12/11/2025
Mosul and Kirkuk – The Heart of Ancient A***n-Kurdish Civilizations! 🔥
For millennia before today’s state borders were drawn, the area around Mosul and Kirkuk was a central location for some of the world’s earliest high cultures. Here, in the heart of northern Mesopotamia, the first A***n-Kurdish civilizations emerged – societies that laid the foundation for language, faith, trade and governance in the region.
From the Gutians and the Medes to the Mitanni and the Kassites, a unique cultural and political legacy was formed over more than eleven hundred years that came to characterize the entire Near East.
The Mari (c. 3000–1750 BC) were one of the earliest urban civilizations in what can be called proto-Kurdish Mesopotamia. They were followed by the Gutians, a mountain people who ruled large parts of the area between the Tigris and the Zagros Mountains. The Gutians, along with the Kassites – an A***n-Kurdish dynasty that ruled Babylon for over six centuries – constitute some of the most well-documented examples of Kurdish state formations in ancient times.
In the same historical circle we find Mitanni, a powerful A***n kingdom in northern Mesopotamia that brought with it advanced horse breeding, chariot technology and a language with distinct Indo-European features. The Elamites in the southwest also had close cultural and political ties to these peoples.
The map of the region shows how these civilizations formed a continuous chain of A***n-Kurdish societies – from Zagros to the Euphrates, from Kirkuk to Van. It was a coherent cultural area where language, symbols and beliefs had the same roots.
The Arab conquest in the 7th century AD changed the demography and politics of the region, but the cultural continuity lived on through language, mythology and the peoples who preserved their traditions in the mountains.
Today, when we speak of Kurdistan as a historical reality rather than a modern construct, the civilizations of Mosul and Kirkuk remind us that Kurdish history does not begin in modern times – it begins in the cradle of civilization itself.❤️☀️💚
Sources:
André Parrot, Mari, Capital of Northern Mesopotamia, 1967
Samuel Noah Kramer, History Begins at Sumer, 1981
