The Dēnkard or Dēnkart (Middle Persian: "Acts of Religion") is a 10th century compendium of the Mazdaen Zoroastrian beliefs and customs. The Denkard is to a great extent an "Encyclopedia of Mazdaism" and is a most valuable source of information on the religion. The Denkard is not itself considered scripture.

The name traditionally given to the compendium reflects a phrase from the colophons, which speaks of the kart/kard, from Avestan karda meaning "acts" (also in the sense of "chapters"), and dēn, from Avestan daena, literally "insight" or "revelation," but more commonly translated as "religion." Accordingly, dēn-kart means "religious acts" or "acts of religion." The ambiguity of -kart or -kard in the title reflects the orthography of Pahlavi writing, in which the letter <t> may sometimes denote /d/.

The individual chapters vary in age, style and authorship. Authorship of the first three books is attributed in the colophones to one Ādurfarnbag (son) of Farrokhzādān, as identified in the last chapter of book 3, and who de Menasce believes lived in the early 9th century. Of these three books, only a larger portion of the third has survived, which de Menasce proposes is the result of a transmission through other persons. The first three books were subsequently edited by a certain Ādurbād (son) of Ēmēdān of Baghdad, who is also the author of the remaining six books and whose work is dated 1020. The manuscript 'B' (ms. 'B 55', B for Bombay) that is the basis for most surviving copies and translations is dated 1659 and which its editor reconstructed from a partially destroyed work. Of other copies only fragments survive.

The Kurdish people, or Kurds (Kurdish: کورد Kurd), are an Iranic people native to the Middle East, mostly inhabiting a region known as Kurdistan, which includes adjacent parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey. They speak the Kurdish language, which is a member of the Iranian branch of Indo-European languages. The Kurds number about 30 million, the majority living in the Middle East, with significant Kurdish diaspora communities in the cities of western Turkey, in Armenia, Georgia, Israel, Azerbaijan, Russia, Lebanon and, in recent decades, some European countries and the United States. The Kurds are an indigenous ethnic minority in countries where the Kurdistan region is located, although they have enjoyed partial autonomy in Iraqi Kurdistan since 1991. An irredentist movement pushes for the creation of a Kurdish nation state.

The exact origins of the name, "Kurd", are unclear. Reynolds believes that the term Kurd is most likely related to the ancient term Qardu. The common root of Kurd and Qardu is first mentioned in a Sumerian tablet from the third millennium B.C. as the "land of Kar-da." Qardu is etymologically related to the Assyrian term Urartu corresponding to Ararat. According to Asatrian, the most reasonable explanation of this ethnonym is its possible connections with the Cyrtii (Cyrtaei)