Т. 1. «Азия и Африка: Наследие и современность»

28 Азия и Африка: Наследие и современность. Т. 1 Секция I Levant Company was running British shipping through the Ottoman Mediterranean 1 . Unsurprisingly, the most extensive accounts of Kurds available in the sixteenth century were in Italian, mostly by Venetian diplomats and merchants, and many of them collected and published in Giovanni Ramusio’s Navigatione (1555–1559) 2 . Taken together, these provide an often detailed and informed history involving the Kurdish inhabited regions from theAk Koyunlu confederacy (c. 1378–1501) to the rise of the Safavid dynasty in Persia under Ismael I and the effects of his defeat by the Ottoman sultan Selim at Ҫaldiran in 1514. With minor changes to the frontiers, the first British travellers arrived to find Kurds divided between these competing imperial states 3 . In the light of F. B. Charmoy’s scholarly translation of the Chèref-Nameh ou Fastes de la Nation Kourde par Chèref-ou’ddine, Prince de Bidlis 4, I will examine the notices of Kurds in Hayton of Corycus’ 1307 history of the Mongol and Islamic invasions of Asia (two separate English translations of which were prepared for Henry VIII in 1520) and in Ramusio’s authors, and then show how the first British travellers to write about the Kurds were not only liable not to recognise Kurds when they met them, but also credulous of unreliable informants, prone to exaggeration and generalization, and singularly uninformed by available knowledge. Three centuries later not a lot had changed. In 1921, the first British Political Officer to take over command of Erbil province from the Ottomans, Rupert Hay, blithely observed that ‘before the war ... the Kurd we had never heard of, or heard of only as the wildest of brigands 5 . Melanie Wood (Zayed University, Dubai, UAE) Emirates Collection of Zayed University Library, United Arab Emirates Local history research is important at each campus of Zayed University, in Dubai andAbu Dhabi. The students of Zayed University are primarily Emirati nationals and aside from having an interest in their history and need for current information about the United Arab Emirates there is a required course of Emirates Studies. The UAE became a country in 1971, from the previous Trucial States, the time before nationhood 1 Ralph Fitch in Richard Hakluyt, The Principal Navigations : Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation. 1589; rpt. 8 vols. London: Dent, 1910. Vol. 3, p. 315. 2 Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Delle Navigationi et Viaggi , 3 vols. Venice: 1555–1559. 3 Martin van Bruinessen, Agha, Sheikh and State: The Social and Political Structures of Kurdistan . London: Zed Books, 1992. P. 144. 4 Chèref-Nameh ou Fastes de la Nation Kourde par Chèref-ou’ddine, Prince de Bidlis, dans l‘Iïâlèt d’Arzeroüme. Trans. François Bernard Charmoy. 2 vols. St Petersburg: Imperial Academy of Sciences, 1868–1875. 5 William Rupert Hay, Two Years in Kurdistan: Experiences of a Political Officer, 1918–1920 . London: Sidgewick and Jackson,1921. P. 2.