Zagros Mountains

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the Iranian shoulder-fired missile took down an F-15 of America over Iran, over Zagros Mountains in April 2026.

Should...

This is the first loss, American loss in 23 years of combat after Iran, uh, i- Iran-Iraq War-

Yeah.

The Kurds, uh, mostly, like, originated from the, like, Zagros mountain range, like between the, like, Iran and, like, Turkey and, like, uh, Iraq.

And there are, like, two different way to describe the, like, Kurdish identity and the nation.

The one coming from the, mostly from the Iranian languages, like, you know, when you say the Kurdish, it's actually coming from this Persian language, mostly point they are the, like, the tribal community that, like, travel from place to place and mainly, like, dealing with the, like, farming or, like, you know, gathering, the other, uh, occupations.

I can't imagine the...

You know, wood for instance, you know, it had to be bought from the mountains of, of Turkey or from the Zagros, or from, you know, if you wanted really fine wood, from, from Lebanon.

I can't imagine the cost of kindling in Babylon.

To, to make all of those glazed bricks must have been a real expense for the Babylonians.

Cuneiform had only been deciphered at the beginning of the 19th century, just a few decades before Smith was born.

In western Iran, about halfway between Baghdad and Tehran, lies a mountain in the Zagros range called Bisitun or Behistun, meaning something like divine place or place of God.

Prominently displayed 100 meters up a sheer cliff is an enormous inscription measuring around 15 meters tall and 25 meters wide with various writing surrounding it, displaying the image of 11 men, with one towering over the others and trodding another figure underfoot.

The first Western reports noting the site and the ruins found there date to the early 1600s, and over the next two centuries, the strange scripts found carved into the mountain were noted by many travelers.

Our culprit peoples are specifically the Massagetae, the Saka, and the Derbikis.

Because so many of our written sources in the first millennium BCE come from the Middle East and increasingly Eastern Europe, it can be easy to forget that further to the east, there lie many, many peoples and countries and kingdoms.

Babylon and Assyria had both struggled to project a consistent amount of administration or hegemony beyond Western Iran and the Zagros Mountains, and so they haven't factored in that much until now.

I mean, you had Ashurbanipal's big raids.

It weighed about 60 pounds.

They were gonna send in dozens of them, and I'm not exaggerating here, and blow up the mountain passes in, in the Zagros Mountain range, bring the mountain down to stop Soviet armor from crossing the border.

Now, if that had happened, I mean, um, that was only the lowest level.

I mean, otherwise, they could use tactical nuclear weapons, or they could have attacked the nuclear bases inside the Soviet Union.

End footnote.

These Kashu, who sprang up suddenly out of obscurity, had from the earliest times inhabited the mountainous districts of Zagros on the confines of Elymais in Media, where the Kassians of the classical historians flourished in the time of Alexander.

Footnote.

The Kashu are identified with the Kassians by Thais, by Schroeder, by F.R. Delitzsch, by Halevi, by Thiel, by Hamel, and by Jensen.

As there were no mountains in the country, they turned to the marshes, and like the Hyksos in Egypt, made themselves at home about the mouths of the rivers, on the half-submerged lowlands, and on the sandy islets of the lagoons which formed an undefined borderland between the alluvial region and the Persian Gulf.

The covert afforded by the thickets furnished scope for the chase which these hunters had been accustomed to pursue in the depths of their native forests, while fishing, on the other hand, supplied them with an additional element of food.

When their depredations drew down upon them reprisals from their neighbors, the mounds occupied by their fortresses and surrounded by muddy swamps offered them almost as secure retreats as their former strongholds on the lofty sides of the Zagros.

They made alliances with the native Aramaeans, with those Kashti, properly called Chaldeans, whose name we have imposed upon all the nations who, from a very early date, bore rule on the banks of the lower Euphrates.

And what I was really interested about is walking... and that not being done before and what you kind of learned about perseverance and yourself and could you tell us a little bit more about that as well

I think particularly walking in Iraq and I've had the opportunity to have projects in in Iran across the border the Zagros mountains where walking is involved as people instantly welcome you in because of how you arrive and meet them.

It's an incredibly humble thing to be walking, whether you're as a pilgrim, but you're just a traveler on foot.

And it started with the pilgrimage.