The account in the Sharafnama (Kurdish: شەرەفنامە Şerefname, “The Book of Honor”), from 1597. For those studying Kurdish identity, it is a very important legend; it is Sharafkhan’s adaptation of the legend of Kaveh in the Persian epic the Shahnama.
After the death of the great Persian king Jamshid, the tyrant Zahhak usurped the throne and established a reign of terror. Besides being cruel by natural inclination, he suffered from a strange disease that made him even more of an oppressor. Two snakes grew out of his shoulders and caused him severe pain, which could only be alleviated by feeding the snakes human brains each day. So every day Zahhak had two young persons killed and their brains fed to the snakes.
The man charged with slaughtering the two young people taken to the palace each day took pity on them and thought up a ruse. He killed only one person a day, replacing the other by a sheep and mixing the two brains. One young person’s life was thus saved every day; he was told to leave the country and to stay hidden in distant inaccessible mountains.
The young persons thus saved gradually came to constitute a large community; they married among themselves and brought forth offspring. These people were named Kurds. Because during many years they evaded other human company and stayed away from the towns, they developed a language of their own. In the forests and the mountains they built houses and tilled the soil. Some of them came to own property and flocks, and spread themselves over the steppes and deserts.
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From the Sharafnama, a history of the Kurdish tribes, written by the Kurdish emir Sharaf Khan Bidlisi, 1597
This translation is taken from Susan Meiselas: Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History. Since there appears to be no published English translation of the Sharafnama, it is not clear where this excerpt is sourced from.
It is striking that the hero in this legend does not seem to be named, though Kurds call him Kawa, a Kurdish form of the Persian name Kaveh.
Kurdology 