Cimmerians

Mounted raiders from the steppe north of the Caucasus, the Cimmerians burst into the history of the Near East at the end of the eighth century BCE. Speaking an Iranian language and sharing much of their culture with the Scythians, they defeated Urartu, destroyed the kingdom of Phrygia, sacked the Lydian capital and alarmed the Assyrian kings, before being crushed around 635 BCE and absorbed into the peoples of Anatolia. They left no writing of their own, so their story comes from Assyrian letters, Greek authors and archaeology.

Around the beginning of the first millennium BCE a drier, colder climate pushed the herding peoples of Central Asia towards true nomadism, and from the tenth century BCE groups from the Altai or eastern Kazakhstan moved west onto the Pontic-Caspian steppe. Archaeologists call the culture they formed there the Chernogorovka-Novocherkassk complex, with its distinctive daggers, horse bits, carved stelae and animal-style art. The Cimmerians were one part of it, living on the steppe north of the Caspian and Caucasus, with the Volga dividing them from the Scythians to the east. Their remains look much like Scythian finds, but contemporary texts treat the two as separate peoples.

By the 720s BCE Cimmerians were active south of the Caucasus, settling near modern Gori in Georgia. They first appear by name in 714 BCE, in intelligence reports sent by the Assyrian crown prince Sennacherib to his father Sargon II, describing a crushing defeat they inflicted on Rusa I of Urartu. In 705 BCE Sargon II was killed in a campaign in Anatolia in which he probably also fought Cimmerians. In the reign of Esarhaddon they split: most moved west into Anatolia under King Teušpâ, while a smaller eastern group stayed near Mannai on the Iranian plateau, raiding Assyria alongside Scythians, Mannaeans and Medes and switching sides as payment suited them. Esarhaddon killed Teušpâ in 679 BCE.

Around 675 BCE the western Cimmerians under Dugdammî, the Lygdamis of Greek writers, overran Phrygia and sacked Gordion; the Phrygian king Midas killed himself. Cappadocia and central Anatolia became their base, and they began to settle in towns of their own. They attacked Lydia, whose king Gyges sought Assyrian help and then defeated them in the 660s. Recovering, they pushed into Assyrian lands in Cilicia, and in 657 BCE an astrologer at Ashurbanipal's court called Dugdammî "King of the Universe", a title otherwise reserved for the Assyrian king. Allied with the Thracian Treres, they took Sardis except its citadel in 644 BCE, killing Gyges, and raided the Greek cities of Ionia and Aeolia, burning the temple of Artemis at Ephesus.

Gravely ill, Dugdammî killed himself in Cilicia in 640 BCE and his son Sandakšatru fared no better. Around 635 BCE the Scythians under Madyes, with Assyrian approval, and the Lydians under Alyattes defeated the Cimmerians and their Treran allies. After this they are no longer recorded as a people; they were absorbed into Lydia, Media and other Anatolian populations. Their raids helped bring down Urartu and Phrygia and opened the way for the Lydian and Median kingdoms, and they spread steppe bows and cavalry tactics across the region. A Cimmerian presence in the Balkans, alongside the Thracians, has been suggested but is very uncertain.

Homer's Odyssey placed a mythical Cimmerian people in a land of mist at the edge of the world. Herodotus told of Scythians driving the Cimmerians from the steppe and of royal tombs by the Tyras river, a tale modern historians treat as legendary, since the Scythians reached the Near East some forty years after the Cimmerians. The Hebrew Bible calls them Gomer, and later Babylonian scribes used Cimmerian as a general word for steppe nomads.

Our maps for 1500, 1000 and 700 BCE draw a large and approximate steppe region labelled Cimerians, north of the Black Sea and Caucasus. The Cimmerians are first recorded only in 714 BCE, and their steppe culture took shape from around the tenth century BCE, so the earlier outlines stand in for the pre-Scythian nomads of the region; neighbours include Thrace, the Illyrians, the Phrygians and Urartu.