THE materials collected in the ensuing pages are the results of about 7,500 miles
of riding and innumerable conversations with policemen, nluleteers, mullahs,
chieftains, sheep drovers, horse dealers, carriers and other people capable of giving
one first hand information. The results I fear are extreinely meagre, but I hope
they may prove of use to future travellers.
As hardly anything has been written on the subject in the English language
heretofore, I have not been able to make a study of the Kurds from a bibliographical point of view. However, I trust that this will not detract from the
interest of the work. I may add that I had among my servants on my last journey
representatives from the three most important sections of the Kurds, so that I was
able to obtain interpreters without any great difficulty, a matter of some importance
amidst the conflicting dialects of the nomads and sedentary mountaineers.
In preparing the following list of the various tribes of the Kurdish race I have
endeavoured to simplify the work of future students by marking down and
cataloguing as many of the tribes as have come either directly or indirectly under
my notice.
After various abortive attempts at setting them down in a manner comprehensible to any one but myself, I have decided for the purposes of this work to
break up the regions inhabited by Kurds into six zones; to each of these zones a
section of the catalogue is devoted, each section containing a separate enumeration.
Thus in the alphabetical list a tribe will be found, as for instance the Merzigi 76B,
section A. To find the position of the tribe the reader must look in zone A on
the map for the number 76; he will find this number is connected to a chain of
letters; the letter B in this chain will mark the spot where this tribe is to be found,
in the catalogue he will find such particulars as I can supply under the number 76B
in the printed section A.
Before closing this preface may I say that the zones marked on the map are
not ethnological but merely a convenient form of grouping