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Cimmerians
unknown–c. 630s BCE
Distribution of "Thraco-Cimmerian" finds. From map in Archaeology of Ukrainian SSR (rus. Археология Украинской ССР) vol. 2, Kiev (1986)
Common languages	Scythian, Cimmerian
Religion	Scythian religion (?)
Government	Monarchy
King
• ?-679 BCE	Teušpa
• 679-640 BCE	Tugdamme
• 640-c. 630s BCE	Sandakšatru
Historical era	Iron Age Scythian cultures
• Established	unknown
• Disestablished	c. 630s BCE

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The Cimmerians (Akkadian: mat Gimirrāya; Hebrew: גֹּמֶר‎‎ Gōmer; Ancient Greek: Κιμμεριοι Kimmerioi; Latin: Cimmerii) were a nomadic Indo-European people, who appeared about 1000 BCE. Originating in the Pontic-Caspian steppe, the Cimmerians subsequently migrated into Western Asia and into Central and Southeast Europe. While the Cimmerians were often described by contemporaries as culturally Scythian, they may have differed ethnically from the Scythians proper, to whom the Cimmerians were related, and who also displaced and replaced the Cimmerians.

The Cimmerians themselves left no written records, and most information about them is largely derived from Assyrian records of the 8th to 7th centuries BCE and from Graeco-Roman authors from the 5th century BCE and later.

Name

The English name Cimmerians is derived from Latin Cimmerii, itself derived from the Ancient Greek Kimmerioi (Κιμμεριοι), of an ultimately uncertain origin for which there have been various proposals:

• according to János Harmatta, it was derived from Old Iranian *Gayamira, meaning "union of clans"
• Sergey Tokhtasyev [ru] and Igor Diakonoff derive it from an Old Iranian term *Gāmīra or *Gmīra, meaning "mobile unit"
• Askold Ivantchik derives the name of the Cimmerians from an original form *Gimĕr- or *Gimĭr-, of uncertain meaning

Identificaton

The Cimmerians were most likely a nomadic Iranian people of the Eurasian Steppe.

Other suggestions for the ethnicity for the Cimmerians include the possibility of their being Thracian, or Thracians with an Iranian ruling class, or a separate group closely related to Thracian peoples, as well as a Maeotian origin. However, the proposal of a Thracian origin of the Cimmerians has been criticised as arising from a confusion by Strabōn between the Cimmerians and their allies, the Thracian tribe of the Trēres.

Location

The original homeland of the Cimmerians before they migrated into Western Asia was in the steppe situated to the north of the Caspian Sea and to the west of the Araxēs river until the Cimmerian Bosporos, and some Cimmerians might have nomadised in the Kuban steppe. The region of the Pontic Steppe until the Lake Maiōtis was instead inhabited by the Agathyrsoi, who were another nomadic Iranian tribe related to the Cimmerians. The later claim by Greek authors that the Cimmerians lived in the Pontic Steppe around the Tyras river was a retroactive invention dating from after the disappearance of the Cimmerians.

During the initial phase of their presence in Western Asia, the Cimmerians lived in a country called Gamir (), that is the Land of the Cimmerians, in Mesopotamian sources, which was located around the Kyros river, to the north and north-west of Lake Sevan and the south of the Darial or Klukhor passes, in a region of Transcaucasia to the east of Kolkhis which corresponds to the modern-day Gori, in southern Georgia.

The Cimmerians later split into two groups, with a western horde located in Anatolia, and an eastern horde which moved into Mannaea and later Media.

History

Origins

The Cimmerians were originally part of a larger group of Central Asian nomadic populations who migrated to the west and formed new tribal groupings in the Pontic and Caspian steppes, with their success at expanding into Eastern Europe happening thanks to the development of mounted nomadic pastoralism and the adoption of effective weapons suited to equestrian warfare by these nomads. Archaeologically, the Cimmerians are associated with the Chernogorovka-Novocherkassk Culture of the Pontic Steppe, which itself showed strong influences originating from the east in Central Asia and Siberia, as well as from the Kuban culture of the Caucasus which contributed to its development. The steppe cultures to which the Cimmerians belonged in turn influenced the cultures of Central Europe such as the Hallstatt culture, and the Cimmerians themselves lived in the steppe situated to the north of the Caspian Sea and to the west of the Araxēs river, while the region of the Pontic Steppe until the Lake Maiōtis was instead inhabited by the Agathyrsoi, who were another nomadic Iranian tribe related to the Cimmerians.

The Cimmerians are first mentioned in the 8th century BCE in Homēros's Odyssey as a people living beyond the Ōkeanos, in a land permanently deprived of sunlight at the edge of the world and close to the entrance of Hāidēs; this mention is purely poetic and contains no reliable information about the real Cimmerians. Homēros's story might however have used as its source the story of the Argonautai, which itself focused on the kingdom of Kolkhis, on whose eastern borders the Cimmerians were living in the 8th century BCE.

According to the 6th century BCE records of Aristeas of Prokonnēsos and the later writings of Hērodotos of Halikarnāssos, the Cimmerians lived in the steppe to the immediate north of the Caspian Sea, with the Araxēs river forming their eastern border which separated them from the Scythians. The social structure of the Cimmerians, according to Hērodotos of Halikarnāssos, comprised two groups of roughly equal numbers: the Cimmerians proper, or "commoners", and the "kings" or "royal race" – implying that the ruling classes and lower classes originally constituted two different peoples, who retained distinct identities as late as the end of the 2nd millennium BCE. Hence the "kings" may have originated as an element of an Iranian-speaking people (such as the Scythians), who had imposed their rule on a section of the people of the Catacomb culture, who were the Cimmerian "commoners."

In the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, the Cimmerians were expelled from their home in the Pontic Steppe and forced to migrate into Western Asia due to a significant movement of the nomads of the Eurasian Steppe. This movement started when the Scythians, a nomadic Iranian tribe living in Central Asia related to the Cimmerians, migrated westwards across the Araxēs river, under the pressure of another related nomadic Iranian tribe, either the Massagetai or the Issēdones, following which the Scythians moved into the Caucasian Steppe, displaced the Cimmerians and conquered their territory. This displacement of the Cimmerians by the Scythians is attested archaeologically in a disturbance of the Chernogorovka-Novocherkassk culture associated with the Cimmerians.

Under Scythian pressure, the Cimmerians migrated to the south into Western Asia. The story recounted by Greek authors, according to which the Cimmerian aristocrats, unwilling to leave their lands, killed each other and were buried in a kurgan near the Tyras river, after which only the Cimmerian "commoners" migrated to Western Asia, is contradicted by how powerful the Cimmerians were according to Assyrian sources contemporaneous with their presence in Western Asia; this story was thus was either a Pontic Greek folk tale which originated after the disappearance of the Cimmerians or a later Scythian legend.

In Western Asia

The Cimmerians who migrated into Western Asia fled through the Klukhor [ru], Alagir and Darial passes in the Greater Caucasus mountains, that is through the western Caucasus and Georgia into Kolkhis, where the Cimmerians initially settled during the 720s BCE. During this period, the Cimmerians were located in a country called Gamir, the Land of the Cimmerians, in Mesopotamian sources, which was located around the Kyros river, to the north and north-west of Lake Sevan and the south of the Darial or Klukhor passes, in a region of Transcaucasia to the east of Kolkhis which corresponds to the modern-day Gori, in southern Georgia. Transcaucasia would remain the Cimmerians' centre of operations during the early phase of their presence in Western Asia until the early 660s BCE.

The Scythians later also expanded to the south, appearing in Western Asia forty years after the Cimmerians, although they followed the coast of the Caspian Sea and arrived in the region of present-day Azerbaijan.

In Transcaucasia

The Cimmerians might have defeated attacks by the Urarṭian kings against Kolkhis and the nearby areas during the 720s BCE.

The first mention of the Cimmerians in the records of the Neo-Assyrian Empire was from between 720 and 714 BCE, when Assyrian intelligence by the crown prince Sîn-aḥḥē-erība reported to the king Šarru-kīnII that the Cimmerians had attacked Urarṭu's province of Uasi through the territory of the kingdom of Mannai. A counter-attack against the Cimmerians at Guriania in what is now Georgia by the Urarṭian king Rusa I, during a campaign where Rusa I himself, his commander in chief, as well as thirteen governors united all the armed forces of the kingdom, was however heavily defeated by the Cimmerians, and the governor of the Urarṭian province of Uasi was killed. This defeat weakened Urarṭu significantly enough that Šarru-kīn II was able to successfully attack and defeat it, and Rusa I committed suicide in consequence.

In 705 BCE, Šarru-kīn II died in this battle, possibly in Media during a battle in which the Cimmerians were participants, although the most accepted view is that he instead died during a campaign against the Anatolian kingdom of Tabal.

The Cimmerians were no longer mentioned in Assyrian records during the reign of Šarru-kīn II's successor Sîn-aḥḥē-erība, and they started being mentioned again by he Assyrians only under the reign of Sîn-aḥḥē-erība's successor, Aššur-aḫa-iddina.

During the period coinciding with the rule of the Assyrian king Aššur-aḫa-iddina (reigned 681–669 BCE), the bulk of the Cimmerians migrated from Transcaucasia into Anatolia, while a smaller group remained in the area near the kingdom of Mannai where they had been settled since the time of Šarru-kīn II, respectively forming a "western" and an "eastern" division of Cimmerians.

In Iran

By 677 BCE, the eastern group of Cimmerians were present on the territory of Mannai, and in 676 BCE they were the allies of Mannai against an Assyrian attack, after which the eastern Cimmerians remained allied to Mannai against Assyria. This eastern Cimmerian group later moved to the south, into Mēdia, with the Scythians as their northern neighbours and occasional allies. In the western Iranian plateau, these eastern Cimmerians might have introduced Bronze articles from the Koban culture into the Luristan bronze culture.

Around 675 BCE, the eastern Cimmerians were recorded by the Assyrians as a possible threat against the collection of tribute from Mēdia. And around the same time, in alliance with the Scythians, the eastern Cimmerians were menacing the Assyrian provinces of Parsumaš and Bīt Ḫamban, and the eastern Cimmerians and the Scythians together were threatening communication between the Assyrian Empire and its vassal of Ḫubuškia.

By the late 670s BCE, the Scythians had become the allies of the Assyrians after the Scythian king Pr̥ϑutavā married a daughter of Aššur-aḫa-iddina, while the eastern Cimmerians remained hostile to Assyria and were allied to Ellipi and the Medes, and when Ellipi and the Medes successfully rebelled against Assyria under Kaštariti from 671 to 669 BCE, the eastern Cimmerians were allied to them.

In Anatolia

By the later 7th century BCE, the centre of operations of the larger, western, division of the Cimmerians was located in Anatolia.

In 679 BCE the Cimmerian king Teušpa was defeated and killed by Aššur-aḫa-iddina near Ḫubušna in Cappadocia. Despite this victory, the military operations of the Assyrians were not fully successful and they were not able to firmly occupy the areas around Ḫubušna, nor were they able to secure their borders, and the Assyrian province of Quwê was left vulnerable to invasions from Tabal, Kuzzurak and Ḫilakku. An Assyrian contract dating to the same as Aššur-aḫa-iddina's victory over Teušpa records of the existence of a "Cimmerian detachment" in Ninua, although it is uncertain whether this refers to Cimmerian mercenaries in Assyrian service, or simply of Assyrian soldiers armed in the "Cimmerian-style", that is using Cimmerian bows and horse harnesses.

Around 675 BCE, the Cimmerians in alliance with the Urarṭian king Rusa II invaded and destroyed the kingdom of Phrygia, whose king Mita committed suicide. The Cimmerians appear to have consequently partially subdued the Phrygians, and an Assyrian oracular text from the later 670s BCE mentioned the Cimmerians and the Phrygians, who had possibly been subdued by the Cimmerians, as allies against the Assyrians' newly conquered province of Meliddu.

A document from 673 BCE records Rusa II as having recruited a large number of Cimmerian mercenaries, and Cimmerian allies of Rusa II probably participated in a military expedition of his in 672 BCE. From 671 to 669 BCE, Cimmerians in service of Rusa II attacked the Assyrian province of Šubria near the Urarṭian border.

Between 671 and 670 BCE, some Cimmerian divisions were recorded as serving in the Assyrian army, although these divisions might have instead simply referred to the "Cimmerian style" armed Assyrian soldiers.

At yet unknown dates, the Cimmerians imposed their rule on Cappadocia, invaded Bithynia, Paphlagonia and the Trōad, and took the recently founded Greek colony of Sinōpē, whose initial settlement was destroyed and which was later re-founded by Greek colonists. In the beginning of that decade, the Cimmerians attacked the kingdom of Lydia, whose king Kukaś contacted the Neo-Assyrian Empire beginning in 667 BCE. Kukaś soon defeated the Cimmerians in 665 BCE without Assyrian help, and he sent Cimmerian soldiers captured while attacking the Lydian countryside as gifts to Aššur-aḫa-iddina's successor, Aššur-bāni-apli. According to the Assyrian records describing these events, the Cimmerians already had formed sedentary settlements in Anatolia.

Assyrian records in 657 BCE of a "bad omen" for the "Westland" might have referred to either a Cimmerian attack on Lydia, or a conquest of the western possessions of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, possibly Quwê or somewhere in Syria, after their defeat by Kukaś, following which the Cimmerians were threatening the Syrian provinces of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. These Cimmerian aggressions worried Aššur-bāni-apli about the security of the north-west border of the Neo-Assyrian Empire enough that he sought answers concerning this situation through divination, and as a result of these Cimmerian conquests, by 657 BCE the Assyrian divinatory records were calling the Cimmerian king by the title of šar-kiššati ("King of the Universe"), a title which in the Mesopotamian worldview could belong to only a single ruler in the world at any given time and was normally held by the King of the Neo-Assyrian Empire. These divinatory texts also assured to Aššur-bāni-apli that he would eventually regain the kiššūtu, that is the world hegemony, captured by the Cimmerians: the kiššūtu, which was considered to rightfully belong to the Assyrian king, had been usurped by the Cimmerians and had to be won back by Assyria. Thus, the Cimmerian king's successes against Assyria meant that he had become recognised in the ancient Near East as equally powerful as Aššur-bāni-apli. This situation remained unchanged throughout the rest of the 650s BCE and the early 640s BCE.

As the result of these Assyrian setbacks, Kukaś could not rely on Assyrian support against the Cimmerians and he ended diplomacy with the Neo-Assyrian Empire.

The Cimmerians attacked Lydia for a third time in 644 BCE, under their leader Tugdammi, the Lygdamis (Ancient Greek: Λυγδαμις, Lugdamis; Latin: Lygdamis) of the Greek authors. This time, the Cimmerians defeated the Lydians and captured their capital, Sfard, and Kukaś died during this attack. After sacking Sardis, Lygdamis led the Cimmerians into invading the Greek city-states of Iōnia and Aiolia on the western coast of Anatolia, which caused the inhabitants of the Batinētis region to flee to the islands of the Aegean Sea, and later Greek writings by Kallimakhos and Hēsykhios of Alexandreia preserve the record that Lygdamis had destroyed the Artemision of Ephesos during these invasions.

After this third invasion of Lydia and the attack on the Asiatic Greek cities, around 640 BCE the Cimmerians moved to Kilikia on the north-west border of the Assyrian empire, where Tugdammi allied with Mugallu, the king of Tabal, against Assyria, during which period the Assyrian records called him a "mountain king and an arrogant Gutian (that is "barbarian") who does not know how to fear the gods." However, after facing a revolt against himself, Tugdamme allied with Assyria and acknowledged Assyrian overlordship, and sent tribute to Aššur-bāni-apli, to whom he swore an oath. Tugdammi soon broke this oath and attacked the Assyrian Empire again, but he fell ill and died in 640 BCE, and was succeeded by his son Sandakšatru.

By the later part of the 7th century BCE, the Cimmerians were nomadising in Western Asia together with the Thracian Trēres tribe who had migrated across the Thracian Bosporus and invaded Anatolia. In 637 BCE, Sandakšatru's Cimmerians participated in another attack on Lydia, this time led by the Trēres under their king Kōbos, and in alliance with the Lycians. During this invasion, in the seventh year of the reign of Kukaś's son Ardys, the Lydians were defeated again and for a second time Sfard was captured, except for its citadel, and Ardys might have been killed in this attack. Ardys's son and successor, Sadyattēs, might possibly also have been killed in another Cimmerian attack on Lydia.

Soon after these Cimmerian attacks on Lydia, with Assyrian approval and in alliance with the Lydians, the Scythians under their king Mādava entered Anatolia, expelled the Trēres from Asia Minor, and defeated the Cimmerians so that they no longer constituted a threat again, following which the Scythians extended their domination to Central Anatolia until they were themselves expelled by the Medes from Western Asia in the 590s BCE. This final defeat of the Cimmerians was carried out by the joint forces of Mādava, who Strabōn credits with expelling the Cimmerians from Asia Minor, and of Kukaś's great-grandson, the king Walweteś of Lydia, whom Hērodotos of Halikarnāssos and Polyainos claim finally defeated the Cimmerians.

Following this final defeat, the Cimmerians likely remained in Cappadocia, whose name in Armenian, Գամիրք Gamirkʿ, may have been derived from the name of the Cimmerians. A group of Cimmerians might also have subsisted for some time in the Trōas, around Antandros, until they were finally defeated by Walweteś of Lydia. These remnants of the Cimmerians were eventually asimilated by the Anatolian populations, and they completely disappeared from history after their defeat by Mādava and Walweteś.

In Eastern Europe

It has been hypothesised that some Cimmerians might have migrated into Eastern, South-east and Central Europe, although such identification is presently considered very uncertain.

Proponents of a Cimmerian migration into southwestern Europe suggest that it affected as far as Thrace, where between 700 and 650 BCE the Ēdōnoi allied with them to expand their country by occupying Mygdonia and the area up to the Axios river at the expense of the Sinties and the Siropaiones. This Cimmerian invasion would have also affected south-eastern Illyria, where raids by Cimmerians allied to Thracians ended the hegemony of Illyrian tribes around 650 BCE, and possibly into Ēpeiros as well, where distinctive Cimmerian horse trappings were found at Dōdōna.

Legacy

After the end of the Neo-Assyrian Empire, the scribes of the Neo-Babylonian Empire which replaced it used the term Gimirri indiscriminately to refer to all the nomads of the steppes, including both the Pontic Scythians and the Central Asian Saka. The Persian Achaemenids who conquered the Neo-Babylonian Empire continued this tradition of using the name of the Cimmerians to refer to all steppe nomads in the Akkadian language, as attested in the Behistun inscription. The Byzantines from a millennium and onwards later similarly referred to the Huns, Slavs, and other populations as "Scythians."

Homēros's mention of the Cimmerians as living deprived from sunlight and close to the entrance of Hāidēs influenced later Graeco-Roman authors who, writing centuries after the disappearance of the historical Cimmerians, conceptualised of this people as the one described by Homēros, and therefore assigned to them various fantastical locations and histories:

• Ephoros of Kymē in tThe 4th century BCE placed the Cimmerians near the city of Kumē in Magna Graecia, where there was located a Ploutōnion and an oracle of the dead, as well as the Lake Avernus, which possessed strange properties. According to Ephoros's narrative, these Cimmerians lived underground and would go out only at night because of a tradition of theirs to never see the Sun.
• Hekataios of Abdēra placed the "Cimmerian" city in Hyperboreia
• Poseidōnios of Apameia wrote that the Cimmerians who passed into Western Asia were merely a small body of exiles, while the bulk of the Cimmerians lived in the thickly wooded and sun-less far north, between the shores of the Okeanos and the Herkunios, and were the same people known as the Kimbroi. Since the names of the Cimmerians and the Kimbroi were similarr, and both were fierce barbarian tribes who had caused significant destruction for the peoples they had invaded, the Greek traditions progressively equated and then identified them with each other.
  • This assertion was criticised by Ploutarkhos as being conjectural rather than based on concrete historical evidence.
  • Strabōn and Diodōros of Sicily, using Poseidōnios as their sources, also equated the Cimmerians and the Kimbroi.

The Cimmerians appear in the Hebrew Bible under the name of Gōmer (גֹּמֶר‎‎).

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. The historical Sicambri, however, were a Germanic tribe from Gelderland in modern Netherlands and are named for the Sieg river.

Early modern historians asserted Cimmerian descent for the Celts or the Germans, arguing from the similarity of Cimmerii to Cimbri or Cymry, noted by 17th-century Celticists. But the word Cymro "Welshman" (plural: Cymry) is now accepted by Celtic linguists as being derived from a Brythonic word *kom-brogos, meaning "compatriot".

According to Georgian national historiography, the Cimmerians, in Georgian known as Gimirri, played an influential role in the development of the Colchian and Iberian cultures. The modern Georgian word for "hero", გმირი gmiri, is said to derive from their name.

It has also been speculated that the modern Armenian city of Gyumri (Arm. Գյումրի ]]), founded as Kumayri (Arm. Կումայրի), derived its name from the Cimmerians who conquered the region and founded a settlement there.

In popular culture

The character of Conan the Barbarian, created by Robert E. Howard in a series of fantasy stories published in Weird Tales from 1932, is canonically a Cimmerian, a people who, in Howard's fictional Hyborian Age, are a pre-Celtic people, the ancestors of the Irish and Scots (Gaels).

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a novel by Michael Chabon, includes a chapter describing the (fictional) oldest book in the world, "The Book of Lo", created by ancient Cimmerians.

Manau's song "La Tribu de Dana" recounts an imaginary battle between Celts and enemies identified by the narrator as Cimmerians.

Archaeology

Although archaeologists initially associated the Cimmerians with the Novocherkassk culture, the more recent view is that the Cimmerians belonged, materially, to the Early Scythian culture.

Cimmerian remains from the period of their presence in Anatolia include a burial from the village of İmirler in the Amasya Province of Turkey which contains typically Early Scythian weapons and horse harnesses. Another Cimmerian burial, located at about 100 km to the east of İmirler and 50 km from Samsun, contained 250 Scythian-type arrowheads.

Language

{{Infobox language |name=Cimmerian |region=North Caucasus |era=unknown-7th century BCE |familycolor=Indo-European Cimmerian language.

According to the historian Muhammad Dandamayev and the linguist János Harmatta, the Cimmerians spoke a dialect belonging to the Scythian group of Iranian languages, and were able to communicate with Scythians proper without needing interpreters. The Iranologist Ľubomír Novák considers Cimmerian to be a relative of Scythian which exhibited similar features as Scythian, such as the evolution of the sound /d/ into /l/.

Only a few personal names in the Cimmerian language have survived in Assyrian inscriptions:

• Teušpa:
  • According to the linguist János Harmatta, it goes back to Old Iranian *Tavispaya, meaning "swelling with strength", although Askold Ivantchik has criticised this proposal on phonetic grounds.
• Askold Ivantchik instead posits three alternative suggestions for an Old Iranian origin of Teušpa:
  • *Taiu-aspa "abductor of horses"
  • *Taiu-spā "abductor dog"
  • *Daiva-spā "divine dog"

• Tugdammē or Dugdammē (), and pronounced Lugdamis (Λυγδαμις) and Dugdamis (Δυγδαμις) by Greek authors
  • According to János Harmatta, it goes back to Old Iranian *Duydamaya "giving happiness"
  • Edwin M. Yamauchi also interprets the name as Iranian, citing Ossetic Тух-домӕг (Tux-domæg), meaning "ruling with strength," although this proposal has been criticised because Тух-домӕг represents the modern phonetics of Ossetian and its form during the Old Iranian period when the Cimmerians lived would have been *Tavaʰ-dam-ak
  • Askold Ivantchik instead suggests that the name Dugdammê/Lugdamis was a loanword from an Anatolian language, more specifically Luwian, while also accepting the alternative possibility of a derivation from a variant of the name of the Hurrian deity Teyśəba/Tešub
  • Ľubomír Novák has noted that the attestation of this name in the forms Dugdammê and Tugdammê in Akkadian and the forms Lugdamis and Dugdamis in Greek shows that its first consonant had experienced the change of the sound /d/ to /l/, which is consistent with the phonetic changes attested in the Scythian languages.

• Sandakšatru: this is an Iranian reading of the name, and Manfred Mayrhofer (1981) points out that the name may also be read as Sandakurru.

• According to János Harmatta, it goes back to Old Iranian *Sandakuru "splendid son"
• Askold Ivantchik derives the name Sandakšatru from a compound term consisting of the name of the Anatolian deity Sanda, and of the Iranian term -xšaθra

Asimov (1991) attempted to trace various place names to Cimmerian origins. He suggested that Cimmerium gave rise to the Turkic toponym Qırım (which in turn gave rise to the name "Crimea").

Genetics

A genetic study published in Science Advances in October 2018 examined the remains of three Cimmerians buried between around 1000 and 800 BCE. The two samples of Y-DNA extracted belonged to haplogroups R1b1a and Q1a1, while the three samples of mtDNA extracted belonged to haplogroups H9a, C5c and R.

Another genetic study published in Current Biology in July 2019 examined the remains of three Cimmerians. The two samples of Y-DNA extracted belonged to haplogroups R1a-Z645 and R1a2c-B111, while the three samples of mtDNA extracted belonged to haplogroups H35, U5a1b1 and U2e2.

See also

• List of kings of the Cimmerian Bosporus, including early kings of Cimmeria

References

Citations

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• Cimmerians
• Peoples of the Caucasus
• History of the North Caucasus
• Tribes described primarily by Herodotus
• Indo-European peoples
• Unclassified languages of Asia
• Unclassified Indo-European languages