Kurds
Antiquity

Many Kurds consider themselves descended from the Medes, an ancient Iranian people, and even use a calendar dating from 612 BC, when the Assyrian capital of Nineveh was conquered by the Medes. The claimed Median descent is reflected in the words of the Kurdish national anthem: "We are the children of the Medes and Cyaxares." Both Kurdish and the Median language (about which very little is known) are categorized as Northwestern Iranian languages, but the current scholarly consensus is that there is no attested pre-modern ancestor of the Kurdish languages. The existing evidence suggests that Kurdish is not a descendant of the Median language. D. N. Mackenzie theorized that Kurdish and split off from the linguistic sub-group of Median at an early point and evolved in parallel with Persian. Certain essential similarities exist between Kurdish and Persian, more than other Northwestern Iranian languages, which has led some scholars to conclude that Kurdish developed from early on in close proximity to Persian, with Kurdish speakers later migrating into the Median territory.
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