stylistic:tone, linguistic:voice_change
Antiquity

The country Kar-da-ka is mentioned on a Sumerian clay tablet dated to the 3rd millennium BC. This land was located next to "the people of Su", which G. R. Driver placed to the south of Lake Van. A thousand years later, a people who may have been called Qur-ṭi-e (the reading is uncertain), thought by Driver to be related to Kar-da-ka and located west of Lake Van, are mentioned in the inscriptions of the Assyrian king Tiglath-Pileser I. In the late 5th century BC, Xenophon mentioned the Karduchoi, a people living to the east of the Bohtan River; this name survived in later times as Qardu or Corduene and other similar toponyms near Mount Judi, on the left bank of the Tigris. The connection between Kurd and Qardu and the identification of the Kurds with the Karduchoi, based on the similarity of the names and the correspondence of the inhabited territory, was widely accepted at the beginning of the 20th century, but it was deemed philologically impossible by Martin Hartmann, Theodor Nöldeke and F. H. Weissbach, who instead identified the Cyrtians, a tribe living in Media and Persia, as the ancestors of the Kurds. Since then, the connection between Kurd and Qardu / Karduchoi has been rejected by many scholars.