How the Zagros peoples vanished from their own history

BAGHDAD, Iraq — BAGHDAD — The histories of the Kurds and other Zagros peoples have long been written not by themselves but by the empires that ruled Mesopotamia, with most surviving records produced by Sumerian and Akkadian states that controlled both political power and the tools of writing. In those texts, mountain communities such as the Guti and Lullubi appear as peripheral, rebellious or disorderly peoples, defined almost entirely through the interests of neighboring lowland powers. The imbalance stems less from a scarcity of sources than from their one-sided nature. While later Sumerian texts frame the Gutian period as an era of collapse and chaos, the same groups' ability to sustain rule over Mesopotamia for an extended period points to established political and administrative structures that the surviving record largely omits. Their own narratives, where they exist, are fragmentary, and much of what is known of them has reached the present through the writings of rival states. The absence of an archive, scholars argue, does not amount to the absence of a historical experience. A more equitable historiography, they say, requires reading the surviving ancient texts as human documents shaped by interest and bias, and evaluating them alongside archaeological, linguistic and geographic evidence rather than treating the existing record as definitive.