Carduchii

[1] The Iranologist and Kurdologist Garnik Asatrian considers them to have been an indigenous pre Indo-European people inhabiting the area before Indo-Aryan migrations.

Some historians have suggested that it is derived from the non Indo-European Urartian due to the suffix "-uchi" or similarity in consonants to the name of the Khaldi people.

[5] The Mesopotamian lowlands in the south and Armenia in the north were the two primary cultural influences on the region, with the former seemingly have a stronger impact.

As a result, the Carduchii's blockade of these routes and occupation of higher land across the path posed a significant challenge for the Greeks.

[6][9][10] Historian John Limbert, writing in 1968, states that "older scholarship believed that the modern Kurds were direct descendants of the Kardukhoi" but that "this view has been widely disputed since the beginning of the twentieth century.

Map depicting the Achaemenid Empire in c. 500 BC, by William Robert Shepherd (1923)