and upon some of them are inscriptions in the Syrian character. The number of Yezidies inhabiting this mountain, as given by Kinneir, is the extravagant one of 2,000,000 souls:* yet, while one of my informants, who had been among them, rated them at only 10,000 souls, another, perhaps equally well informed, supposed they were only 5,000 souls. It is reasonable to suppose that a few years since they were much more numerous; but in the wars made upon them by the regular troops of the late Sultan Mahmud, they were mercilessly destroyed as heathen, by the sword, and thousands were carried off to be sold as slaves. The war was carried on by the people sheltered in some of the immense natural and artificial caves of the mountain. When they finally surrendered, one man pretended to have counted over five hundred men coming out of a single cave.†

The principal town of Sinjar lies to the north of the mountain, and is usually known simply as "the city." It is the place called in Roman history Zingara, and was a fortress, passing repeatedly from the hands of the Persians to their Roman or Greek enemies. It contains, I was told, large and rich ruins, like those of Dara, near Mardin. It is said that all the Yezidies of the Sinjar were originally of five tribes; some of the names of which are, Koreish, Kaidiyé, Dûrman, and Havakiyé. The names of certain villages are Jenûviyé, Semmoka, Kerré, Dakhyan, Yara, Kheiran. Rich was told, at Mosul, that the Yezidies are distinguished from others by the name of Jenu, or Jelu.§

The second region where the Yezidies are now found, in probably the greatest numbers, is east of the Tigris. Taking Mosul as a centre, and drawing an arc of a circle, beginning at forty miles southeast of that city, around to forty miles west of north, we shall have included the greater portion of the villages found in that quarter. Their villages are found in the plains contiguous to the mountains, or in the mountains. themselves, that run from the convent of El Kosh, southeast to the river Zab. The villages in that quarter may be estimated at over fifty. Many of them are in the limestone cliffs of the

*Kinneir's Asia Minor and Kurdistan, 1814. London. +Southgate's Tour in Armenia, etc., Vol. II. N. York, 1840. Gibbon's Dec. and Fall.

§ Rich's Tour in Kurdistan, Vol. II. Lond. 1836.

mountains, and some of their homes were formerly tombs or charnel-houses. The common name of this people in this quarter is Dasini, which was the ancient name of this district; ecclesiastical history informing us of an ancient bishopric of that name.* In Kurdistan proper there is a ruined village to this day called Dasin, and the name is applied to the Yezidies of no other region. Another name of a district is Berghe, or Berghiyé-being the northern part of this territory, in which alone are said to be fifty villages. The following are the names of some of the towns: Kafti, Eski Kelleh, Nemir, Baasheka, Baazani, Cofan, Haji Jo, Mizik, Moghara, Sherab Airan, Sirej Khan, Baadli and Sherabi. At El Kosh, Mr. Rich remarks, he was surrounded with Yezidi villages in abundance.†

From Jezira, on the Tigris, four days north of Mosul, we have eastward another cluster of Yezidies, surrounded almost entirely by Mohammedan Kurds. The names of some of their tribes are: Benwid, Kaun, Pûrésh, Hiûrel.‡

Between Sert (the ancient Tigranocerta) and Diarbekir, on the north of its branch of the Tigris, we have Yezidi villages again, scattered along in clusters, as at Bismil, Beshir, and Redwan, or Yezidi Khan. It is here chiefly a champaign country, with rolling hills. The names of some of their tribes are Khunduki, Behemrer, Serhani, Bejborni, Torkashiki.§ These Yezidies, with those in the vicinity of Jezira, (the ancient Bezabdé,) are known by the general name of the Musessan, or Dinnedi tribes.

Stretching westward from the Tigris at Jezira, across to Bir on the Euphrates, south of the mountain chains, we shall find Yezidies scattered through that whole distance. In the Tor mountains, surrounded with Syrians, speaking the Syrian language, are many villages. Mr. Southgate speaks of nine in the district of Haznäûr; in the plain before Mardin are six or seven; near Orfa, in a district whose chief town is called Nebbi Eyyoub, the burial-place of the prophet Job,-it is pretended there are in all at least 5,000 Yezidies. Many of them live in tents in summer, and retire to huts in the mountains in winter.

Far remote from any of these tribes, we find three villages at the foot of Mt. Ararat, containing together three hundred

* Dr. Grant. Miss. Herald, March, 1841.

Rich's Tour in Kurdistan.

Jihan Numa.

§ Ibid.

families. The name of one of these villages is Kara Bûlak.* We have never learned that there are any more in that vicinity.

Some few villages are found west of the Euphrates on entering Syria. We see, however, that nearly all this people are found within what is popularly regarded as Mesopotamia, and within two days' journey of Mosul.

Population. After having made repeated estimates of the whole population of the Yezidies, I have ventured to put it at rising of fifty thousand souls. I should not be surprised, if farther investigations should carry this number somewhat higher. A universal geography in Armenian gives the whole population of this people at 1,000,000, counting those of the Sinjar as 500,000 souls; but this is too large an estimate.

Language. The language of the Yezidies, in their villages and families, is universally, and, I believe, solely the Kurdish. Though with other nations they speak Arabic or Turkish, yet I know of none with whom these languages are vernacular. Those that live in the Tor mountain, surrounded by Jacobites talking Syriac, still use the Kurdish. In the main they may be regarded as speaking the same dialect of the Kurdish; yet, being occasionally contiguous to Kurds speaking one of the three other dialects, their own may become much modified. This dialect is that of Amadieh, in Kurdistan proper, of which Father Gazzoni published a grammar, in 1787, at Rome. These Kurdish dialects bear an intimate relation to the Zend, or Pehlévi, the ancient language of Assyria and Media, which has always, in a large number of its words, though not in forms, borne a relation to the Chaldee. Gazzoni, Rich, Wolff, Dr. Grant and others, testify that their language is Kurdish; only Wolff pretends they have, besides, a secret language. If they have any secret language, it can only be certain words to express religious ideas. At any rate, it cannot be the Chaldee or Syriac, which are spoken by thousands of families around them, for it would no longer be a secret language. Mr. W., obtaining all his information from Jews, would give a Shemitish form to all the words he might cite.

Character and Manners. In general they must be regarded as even inferior in civilization to the proper Kurds, by whom they are surrounded. For centuries past, according to the tes

* Smith and Dwight's Researches in Armenia, Vol. II. p. 270.

timony of all travellers, they have manifested to all who were not of their sect an inimical spirit. Whether in the Sinjar, east of the Tigris, or near Orfa, they have been in the habit of plundering all caravans, and would, like such people generally, make exploits of this kind their boast and glory. They are said also to have manifested a hardened, cruel spirit, in leaving their victims stark naked in a burning plain, or in recklessly murdering them. These traits, however, do not prevent the same individual at his own home from being hospitable, goodnatured and affectionate. They are brave, if this animal quality is to be praised, for they reck little of eternity. They would rush-accompanied perhaps by their women-from their fastnesses, armed with sabre and pistols and a ten-foot lance, firing behind them, as they fled at speed from the enemy, like the ancient Parthians, whose country they inhabit.

Their social customs are, to a great extent, the same as those of other Kurds. Like them they are attached to robes of white cotton, with white turbans, crossed by a black band. Like them, their long reddish-black locks, from behind their heads, are curled long and fall down before on their shoulders. Their women also wear the same dress as the Kurdish women, with a high frame-work on their heads, covered with white cotton and the black band. In fact there is nothing in dress to distinguish them from the Mohammedan Kurds. Their women go unveiled, and are regardless of other exposures, yet faithful to their husbands. Polygamy is not lawful among them. Living as they do, in excluded communities, having no books or knowledge of literature, cut off from intercourse with the more civilized people around them, we must expect to find among them the same traits that distinguish any other degraded people.

Race. The facts we have already mentioned of the coincidence of their language, moral qualities, dress and manners, with those of the Kurds, would suggest that we must regard them as being originally of the same race with them. All the traits we have mentioned, they have in common with the people inhabiting independent Kurdistan, and the Carduchian mountains of Xenophon. And all the facts we shall enumerate will indicate that they originally spread out from that centre east of the Tigris. Those Kurds that now overrun all that country south of Erzroom, as far as Diarbekir, are all said to have come, within one hundred and fifty years, from this same region; and although they are orthodox Kurds, having no sym

pathy with Yezidies, yet the name which some give to them is also Dasini, though some say Dasemi. The physiognomy of both Kurds and Yezidies is similar, and if it corresponds with many of the Christians of those same regions, it is no more than was to have been expected, if they are both either aborigines of the country, or formerly intermixed. However, the difference in dress, which Mohammedan bigotry enforces upon the Christians, gives with its dark colors a semblance of greater difference than really exists. Dr. Grant suggests that they may be of the same race with the Nestorians, whom he regards as of Hebrew descent; and this partly on the ground that the Nestorians affirm that the Yezidies were formerly Nestorians. The Jacobite Syrians also claim that the Yezidies formerly belonged to them; and, as we see, have some historical affinities by which they establish it. They are both probably correct; for as the Nestorian and Jacobite churches included people of various nations, so also some of the Yezidies belonged to both of these churches.

If, with many ethnographers, we regard the Kurdish as of the Persian family of languages,* and that it was one of the languages of Assyria and Chaldea when the Jews were transported thither, then we might perhaps apply to them the name Chaldean even as a race, as we now apply it to the Nestorians, who have retained the name as a distinction of religion. An additional testimony of their being Kurds is found in the following, as one from many, in Hagi Kalfa's geography. He says: "The Kurds are Sonnies, except the tribes of Sini, and Dasini, and Khalvi, who are Yezidies," implying that the Yezidies are of the Kurdish tribes.

Civil Organization. Little exists to distinguish them in their relations as communities from the rest of the Kurds. They are divided into many tribes. They have some tribes, as the Koreish of the Sinjar, and the Sheikkhauli near El Kosh, who by birth are regarded as being superior to all the rest; but neither of the heads of these tribes can be regarded as being either pope or king of the whole body of the Yezidies. Whether the Koreish are of the same tribe as that from which the prophet descended, I know not; but south of Erzroom is a tribe of orthodox Kurds, who also are called Koreish. The relative importance of the various tribes changes from year to year;

* Balbi Abreg. Geog. Paris, 1834.