[Ramius]

The map on that Assyrian site showed an indistinct area that seems to include some of the same upper mesopotamia, up into Turkey and over into Iran...

But I'm gathering that they're distinct from each other and that Kurds tended more to the east, while Assyrians were more to the west in that general region? Assyria centered on Nineveh, and Kurdistan from Mosul or so, eastward?

[Antoninus]

But I'm gathering that they're distinct from each other and that Kurds tended more to the east, while Assyrians were more to the west in that general region? Assyria centered on Nineveh, and Kurdistan from Mosul or so, eastward?

Basically, I think the difference was that the Assyrians (as they're called in the above article) were largely Hellenized--though still speaking the Syriac language--city dwellers while the Kurds were "barbarians"--hearty mountaineers who had contacts with Persia and the Roman domains but were largely left alone due to the difficulty of the terrain. I don't think the author of the aritcle above was necessarily referring to the ancient Assyrians of Ninevah but to the comparatively more modern Greco-Roman "Assyrians" of Antioch and the surrounding cities.

[Fred Nerks]

http://www.khazaria.com/genetics/abstracts.html

Jewish Genetics: Abstracts and Summaries

...At the present time, it is known that Eastern European Jews have a significant Eastern Mediterranean element which manifests itself in a close relationship with Kurdish, Armenian, Palestinian Arab, Lebanese, Syrian, and Anatolian Turkish peoples. This is why the Y-DNA haplogroups J and E, which are typical of the Middle East, are so common among them...

[GoLightly]

Assyrians held much of the territory on that map at one point, cuz they had a huge empire.

http://www.keyway.ca/htm2002/ancassy.htm

This page has a lot more maps, cuz different times had different "borders" for the territory they held.

http://aina.org/maps/historic/historic.htm