The Cimmerians

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There is a frontier in the Assyrian royal annals where the scribes begin to record a danger out of the north, a people on horseback they call the Gimirru, pressing down from beyond the mountains against the kingdoms of the king’s interest. The name appears, recurs, and is at last fought to a standstill, and the men who carried it left nothing of their own beside it — no inscription, no chronicle, no line of verse. The Greeks knew the same people as the Kimmerioi and gave them a homeland on the Black Sea and a story of flight. Between the two records, and the broken things the spade has turned up on the steppe, stands all that can be said of the Cimmerians: the first of the great horse-nomads to break upon the settled south, and a people met only ever in the words of others.

Genealogy

The Cimmerians belong to the Pontic-Caspian steppe, the long grass-country running north of the Black Sea and the Caucasus, in the centuries before the Scythians held it. The scholarly reconstruction places them there across the ninth and eighth centuries before our era, a mounted people of the Ciscaucasian and Caspian grasslands, most likely Iranian in speech — the few names that survive, those of their kings, can be read as Iranian, though the etymologies are not secure. They were a steppe people of the kind the southern kingdoms would learn, over the next centuries, to know well: living by the horse and the herd, mobile, formidable in the saddle, and bound to a sacred world of which almost nothing has come down. This much is consensus; the precise shape of their homeland and the borders of their country are not.

Their displacement is the hinge of the whole story, and it is told by Herodotus. In the version he set down, the Scythians, pressed in their turn from the east, crossed into the Cimmerian country and the Cimmerians fell to debate. The common people, he writes, judged it best to withdraw and yield the land; the princes resolved to die in it. Neither would persuade the other. The princes, unwilling to flee with the people and unwilling to share the land with the incomers, divided themselves into two equal companies and fought each other until all were slain, and the people buried their kings by the river Tyras — the Dniester — where, the historian adds, their graves could still be seen in his own day. The rest departed, and the Scythians came into an empty land. The episode is told at Histories 4.11, and the text preserves the strange dignity of it: a ruling class choosing to lie dead in its own country rather than abandon it.

The picture that the spade returns is consistent with this, and as silent. Across the steppe and the northern Caucasus the archaeologists have recovered the material of a horse-people of the pre-Scythian centuries — bronze and iron weapons, horse-gear, the long daggers and the bridle-fittings of a mounted warrior aristocracy — and a portion of it is conventionally assigned to the Cimmerians, on the strength of date and place rather than any label the makers left. The assignment is a working hypothesis, not a signature; the metalwork names no people. What it shows is a society built on the horse and the herd, mobile and armed, the kind of society that could break out of its grasslands under pressure and fall on the kingdoms below as a sudden, mounted force. The graves give the shape of a life and withhold the name attached to it, which is the condition of nearly everything Cimmerian.

How much of Herodotus’ tale is history and how much is the shape a good story takes is a question the sources cannot close. He wrote two centuries and more after the events, working from what the Greeks of the Black Sea coast remembered and from the place-names that still carried the older people’s name: a region called Cimmeria, the Cimmerian walls, the Cimmerian ferries, the strait the Greeks called the Cimmerian Bosphorus. Modern study, reading the Greek beside the Assyrian cuneiform, takes the displacement as broadly real — a westward Scythian pressure that broke the Cimmerians out of the steppe around the middle of the eighth century — while leaving the route and the timing contested. What is not in doubt is the direction the broken people took. They went south, through or around the Caucasus, into the kingdoms of the Near East and Anatolia. There the scribes of the Assyrian court were waiting with their styluses, and the Cimmerians enter the written record at last — as an enemy.

Reconstruction of the Cimmerian migrations from the Pontic steppe across the Caucasus into Anatolia and the Near East, eighth–seventh centuries BCE. Antiquistik, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0.

The raiders from the north

The defining fact about the Cimmerians is that they have no literature of their own, and so the account of what they did is built entirely from the records of the peoples they struck. This is not a gap to be papered over; it is the spine of the subject. Three bodies of evidence carry the weight, each at its own distance and angle. The Assyrian royal annals, written by court scribes whose interest was the king’s glory, track the Gimirru as a threat on the northern marches across three reigns. The Greek authors — Herodotus first among them — preserve, generations later and through a Hellenic lens, the place-names and the memory of the kingdoms the Cimmerians broke. And the archaeology of the steppe and the Caucasus, abundant in metalwork but mute as to names, is read by scholars who must guess at which graves and which daggers belonged to the people the texts call Cimmerian. The reader should hold each kind of source at its proper remove; the Cimmerians themselves are silent throughout.

In the Assyrian record they first surface around 714 before our era, on the northern frontier where the kingdom of Urartu held the highlands of eastern Anatolia. The earliest notices are diplomatic as much as military: the king’s intelligence-gatherers report a people called the Gimirru active beyond Urartu, and the Cimmerians fell on Urartu and dealt its king, Rusa I, a heavy defeat — a blow that figured, that same year, in the calculations of Sargon II of Assyria as he moved against Urartu himself. From that point the Gimirru are a fixed danger in the scribes’ world, a force that could be feared, fought, occasionally bought off, and never quite removed. There is a tradition, not beyond dispute, that Sargon himself died in 705 fighting on that northern frontier, in country where the Cimmerians were active. Under Esarhaddon, who reigned from 681, the pressure grew acute: in 679 the Cimmerians under their king Teušpā drove into Assyrian-held territory and were met and defeated, Teušpā killed in the fighting. Even then they were not done; the annals of Esarhaddon’s successor, Ashurbanipal, still reckon with the Gimirru and their later king Dugdammî as a power on the edge of the Assyrian world, decades after Teušpā’s death. The Met’s account of the period frames the Cimmerians as the nomadic shock that fell upon Anatolia in these decades, breaking one settled kingdom after another.

The kingdom of Phrygia, in the Anatolian uplands, was among the first to fall. Around 696, by the reconstructed chronology, the Cimmerians overran the Phrygian country and burned its capital, Gordion — the walls carried, the city fired. The death of the Phrygian king belongs to this catastrophe: Herodotus reports that he took his own life when the city fell, the tradition attaching the famous name of Midas to the last Phrygian ruler, and Strabo, centuries later, gives a different and stranger account of how the king died. The kingdom did not recover as a political power. The dating and the details are reconstructed from scattered notices and are not all secure, but the broad fact stands: a settled kingdom of Anatolia was undone by a people from the steppe.

Lydia, to the west, was the next great power in the Cimmerians’ path, and here Herodotus is fullest. In the reign of Gyges, founder of the Lydian royal line, the Cimmerians struck; Gyges threw them back at first, sought Assyrian help against them, and was in the end killed fighting them, around 644, when they sacked the lower city of Sardis and spared only the citadel. Under Gyges’ successor Ardys the assaults continued, Sardis falling a second time but for its acropolis, the Cimmerians by now operating in concert with other northern peoples who had crossed into Anatolia. The Greek cities of the Ionian coast were drawn into the same wave of raids, and the memory of Cimmerian violence on the western seaboard lingered in Greek verse, where the name became almost a byword for the terror out of the north. The pattern across these decades is consistent: a mounted people striking the rich kingdoms of the south, taking their cities, exacting what they could, and moving on, without ever settling into a state that the southern records could name and bound. This is part of why they are so hard to grasp — they registered on the settled world as an event rather than as a neighbor, a recurring blow rather than a country with a capital and a court of its own that an Assyrian or a Greek might describe from within.

Of the Cimmerians’ own gods and inner life, almost nothing survives, and the honest course is to say so rather than to invent a pantheon. They were in all likelihood an Iranian-speaking people, kin in language and way of life to the Scythians and the Saka of the eastern steppe, and one may reasonably suppose a sacred world of the steppe kind — the open sky, the hearth, the horse, the buried dead. But the Cimmerians left no Herodotus of their own to set their powers down, as the Greek historian set down the Scythian gods, and no inscription names their deities. Where the record for the Scythians offers at least a Greek list of divine names to argue over, for the Cimmerians it offers silence. They stand at the edge of history as the shadow of the nomad: the first steppe people the settled south learned to fear, and the one about whose own beliefs the least can be said.

A Cimmerian dagger, from the collections of the Kyiv Archaeology Museum — among the mute metalwork by which the steppe people are known where the texts fall silent. O.Mustafin, via Wikimedia Commons. CC0.

Reception and afterlife

The Cimmerians vanish from the record almost as abruptly as they entered it. Their power in Anatolia was broken in the middle decades of the seventh century by the kingdoms they had savaged, working in concert with their own steppe successors. Herodotus and later writers credit the Lydian king Alyattes, grandson of Gyges, with the final expulsion of the Cimmerians from Asia, and the Scythians under their king Madyes — the very people who had driven the Cimmerians from the steppe — took a hand in finishing them in Anatolia. After that the Gimirru cease to trouble the Assyrian scribes, and the Kimmerioi pass out of Greek history except as a memory and a set of place-names. They were absorbed or destroyed; no migration carried a Cimmerian kingdom into the later record, and no people of the historical period can be securely called their descendants. A generation of upheaval, set in motion by a people on horseback, closed without an heir.

What remained of them is held in three keepings. The first is Herodotus, who gave them their homeland on the Black Sea, their place-names along the strait, and the grave story of the kings who chose to die in their own country — a narrative read now with full awareness of its distance from the events and its debts to Greek storytelling, but indispensable for all that. The second is the Assyrian cuneiform record, where the Gimirru appear as a dated danger across the reigns of Sargon II, Esarhaddon, and Ashurbanipal — the hardest evidence there is, naming kings (Teušpā, the later Dugdammî whom the Greeks called Lygdamis, and Sandakšatru) and pinning the raids to particular years. The third is the long scholarly labor of fixing, from the records of others and the metalwork of the steppe, the homeland, the route, and the fate of a people who left no words of their own.

One knot in that labor deserves marking, because it bears on how the Cimmerians are kept distinct from their neighbors. In the later Neo-Babylonian and Persian usage, the term Gimirri came to be applied loosely to the Scythians and to the Central Asian Saka — a sign that to the inhabitants of Mesopotamia the steppe peoples could read as a single type, the horse-nomad from beyond the mountains. For the eighth and seventh centuries, the period of the raids on Anatolia, the equation Gimirru-equals-Cimmerian is sound, and that is the people of this entry. But the later blurring is a real feature of the sources, and it has to be flagged rather than allowed to dissolve the Cimmerians into the Saka or the Scythians. The Cimmerians are the earlier people: the ones the Scythians displaced, the ones who crossed the Caucasus first, distinct alike from the Scythians who came after them on the Pontic steppe and from the Sarmatians who would in time succeed the Scythians there in the west.

So the Cimmerians come down as the type-case of a people known wholly from the outside. Where the Scythian world can be entered through Herodotus’ long account and the gold of the royal kurgans, the Cimmerian world cannot be entered at all; it can only be inferred from the wreckage they left in other kingdoms’ annals and the daggers they left in the steppe soil. They were not a horde and not a savagery — they were a steppe people moving under pressure, doing to the south what mounted peoples would do to it again and again across the next thousand years. That they did it first, and that they did it without leaving a single sentence of their own, is the whole of their place in the record: the opening shadow of the nomad, fixed forever in the words of the men they rode down upon.

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