Paul W. answered • 04/09/19
Dedicated to Achieving Student Success in History, Government, Culture
This sounds like a case of national / ethnic chauvinism, "We invented it first!" syndrome. It's not at all unusual for a particular people to make, at best, exaggerated claims for their influence on history. I'm reminded of the outlandish title of Thomas Cahill's 1995 book, How the Irish Saved Civilization. All I can think of is that the Chinese and Aztecs would have been more than a little surprised at this claim!!! (To be fair to Mr. Cahill, it should be noted that the titles of books are often chosen by publishing firms and not by the authors...) Did the Irish play an important role in reviving Classical learning in Western Europe during the Early Middle Ages? Yes, they most certainly did. But this is a long, long way from 'Saving Civilization'!
It's no accident that both the Kurds and the Irish are peoples who have, more often than not, been the victims of domination by more powerful neighbors rather than exercising domination. In other words, there's a certain degree of an unacknowledged inferiority complex at work, not that this is by any means something exclusive to the Kurds and the Irish....
The assertion that the Kurds 'invented' agriculture simply can't be true. Even if one were to accept the notion that the Kurds were the first people to practice agriculture in Eurasia and, thus it was the example of the Kurds that was copied and recopied by peoples throughout Eurasia and Africa, it fails to explain how the peoples of the Americas learned about agriculture from the Kurds.
No, it seems likely that many different peoples in locations all around the world discovered independent of one another the advantages of growing crops and / or raising domesticated animals. Perhaps the earliest ancestors of the Kurds were among the different peoples who first began to rely on agriculture, but the Kurds were most certainly not the only people to do so.
