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The Kurdish Tribes of the Ottoman Empire Reprinted from Lt. Col. Sir Mark Sykes, The Caliphs 'Last Heritage: A short history of the Turkish Empire. London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1915, "Appendix," pp. 553-588.
Preface
The materials collected in the ensuing pages are the results of about 7,500 miles of riding and innumerable conversations with policemen, muleteers, mollahs, chieftains, sheep drovers, horse dealers, carriers and other people capable of giving one first hand information. The results, I fear, are extremely 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 endeavored 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 anyone 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 Mezigi 76 in 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.