37 Kimmerians Cimmerians

Cimmerians

The Cimmerians (also Kimmerians, Greek Κιμμέριοι Kimmerioi) are an ancient people, first mentioned in the late 8th century BC in Assyrian records.

Likely originating in the Pontic steppe and invading by means of the Caucasus, they probably assaulted Urartu in c. 714 BC. They were defeated by Assyrian forces under Sargon II in 705 and turned towards Anatolia, conquering Phrygia in 696/5. They reached the height of their power in 652 after taking Sardis, the capital of Lydia. Soon after 619, Alyattes of Lydia defeated them. There are no further mentions of them in historical sources, but it is likely that they settled in Cappadocia.

OriginsEdit

The origin of the Cimmerians is unclear. They are mostly supposed to have been related to either Iranian or Thracian speaking groups which migrated under pressure of the Scythian expansion of the 9th to 8th century BC.^[2][3][4]

According to Herodotus, the Cimmerians inhabited the region north of the Caucasus and the Black Sea during the 8th and 7th centuries BC (i.e. what is now Ukraine and Southern Russia), although it isn't possible to identify the Cimmerians as the bearers of any specific archaeological culture in the region

The supposed origin of the Cimmerians north of the Caucasus at the end of the Bronze Age loosely corresponds with the early Koban culture (Northern Caucasus, 12th to 4th centuries BC), but there is no compelling reason to associate this culture with the Cimmerians specifically.^[6]

There is a tradition in archaeology of applying Cimmerian to the archaeological record associated with the earliest transmission of Iron Age culture along the Danube to Central and Western Europe, associated with the Cernogorovka (9th to 8th centuries) and Novocerkassk(8th to 7th centuries) between the Danube and the Volga. This association is "controversial", or at best conventional, and is not to be taken as a literal claim that specific artifacts are to be associated with the "Cimmerians" of the Greek or Assyrian record.

The use of the name "Cimmerian" in this context is due to Paul Reinecke, who in 1925 postulated a "North-Thracian-Cimmerian cultural sphere" (nordthrakisch-kimmerischer Kulturkreis) overlapping with the younger Hallstatt culture of the Eastern Alps. The term Thraco-Cimmerian (thrako-kimmerisch) was first introduced by I. Nestor in the 1930s. Nestor intended to suggest that there was a historical migration of Cimmerians into Eastern Europe from the area of the former Srubna culture, perhaps triggered by the Scythian expansion, at the beginning of the European Iron Age. In the 1980s and 1990s, more systematic studies[by whom?] of the artifacts revealed a more gradual development over the period covering the 9th to 7th centuries, so that the term "Thraco-Cimmerian" is now rather used by convention and does not necessarily imply a direct connection with either the Thracians or the Cimmerians.

 Assyrian primary records of the Cimmerian invasion.^[9] These records appear to place the Cimmerian homeland, Gamir, south rather than north of the Black Sea.^[10][11][12]

The first 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 Uish desh, seems to have been located within the buffer state of Mannae. The later geographer Ptolemy placed the Cimmerian city ofGomara in this region. The Assyrians recorded the migrations of the Cimmerians, as the former people's king Sargon II was killed in battle against them in 705 BC.

The Cimmerians were subsequently recorded as having conquered Phrygia in 696–695 BC, prompting the Phrygian king Midasto take poison rather than face capture. In 679 BC, during the reign of Esarhaddon of Assyria (r. 681–669 BC), they attackedCilicia and Tabal under their new ruler Teushpa. Esarhaddon defeated them near Hubushna (Hupisna