- See Cimmeria (Conan) or Cimmeria (Poem)
for the fiction of Robert E. Howard.
The Cimmerians (Greek: Κιμμέριοι, Kimmerioi) were
ancient equestrian nomads who, according to Herodotus, originally inhabited the region north of the Caucasus and the
Black Sea, in what is now Russia and Ukraine, in the 8th and 7th century
BC.
Origins
Their origins are obscure, but they are believed to have been Indo-European.
Their language is regarded as being related to Thracian or Iranian, or at least to have had an Iranian ruling class.[1]
According to Encyclopedia Britannica:They probably did live in the area north of the Black Sea, but attempts to define
their original homeland more precisely by archaeological means, or even to fix the date of their expulsion from their country by
the Scythians, have not so far been completely successful.[2]
Very little is known archaeologically of the Cimmerians of the Northern Black Sea Coast. They are associated with the
Srubna culture, which displaced the earlier catacomb
culture (2000-1200 BCE).
A few stone stelae found in Ukraine and the northern
Caucasus have been connected with the Cimmerians. They are in a style clearly different from both the later Scythian and the
earlier Yamna/Kemi-Oba stelae.
There is a theory that the Cimmerians were Bulgars. According to the ancient "History of the
Monk Spiridon" and to the "History of Zograf" (Zograf Monastery), the Cimmerian king
Koled had two sons — Brem and Bolg. After a war with the Scythians, part of the Cimmerians migrated to the west, where Brem
conquered West European lands; the Celts and the Brythons became Brem's successors. The other
part of the Cimmerians migrated to the south, where Bolg's tribe resided on the Balkan Peninsula . Bolg's capital was discovered
after archaeological excavations near the town of Kazanlak in what is now central Bulgaria.
Historical accounts
Cimmerian invasions of Colchis, Urartu and Assyria during the reign of King Rusas I
The first historical record of the Cimmerians appears in Assyrian annals in the year
714 BC. These describe how a people termed the Gimirri helped the forces of
Sargon II to defeat the kingdom of Urartu. Their original
homeland, called Gamir or Uishdish, seems to have been located within the buffer state of Mannae. The later geographer Ptolemy placed the Cimmerian city of
Gomara in this region. After their conquests of Colchis and Iberia in the First Millennium BC, the Cimmerians also came to be
known as Gimirri in Georgian. According to Georgian historians,[3] the Cimmerians played an influential role in the development of
both the Colchian and Iberian cultures. The modern-day
Georgian word for hero which is gmiri, is derived from the word Gimirri, a direct
reference to the Cimmerians which settled in the area after the initial conquests.
Some modern authors assert that the Cimmerians included mercenaries, whom the Assyrians
knew as Khumri, who had been resettled there by Sargon. However, later Greek accounts describe the Cimmerians as having
previously lived on the steppes, between the Tyras (Dniester)
and Tanais (Don) rivers. Several kings of the Cimmerians are mentioned in Greek and
Mesopotamian sources, including Tugdamme (Lygdamis in
Greek; mid-7th century BC), and Sandakhshatra (late-7th century).
A mythical people also named Cimmerians are described in Book 11, 14 of Homer's
Odyssey as living beyond the Oceanus, in a land of fog
and darkness, at the edge of the world and the entrance of Hades; most probably they are unrelated to the Cimmerians of the Black
Sea.[4]
According to the Histories of Herodotus (c. 440 BC), the Cimmerians had been
expelled from the steppes at some point in the past by the Scythians. To ensure burial in their ancestral homeland, the men of
the Cimmerian royal family divided into groups and fought each other to the death. The Cimmerian commoners buried the bodies
along the river Tyras and fled from the Scythian advance, across the Caucasus and into
Anatolia and the Near East. Their range seems to have
extended from Mannae eastward through the Mede settlements of the Zagros Mountains, and south of there as far as Elam.
The migrations of the Cimmerians were recorded by the Assyrians, whose king, Sargon II, died in battle against them in
705 BC. They are subsequently recorded as having conquered Phrygia in 696 BC-695 BC, prompting the
Phrygian king Midas to take poison rather than face capture. In 679
BC, during the reign of Esarhaddon of Assyria, they attacked Cilicia and Tabal under their new ruler Teushpa.
Esarhaddon defeated them near Hubushna (tentatively identified with modern Cappadocia).
In 654 BC or 652 BC – the exact date is unclear – the
Cimmerians attacked the kingdom of Lydia, killing the Lydian king Gyges and causing great destruction to the Lydian capital, Sardis. They
returned ten years later during the reign of Gyges' son Ardys II and this time captured the
city, with the exception of the citadel. The fall of Sardis was a major shock to the powers of the region; the Greek poets
Callinus and Archilochus recorded the fear that it
inspired in the Greek colonies of Ionia, some of which were attacked by Cimmerian and Treres raiders.
The Cimmerian occupation of Lydia was brief, however -- possibly due to an outbreak of plague. Between 637 BC and 626 BC they were
beaten back by Alyattes II of Lydia. This defeat marked the effective end of Cimmerian
power. The term "Gimirri" was used about a century later in the Behistun
inscription (ca. 515 BC) as a Babylonian equivalent of Persian Saka (Scythians), but otherwise Cimmerians are not heard of again in Asia, and their ultimate fate is uncertain. It
has been speculated that they settled in Cappadocia, known in Armenian as Gamir
(the same name as the original Cimmerian homeland in Mannae). However, certain Frankish
traditions would locate them at the mouth of the Danube (see Sicambri).
A reference to the Cimmerians is preserved in Gomer גמר of the
Hebrew Bible (Standard Hebrew Gómer,
Tiberian Hebrew Gōmer, Genesis
10:2, Ezekiel 38:6). As the eldest son of Japheth and the father of Ashkenaz, Riphath and Togarmah, his descendants thus represent one of the major branches
of the Japhethic race.
The Cimmerians are also referred to in Homer's Odyssey, as well as in contemporary literature by Robert E. Howard in his Conan
series of novels.
Timeline
- 721-715 BC – Sargon II mentions a land of Gamirr near to Urartu.
- 714 – suicide of Rusas I of Urartu, after defeat by both the Assyrians and
Cimmerians.
- 705 – Sargon II of Assyria dies on an expedition against the Kulummu.
- 679/678 – Gimirri under a ruler called Teushpa invade Assyria from Hubuschna (Cappadocia?). Esarhaddon of Assyria defeats them in battle.
- 676-674 – Cimmerians invade and destroy Phrygia, and reach Paphlagonia.
- 654 or 652 – Gyges of Lydia dies in battle against the Cimmerians. Sack of Sardis; Cimmerians and Treres plunder Ionian colonies.
- 644 – Cimmerians occupy Sardis, but withdraw soon afterwards
- 637-626 – Cimmerians defeated by Alyattes II.
- ca. 515 – Last historical record of Cimmerians, in the Behistun inscription of Darius.
Language
Of the language of the Cimmerians, only a few personal names have survived in Assyrian
inscriptions:
- Te-ush-pa, mentioned in the annals of Esarhaddon, has been compared to the
Hurrian war deity Teshub; others interpret it as
Iranian, comparing the Achaemenid name
Teispes (Herodotus 7.11.2)
- Dug-dam-me (Dugdammê) king of the Ummân-Manda (nomads) appears in a
prayer of Ashurbanipal to Marduk, on a fragment at the
British Museum. Other spellings include Dugdammi, and Tugdammê. Yamauchi
(1982) interprets the name as Iranian, citing Ossetic "tux-domaeg" meaning "ruling with strength." The name appears corrupted to
Lygdamis in Strabo I.3.21.
- Sandaksatru, son of Dugdamme. This is an Iranian reading of the name, and Mayrhofer (1981) points out that the name
may also be read as Sandakurru. Mayrhofer likewise rejects the interpretation of "with pure regency" as a mixing of
Iranian and Indo-Aryan. Ivancik suggests an association with the Anatolian deity
Sanda.
Some researchers have attempted to trace various place names to Cimmerian origins. It has
been suggested that Crimea is named after the Cimmerians[citation needed] as well as the Armenian city of
Gyumri. This, however, seems to be a dubious premise. The name "Crimea" is traceable to the
Crimean Tatar word qırım (literally "my steppe" of "my hill"), and the peninsula was known as Taurica ("peninsula of the
Tauri") in antiquity (Strabo 7.4.1; Herodotus 4.99.3, Amm. Marc. 22.8.32).
The Cimmerians are now often classified as an Iranian people, but based on ancient
Greek historical sources, a Thracian or (less commonly) a Celtic association is sometimes assumed. According to C. F. Lehmann-Haupt, the language of the Cimmerians could
have been a "missing link" between Thracian and Iranian.
Possible offshoots
The Cimmerians are thought to have had a number of offshoots. The Thracians have been
identified as a possible western branch of the Cimmerians. If Herodotus is to be believed, both peoples originally inhabited the
northern shore of the Black Sea, and both were displaced around the same time by invaders from
further east. Whereas the Cimmerians would have departed this ancestral homeland by heading east and south across the Caucasus,
the Thracians migrated west and south into the Balkans, where they established a successful and
long-lived culture. The Tauri, the original inhabitants of Crimea, are sometimes identified as a
people related to the Thracians.
Although the Cimmerians of historical record only appear on the stage of world history for a brief time (during the
7th century BC), numerous Celtic and Germanic peoples have traditions of being descended from the Cimmerians or Scythians, and some of their
ethnic names seem to bear out this belief (e.g. Cymru, Cwmry or
Cumbria, Cimbri). It is unlikely that either Proto-Celtic or Proto-Germanic entered Europe as late as the 7th
century BC, their formation being commonly associated with the Bronze Age Urnfield and
Nordic Bronze Age cultures, respectively. It is, however, conceivable that a
small-scale (in terms of population) 8th century "Thraco-Cimmerian" migration triggered
cultural changes that contributed to the transformation of the Urnfield culture into the Hallstatt C culture, ushering in the European Iron Age.
The etymology of Cymro "Welshman" and Cwmry "Cumbria", erroneously conntected
to the "Cimmerians" by 17th-century celticists, comes instead from Old Welsh combrog "compatriot, Welshman"[5], from Proto-British *kom-brogos[6][7],
and is related to its sister language Breton's keñvroad, keñvroiz "compatriot"
[8]. As for the Cimbri
tribe, they are considered to be a Celtic tribe hailing from the Himmerland (Old Dutch Himber sysæl) region in northern
Denmark [9]. In addition, in sources beginning with the
Royal Frankish Annals, the Merovingian kings
of the Franks traditionally traced their lineage through a pre-Frankish tribe called the
Sicambri (or Sugambri), mythologized as a group of "Cimmerians" from the mouth of the
Danube river, but who instead came from Gelderland in modern
Netherlands and are named for the Sieg river [10].
If the Scythians are assumed to be related to the Cimmerians, as has often been claimed, many other peoples claiming possible
Scythian descent could also be added to this list. Later Cimmerian remnant groups may have spread as far as to the
Nordic Countries.
The association of the Cimmerians with one of the Lost Tribes of Israel plays a
certain role in British Israelism.
In popular culture
Archaeology
Notes
- ^ Cimmerian. (2006). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved August 30, 2006,
from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium [1]. Actual quote: The origin of the Cimmerians is obscure. Linguistically they are usually regarded as Thracian
or as Iranian, or at least to have had an Iranian ruling class.
- ^ Cimmerian. (2006). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved August 30, 2006,
from Encyclopædia Britannica Premium [2].
- ^ Berdzenishvili, N., Dondua V., Dumbadze, M., Melikishvili G., Meskhia, Sh.,
Ratiani, P., History of Georgia (Vol. 1), Tbilisi, 1958, pp. 34-36
- ^ Entry: Κιμμέριοι at Henry Liddell & Robert Scott.
- ^ Gove, Philip Babcock, ed. Webster's Third New International Dictionary.
Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 2002: 321
- ^ Jones, J. Morris. Welsh Grammar: Historical and Comparative. Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1995.
- ^ Russell, Paul. Introduction to the Celtic Languages. London:
Longman, 1995.
- ^ Delamarre, Xavier. Dictionnaire de la langue gauloise. Paris:
Errance, 2001.
- ^ Jones, Gwyn. A History of the Vikings. London: Oxford University
Press, 2001.
- ^ Geary, Patrick J. Before France and Germany: The Creation and
Transformation of the Merovingian World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Bibliography
See also
External links
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