'IRAQ AND THE PERSIAN GULF' [‎217v] (439/862)

CHAPTER VI
PEOPLE
Race
A nthropological study and measurements have been made on so
ri restricted and local a scale in Iraq that the following remarks and
generalizations must be taken with great caution.
The history of Iraq has shown that the country has been subject to
periodic invasion and settlement by the peoples of Anatolia Peninsula that forms most of modern-day Turkey. , the
Iranian plateau, the Arabian peninsula, and Turkistan throughout
the past 6, ooo years. Yet there is a remarkable homogeneity among the
inhabitants of southern Iraq, who may be styled ‘Arabs’. Nomads
and fellahin Arabic for ‘peasant’. It was used by British officials to refer to agricultural workers or to members of a social class employed primarily in agricultural labour. approximate to a racial type, though there is a deal of
variation within the type. This unity is due to the fact that the bulk of
the invading peoples have been drawn ultimately from one source,
the Caucasian folk who in very remote times provided the racial
stocks of the Middle East. The Arabs seem to be a mixture of the
two main divisions of Caucasian Man, the Alpine (including the
Armenoid) and the Mediterranean. It is widely held that the present
population of at least the ‘Middle Euphrates’ 1 zone are of the same
general type as the inhabitants of Sumer and Akkad in the third millen
nium b.c. and are even their direct descendants. But from what is
known of the Chaldean and later invasions from the Arabian penin
sula the latter theory does not seem to be probable, except perhaps
for the true Marsh Arabs, whose racial characteristics have not yet
been studied (p. 339). Within this homogeneous block of Arab Iraq
the only notable exceptions are the Persian and Indian colonies, mostly
at Karbala and Najaf, which are maintained by special circumstances;
even the Jews are racially akin to the Arabs.
In northern Iraq there is a similar homogeneity among the hillmen.
The Kurds and their racial associates, the Yezidis and ‘Assyrians’,
form a distinctive type, but their racial affinities have not yet been
exactly established, though they would seem to be closely connected
with the Alpine branch of Caucasian Man and also with the inhabi
tants of north-west Persia. The Kurds were already present in the
northern mountains in the Parthian period, and are generally regarded
as the descendants of the Medes of the Assyrian period. The plains
of northern Iraq contain a conglomeration of nationalities and races
1 See p. 353 n. 1.