"Who Owns the Medes? The Competing Ethnic Nationalisms and Approaching the History of Medes in the First Half of the Twentieth Century"

The construction /reconstruction of collective memory in order to shaping modern ethnic/ national identities was considered by the Muslim intelligentsia since the late of nineteenth century. In this process, the writings of Orientalists and the archaeological discoveries played a substantial role; as in the refashioning history of pre-Islamic Iran, the history of the Medes was discovered in the light of European studies based on Herodotus’s accounts and Assyrian inscriptions. Then, Median kingdom (eighth to sixth centuries BC), dominated the western and northwestern parts of Iran (i.e. Azerbaijan and Kurdistan), is identified as the starting point for the political rule of the Aryans on the Iranian Plateau. On the other hand, during the discussions that took place between the Ottoman intellectuals in the 1910s around the issues of Turkish identity and unity of Turkic peoples, the ethnic nature of Iranian Azerbaijan and therefore the origin of the Medes were also disputed. In 1918, Sâmih Rifat (Yalnızgil) and Rıza Tevfik (Bölükbaşı) debate over the ethnic identity of Zoroaster, the Prophet of Ancient Iran, led to a discussion of the Turkic or Aryan origin of the Medes.
In 1930’s, the Medes were considered as the ancient ancestors of Azerbaijanis in the process of construction of national identity for the Azerbaijan Soviet Socialist Republic in the Stalin era and thus Media was announced as the first Azerbaijani state. Since the mid-1940s, the pro-Soviet activists in Iranian Azerbaijan propagandized for this theme, emphasizing the hostility between the Medes as the ancestors of the Turkic-speaking people of Azerbaijan and the Persians (Achaemenids) as the ancestors of the Persian-speaking people of Iran. The legacy of Medes simultaneously was used by the famous pioneers of Kurdish nationalism, Bedirhanids, who believed that the Medes are the ancient ancestors of Kurds. The purpose of this paper is to examine primary sources, especially Turkish, Azerbaijani and Kurdish periodicals, which perceived the history of the Medes - as the ancient sovereigns of a present-day borderland - in the framework of Iranian, Turkish, Azerbaijani and Kurdish nationalisms in the first half of the twentieth century as a formative stage of shaping modern ethnic/ national identities.