found in the development
of Sanskrit studies in Germany, which generated the advent of comparative
linguistics in the 1820s and also fostered, later on, an alternative approach
based on the classical philology of the Altertumswissenschaft. This classical-
philological perspective vowed to focus on history and society as a whole, and
its influence can be seen in works such as F.-B. Charmoy’s translation of
the Sharafnāmeh of Sharaf Khān Bidlīsī. Meanwhile, the large collections of
linguistic data gathered at the end of the eighteenth century were broken up
by the new approach of comparative linguistics. By grouping languages to-
gether in closed systems of kinship, it was restoring historicity by bringing in
discontinuity in the world’s linguistic diversity. Furthermore, it consecrated
language as mainly an oral, rather than written, phenomenon, and thus placed
the “people” at the centre of attention.
Already prominent at the beginning of the nineteenth century with studies
such as Jacob Grimm’s essay on German lyrical poets, this trend would gain
momentum in the course of the century and enable hitherto ignored peoples
such as the Kurds, Romani and others, to be studied on par with the Ancient
Greek and Romans, at least in so far as language was concerned. The old trend
was even reversed and by the middle of the nineteenth century, there emerged
a kind of distrust towards the use of literate production for the study of langua-
ges. This is visible in the works of A. Chodźko and A. Socin on Kurdish, whose
written tradition they felt contained too many foreign words and did not repre-
sent the “original” state of the language. This would have an adverse effect on
the study of written Kurdish literature, giving rise to the myth of the Kurds as a
people whose essential means of literary expression was oral.
100 For a detailed discussion of the nature of scientific fields and their relationships with the
global social space on the one hand, and the trajectories of individual researchers on the
other, see Bourdieu, Pierre. Les usages sociaux de la science : pour une sociologie clinique du
champ scientifique. Paris: INRA, 1997 and Bourdieu, Pierre. Science de la science et réflexi-
vité : cours du Collège de France (2000–2001). Paris: Raisons d’agir, 2000.

88 Alsancakli
This tendency, which M. Leezenberg has called the “folklorization of Kurds”,

is a prominent feature of works on the Kurds published by the Imperial Aca-
demy of Sciences in St. Petersburg. It continued throughout the 20th century
and is visible even to this day. However, an increased contextualization provi-
des us with a better understanding of why people like Chodźko and Socin wro-
te the things they wrote, and this in turn allows us to have a more critical
outlook on their works and the opinions they formulate. This is where the his-
tory of Kurdish studies intersects with the field’s contemporary practice. In-
deed, as closer scrutiny is put on these earlier works, we are able to read them
in a more informed manner, which will hopefully help us distinguish the ove-
rarching tendencies they display and conduct our research in a more balanced
way.

The Early History of Kurdish Studies (1787-1901)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Early History of Kurdish Studies (1787-1901)

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Early History of Kurdish Studies (1787-1901)

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The Early History OfDie

The Early History of Kurdish Studies (1787–1901)

Kurdish studies – Orientalism – philology – linguistics – history of science – 19th

Any attempt at writing the history of Kurdish studies is bound to be reflexive to

ISSN 0043-2539 (print version) ISSN 1570-0607 (online version) WDI 1

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

5 Lepenies and Weingart, “Introduction”, x.

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

In agreement with the previous statement, Suzanne Marchand comments that

Peter Simon Pallas & Johann Anton Güldenstädt

As an auxiliary to the processes of data collection undertaken, Marchand goes

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

the Kurdish language were collected by European travellers to be published in

It is only as an “addition” that the expedition members “were to note the

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

lists, with little to offer in terms of actual commentary or contextualization.

Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro & Maurizio Garzoni

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

meccanismo ed’armonia dell’idiomi, published in 1785), but it does contain

the Kurdistani (il Curdistano) is more akin to Persian than Turkish; so

17 Hervás y Panduro, Lorenzo. Origine, formazione, meccanismo ed’armonia dell’idiomi, 96f.

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

Many of the wordlists used by L. Hervás y Panduro, whether for languages of

considering these difficulties, and mastering the Kurdish language as well

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

purpose, namely to “find Oneness in Multiplicity and explain the diversity of

23 Auroux, Sylvain. Histoire des idées linguistiques, vol. 2: Le développement de la grammaire

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

Johann Adelung & Julius Klaproth

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

Johann Adelung’s Mithridates. Johann Christoph Adelung (1732–1806) was a li-

29 Adelung, Johann. Mithridates, oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde, 297f. Berlin: Vossischen

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

originating from a Perso-Median dialect with Semitic borrowings”.34 He also

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

Friedrich Schlegel’s book had a formative influence on the mind of many

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

August Friedrich Pott

Pondering on the consequences of Bopp’s revolutionary new approach, Fou-

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

language is no longer linked to civilizations by the level of learning to

Mentioning Grimm’s study of German lyrical poets of the medieval era as

language is no longer linked to the knowing of things, but to men’s free-

This analysis is important, because it enables us to get a clearer understanding

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

Joan Leopold notes that

Having published the second volume of his Etymological Researches in 1836,

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

the oppositional group became involved in active political campaigning and

50 Leopold, The Letter Liveth, li–lii.

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

53 See Rabault-Feuerhahn, L’Archive des origines, 136.

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

Die Welt des Islams 56 (2016) 55-88

Ilya Berezine & Alexandre Chodzko

60 Leopold, The Letter Liveth, 309.