Previous to this period these had been an almost mythical race in the eyes of the civilised races of the Oriental world. They imagined them as living in a perpetual mist on the confines of the universe: “Never does bright Helios look upon them with his rays, neither when he rises towards the starry heaven, nor when he turns back from heaven towards the earth, but a baleful night spreads itself over these miserable mortals.” *
* Odyssey, xi. 14-19. It is this passage which Ephorus
applies to the Cimmerians of his own time who were
established in the Crimea, and which accounts for his saying
that they were a race of miners, living perpetually
underground.
Fabulous animals, such as griffins with lions’ bodies, having the neck and ears of a fox, and the wings and beak of an eagle, wandered over their plains, and sometimes attacked them; the inhabitants were forced to defend themselves with axes, and did not always emerge victorious from these terrible conflicts.
Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the reliefs on the silver vase
of Kul-Oba.
The few merchants who had ventured to penetrate into their country had returned from their travels with less fanciful notions concerning the nature of the regions frequented by them, but little continued to be known of them, until an unforeseen occurrence obliged them to quit their remote steppes. The Scythians, driven from the plains of the Iaxartes by an influx of the Massagetæ, were urged forwards in a westerly direction beyond the Volga and the Don, and so great was the terror inspired by the mere report of their approach, that the Cimmerians decided to quit their own territory. A tradition current in Asia three centuries later, told how their kings had counselled them to make a stand against the invaders; the people, however, having refused to listen to their advice, their rulers and those who were loyal to them fell by each other’s hands, and their burial-place was still shown near the banks of the Tyras. Some of their tribes took refuge in the Chersonesus Taurica, but the greater number pushed forward beyond the Mæotio marshes; a body of Scythians followed in their track, and the united horde pressed onwards till they entered Asia Minor, keeping to the shores of the Black Sea.* This heterogeneous mass of people came into conflict first with Urartu; then turning obliquely in a south-easterly direction, their advance-guard fell upon the Mannai. But they were repulsed by Sargon’s generals; the check thus administered forced them to fall back speedily upon other countries less vigorously defended. The Scythians, therefore, settled themselves in the eastern basin of the Araxes, on the frontiers of Urartu and the Mannai, where they formed themselves into a kind of marauding community, perpetually quarrelling with their neighbours.** The Cimmerians took their way westwards, and established themselves upon the upper waters of the Araxes, the Euphrates, the Halys, and the Thermodon,*** greatly to the vexation of the rulers of Urartu.
* The version of Aristaeas of Proconnesus, as given by
Herodotus and by Damastes of Sigsea, attributes a more
complex origin to this migration, i.e. that the Arimaspes
had driven the Issedonians before them, and that the latter
had in turn driven the Scythians back on the Cimmerians.
** The Scythians of the tradition preserved by Herodotus
must have been the Ashguzai or Ishkuzai of the cuneiform
documents. The original name must have been Skuza, Shkuza,
with a sound in the second syllable that the Greeks have
rendered by th, and the Assyrians by z: the initial
vowel has been added, according to a well-known rule, to
facilitate the pronunciation of the combination sk, sine. An
oracle of the time of Esarhaddon shows that they occupied
one of the districts really belonging to the Mannai: and it
is probably they who are mentioned in a passage of Jer. li.
27, where the traditional reading Aschenaz should be
replaced by that of Ashkuz.
*** It is doubtless to these events that the tradition
preserved by Pompeius Trogus, which is known to us through
his abbreviator Justin, or through the compilers of a later
period, refers, concerning the two Scythian princes Ylinus
and Scolopitus: they seem to have settled along the coast,
on the banks of the Thermodon and in the district of
Themiscyra.
They subsequently felt their way along the valleys of the Anti-Taurus, but finding them held by Assyrian troops, they turned their steps towards the country of the White Syrians, seized Sinôpê, where the Greeks had recently founded a colony, and bore down upon Phrygia. It would appear that they were joined in these regions by other hordes from Thrace which had crossed the Bosphorus a few years earlier, and among whom the ancient historians particularly make mention of the Treres;* the results of the Scythian invasion had probably been felt by all the tribes on the banks of the Dnieper, and had been the means of forcing them in the direction of the Danube and the Balkans, whence they drove before them, as they went, the inhabitants of the Thracian peninsula across into Asia Minor. It was about the year 750 B.C. that the Cimmerians had been forced to quit their first home, and towards 720 that they came into contact with the empires of the East; the Treres had crossed the Bosphorus about 710, and the meeting of the two streams of immigration may be placed in the opening years of the seventh century.**
* Strabo says decisively that the Treres were both
Cimmerians and Thracians; elsewhere he makes the Treres
synonymous with the Cimmerians. The Treres were probably the
predominating tribe among the people which had come into
Asia on that side.
** Gelzer thinks that the invasion by the Bosphorus took
place about 705, and Radet about 708; and their reckoning
seems to me to be so likely to be correct, that I do not
hesitate to place the arrival of the Treres in Asia about
the time they have both indicated—roughly speaking, about
710 B.C.