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.

[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.

[1] Their lands was part of the route that the Greek force known as the Ten Thousand marched through following the Battle of Cunaxa in 401 BC.

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.