A Syriac work recounts the life of a Christian convert belonging to the Parthian house of Mihran. One particularly interesting feature of the account is the way in which members of the family are distributed across the Shahrazur region.
Gushnazdad was born in what is now the province of Krmashan. His father, as one might expect, had travelled some distance from his place of origin. The lands that later Arabic geographers came to call “the Mountains” formed part of the wider territory in which the house of Mihran had established itself by the late Sasanian period.
The earliest Arabic sources to explicitly associate the house of Mihran with the designation “Kurd” may, on closer inspection, tell us rather more than the conventional interpretation allows. They need not be understood as referring simply to a nomadic people, but quite the opposite.
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