The Cimmerians

The Assyrian name of the Cimmerians, Gimirru (gentilic Gimirrāya), the first of the steppe peoples to appear in the cuneiform record. From the reign of Sargon II, who may have died fighting them, the Assyrian texts track the Gimirru as a deadly new force out of the north: they shattered Urartu, overran Phrygia, and pressed on Lydia, whose king Gyges appealed to Ashurbanipal for help against them. The Assyrians faced them as raiders no settled army could easily hold.

Gimirru is the form that anchors the Cimmerians in datable history, the people of Homer’s fog given a hard chronology in the royal annals. It is also the source of the Hebrew Gomer, and through the parallel between Gimirru and the Scythian Iškuza in the Assyrian record runs the same relationship the Hebrew table of nations preserves as father and son. The two peoples the Assyrians knew as Gimirru and Iškuza, the Cimmerians and the Scythians, the Bible would remember as Gomer and Aškenaz, the older nomad and the younger that displaced him.

The Greek name of the Cimmerians, Kimmérioi. They enter Greek literature twice over: as the misty people at the edge of the world in the Odyssey, dwelling in perpetual fog beyond the Ocean where Odysseus goes down to the dead, and as a real historical scourge in Herodotus, who reports that the Cimmerians, driven from the Pontic steppe by the Scythians, swept through Anatolia, where they sacked cities and killed the Lydian king’s forebears.

Kimmérioi is the Greek member of the *Gomer family, the same name the Assyrians wrote Gimirru and the Hebrews Gomer. The doubling of the Cimmerians in Greek, half mythical shadow-people, half remembered invaders, is characteristic of how the Greeks held their oldest barbarian neighbors, at once a name out of Homeric legend and a force their grandfathers had fought. The historical Cimmerians vanished within a century; the Homeric Kimmérioi at the gates of the underworld outlived them by the whole length of the classical tradition.

The Hebrew name Gomer, in the table of nations the firstborn son of Japheth and the father of Aškenaz, Riphath, and Togarmah; in Ezekiel, one of the far-northern peoples mustered in the army of Gog. It is identified with the Assyrian Gimirru, the Cimmerians, the same northern raiders the cuneiform sources knew, placed by the Hebrew geographers among the remote peoples of the north.

Gomer completes the *Gomer family, the Cimmerian name in Hebrew beside the Assyrian Gimirru, Greek Kimmérioi, and Latin Cimmerii. Its genealogical position is the quietly remarkable thing: by making Gomer the father of Aškenaz, the table of nations encodes the historical truth that the Cimmerians preceded the Scythians on the steppe and were driven out by them. Whether this is memory or coincidence, the Hebrew text preserves the right order of the peoples, the Cimmerian Gomer begetting the Scythian Aškenaz exactly as the one nomad nation gave way to the other on the grasslands north of the Caucasus.

The Latin name of the Cimmerians, Cimmerii, taken from the Greek; the Romans inherited the Greek doubling of the people into a historical nation and a land of perpetual darkness. Ovid sets the cave of Sleep in a sunless Cimmerian land where the god of dreams lies in eternal night, and the phrase “Cimmerian darkness,” Cimmeriae tenebrae, became a Latin commonplace for total gloom, the Homeric fog hardened into a proverb.

Cimmerii carries the *Gomer family into the European languages, where “Cimmerian” survives chiefly in that proverbial darkness and as the scholarly name for the historical people. By the Roman period the actual Cimmerians were a thousand years gone, the first of the steppe nations to come and go; what remained was the literary shadow, the misty people at the world’s edge. The Latin thus fixed two legacies of one name, the historical Cimmerians of the Assyrian wars and the imaginary Cimmerians of the land of night, both descended from the raiders the Hebrews called Gomer.