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A Tomb in Kurdistan

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 April 2016

C. J. Edmonds
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Extract

During the summer of 1931, in the interval between the departure of the first and the arrival of the second of the two distinguished scholars who have occupied the post of Director of Antiquities in Iraq since the death of Gertrude Bell, I was privileged to hold for a few months inexpert administrative charge of the Department. It was at this time that my friend Aḥmad Beg-i Taufiq Beg, Mutaṣarrif of Sulaimani, reported that he had discovered in the naḥiya of Surdash a rock carving which he believed to be ancient Persian. The news was surprising. From 1919 to 1922, when the liwa was under direct British administration, many political and military officers had scoured the district on duty or in search of sport; in the last seven years, since the re-establishment of regular administration, visitors, though not particularly numerous, had not been rare; I myself, with many Kurdish friends who know of my interest in these things, had been in the neighbourhood two or three times. Yet I had never heard any whisper of the existence of such a monument. There was, indeed, one cave near Awdalan that was frequently talked about, an immense hollow running deep into the mountain and holding, no doubt, much of interest to the student of primitive man; but it was not that. I made up my mind to visit the place myself as soon as possible. But for the next three years a perverse fate seemed to turn my footsteps consistently in the direction of the Syrian desert, away from the Kurdish hills; and it was not until April 1934 that the fortunate conjunction of the ‘Id-al-’Adhḥa holidays and Easter gave me my opportunity. Aḥmad Beg was kind enough to make all the preliminary arrangements with Shaikh ‘Abdul Karim of the Qadiri-darwish takya of Awdalan, and to accompany me himself.

Type
Research Article
Information
IRAQ , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , November 1934 , pp. 183 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © The British Institute for the Study of Iraq 1934

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References

page 183 note 1 Place-names are given in their Kurdish forms, transliterated as far as possible according to the Royal Geographical Society System II, unless the name is already well known in another, probably the Persian, form (e.g. Zab not Kurdish Zê, Shahrazur not Kurdish Sharazor).

page 183 note 2 A takya may be a convent inhabited by a number of darwishes or, as in this case, the ‘lodge’ of a shaikh of one of the darwish orders who sets up as a spiritual guide.

page 183 note 3 I should like to thank Mr. A. J. Booth for preparing the sketch-map; Dr. Julius Jordan for arranging the enlargement of the photographs published for my own study; and the artist of the Oxford Press for drawing the elevation from my own rough sketch and the photographs.

page 184 note 1 I have never heard a Kurd call this mountain Pir ‘Umar Gudrun, as it is named in the older maps and in the Turkish salnamas or administrative year-books. The name is explained as Pir-i ma Gudrun, Our Spiritual Guide Gudrun, Guḍrun being a common Kurdish name. Kurdish piety sometimes makes Gudrun a Companion of the Prophet who was killed at the time of the Arab conquest.

page 185 note 1 Turkish names are not rare in this vicinity though the population is purely Kurdish; Surqaushan also was not improbably Suqaushan, ‘Waters-meet’, corresponding to the Kurdish Duwawan, ‘Two-waters’, the name of the reach opposite Zarzi.

page 185 note 2 I had no means of reaching the upper parts of the carving to measure them; owing to the narrowness of the ledge all photographs were taken with the camera at an angle or tilted.

page 185 note 3 I have called the object a ‘bow’ for want of a better name; in the notes made at the time I called it a ‘harp’; there are obvious difficulties in identifying it as either.

page 187 note 1 It has been pointed out to me that it is not clear in the photograph that this is a strap. That, however, is the impression I got at the time, and noted.

page 189 note 1 Dr. Ernst Herzfeld, to whom I have unfortunately not been able to show my photographs before sending this to press, informs me that, besides the rock tombs of Sahna, Dukkan-i-Daud, and one near Miyanduab, he knows of one between Persepolis and Susa. The former, which he regards as Median, have columns cut free out of the rock. Only the last-named tomb in the south has engaged columns; he regards it as pre-Achaemenian, i.e. belonging, for example, to an ancestor of Cyrus. At Sakawand, south of Bistun, there is a small niche, not a tomb, with a small, rough sculpture representing two figures and a fire altar; this, he believes, is to be attributed to the Pseudo-Smerdis Gaumata, who was killed by Darius at the place called Sikayauvatiš, i.e. modern Sakawand, in the district Nisaya, i.e. the district south of Bistun.

page 192 note 1 Kurdish-Persische Forschungen: Die Mundart der Mukri-Kurden, Teil I, 228-46.