The Kurdish calendar was originally a lunisolar calendar related to the Babylonian calendar, but is now a solar calendar related to the Iranian calendar. On March 20, 2012 it will be Jejhnan 1, 2624 in the Kurdish calendar.

The Kurdish calendar starts at 612 BC. The Median kingdom and the founding of its capital city at Ecbatana (modern Hamadan) was probably not before 625 BC that Cyaxares succeeded in uniting the many Median tribes into a single kingdom. In 614 BC, he captured Ashur, and in 612, in an alliance with Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon, his forces stormed Nineveh, putting an end to the Assyrian Empire.

Evidence of the area's prior history indicates that the Middle East in general had been one of the earliest areas to experience what the Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe called the Neolithic Revolution. That revolution witnessed the development of settled, village-based agricultural life. Kurdistan (Western Iran) has yielded much evidence on the history of these important developments. In the early Neolithic (sometimes called the Mesolithic) period, evidence of significant shifts in tool making, settlement patterns, and subsistence living including nascent domestication of both plants and animals, which comes from such important Kurdish sites as Asiab (Asíyaw), Guran, Ganj-e Dareh (Genjí Dara), and Ali Khosh (Elí xosh). Similar developments in the Zagros are also traceable at sites such as Karim Shahir and Zawi Chemi-Shanidar. This early experimentation with sedentary life and domestication was soon followed by a period of fully developed village farming, as is evident at important Zagros sites such as Jarmo, Sarab, upper Ali Kosh, and upper Guran. All of these sites date wholly or in part to the 8th and 7th millennia BC.