"Look at this", he said, pointing at a photo of an exquisitely carved sculpture showing an animal, half-human, half-lion. "It's a sphinx, thousands of years before Egypt. South-eastern Turkey, northern Syria - this region saw the wedding night of our civilisation."
This all makes a lot of sense to me. Afterall the Vendidad speaks of the coming of the ice-age, and the Kurds are one of the first settlements.
