About the same time there were irruptions from the plain; the movements were probably gradual and may have begun somewhat earlier, but direct evidence of this phase is at present lacking. These people of the plain advanced into Thrace, introducing there the Thracian tongue and the worship of Ares; they dominated the aborigines, including the thrifty lake-dwelling Pæonians, and made themselves masters of much of what was afterwards known as Macedonia. Some of these tribes, notably the Briges, crossed the Hellespont and introduced Phrygian speech into Asia Minor, in the east of which it still survives as Armenian.
It was some straggling adventurers from this movement who about 1250 B.C. entered Thessaly, where, as we have seen, some Wiros had long been settled. Some may have come from Thracian lands, some down the Vardar valley, and some stragglers from the Latin group, perhaps, down the Spercheus valley, having tarried awhile around Dodona. These were the “Achæan” heroes, who seem to have made themselves masters of the Mycenean city states, groaning under the rule of Minoan tyrants. A generation later these joined others in attacking Egypt, and it was their grandsons who, under the leadership of the king of men, sacked the city of Priam.
The next movement came from the Celtic mountain zone. It was between 1200 and 1175 B.C. that the Celtic lords, accompanied by the bravest of their henchmen, left the Celtic cradle, crossed the Rhine, and passed through the Belfort gap into Gaul. By degrees they conquered the whole of the country, though they made their mark less in Aquitaine and Brittany. Others, passing in all probability down the Rhine, landed on the east coast of Great Britain, and settled in the eastern counties and in Wessex. It is too soon, as yet, to define the area which they occupied, but the available evidence, derived from the swords and the finger-tip ware, suggests the region south-east of the chalk scarp. Later on a few of these passed across the densely-wooded Midland plain, across Wales by the upper Severn valley and the Bala cleft, and reached the gold fields of Ireland. It was some little time, however, before they settled in any numbers in the land which still preserves their language.
This seems to be all that we can as yet restore of the movements of the Q Wiros, though there is a sequel to be added later; we must turn now to the problem of the P speaking people. We have seen that about the time that the Celts were leaving the mountain zone for the west, bands of Wiros from the plain, passing through the Moravian gate, across Galicia and Podolia, reached the rich valley of the Koban to the north of the Caucasus mountains. Here they learned the use of iron from their humble neighbours on the other side of the mountains, who were perhaps the Chalybes, and made for themselves steel blades for their swords. It was during their sojourn here that they must have mixed with other Wiros who were still roaming the steppes of this region, and who were almost certainly of Iranian speech, which was spoken in this area in the time of Herodotus, and still survives among the Ossetes[493] in the Caucasus mountains. They may, too, have come into contact and intermarried with other folk, who were perhaps not Wiros. For some reason, which I do not pretend to explain, their speech, which on their arrival must have been allied to Thracian, changed its phonological laws, and they acquired the habit of labialising the Qu of their original tongue.
Rostovtzeff has suggested that these Koban Wiros were the Cimmerians,[494] and since, as we have seen, these P speaking people appear a few years later in Gaul, and again are found approaching, if they do not actually reach, the peninsula of Jutland, it seems reasonable to believe that the statement of Posidonius,[495] which has received Ridgeway’s approval,[496] is correct, and that the Cimmerians of Russia and of the west,[497] as well as the people who gave their name to the Cimbric Chersonese are all one P speaking people, and that we must include in their number the Brythonic Cymry of Britain, in spite of what Rhys has written to the contrary.[498] Whether the name was originally com-brox, compatriots, or not, I must leave to philologists to determine, but if Rhys’ etymology is correct, these compatriots were those who set out from the Koban to conquer the greater part of Europe. If this be so the statement quoted by Pliny from Lycophron that the Cimmerii were a people living around Lake Avernus[499] may not be a poetic fable, as has been supposed, but may show us that some of the Villa-nova invaders of Italy retained for a time the common name which survives in Wales to-day. Thus I am assuming that the words κιμμέριοι, κίμμεροι, Cimbri Cymry are all one, and suggest the use of the term Kimri[500] for the whole group.
Herodotus tells us that the Russian Cimmerians built castles or forts,[501] a custom which is found among the early iron age or Hallstatt inhabitants of the mountain zone,[502] and reached this country somewhat later in the form of Hill-top camps. Their distribution has not yet been well worked out, but their date is Hallstatt or sometimes later, and the available evidence from their distribution in time and space suggests that they were the work of different branches of the Kimri.
A large number of the Kimri, perhaps the greater part, remained in the Koban region until the seventh century, when they were displaced by incoming Scythian hordes, who appear to have been of mixed Iranian and Mongol origin; then they overran Asia Minor as far as Sardis.[503] But many of these Kimri left the steppe almost immediately after they had developed their iron swords and settled in Thrace; later they moved up the Danube valley as far, at least, as its junction with the Save. It was not long before the bulk of them moved southwards, probably down the Vardar valley, and about 1000 B.C. began the Dorian invasion of Greece. These introduced into that country iron swords and a P tongue, which, owing to their having mingled with Iranian neighbours in the steppe, retained marked affinities with that group of languages, especially in connection with weapons and other warlike materials.
The remainder divided, the larger group pushing up the Danube valley towards Ulm and Sigmaringen where they adopted the Celtic speech of their subjects, but labialising the Qs. The smaller group made themselves masters of North Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, and like their fellows adopted the language of the country, which was allied to Latin, but with the usual changes.
It was the latter group which was the first to move, either across the Adriatic or to the north-west and then over the Predil pass into the Friuli. Though they introduced their culture among the Veneti they did not supplant their language, but they pushed on across the Po valley, destroying the Terramara settlements and dispersing their inhabitants to Etruria, Latium and the region around Tarentum. They settled in the plain to the north of the Apennines, with their headquarters at Felsina or Bononia, and gradually conquered all the peninsula except Etruria, the Greek colonies and the lands occupied by the Latin tribes. It is doubtful whether these Kimri who invaded Italy were ever known to themselves by one name, but to others they were summed up as Ombri or Umbri. Later, as we have seen, one of their tribes, the Sabines, issuing by night from Amiternum, displaced some of the Latin tribes from the region around Reatæ, whence the dispossessed Latins departed towards the mouth of the Tiber. Here some of them coalesced with Terramara refugees, who had erected a dry terramara on a hill-top beside the river, and to this hill they gave the name of one of their abandoned cities, Palatium, so that it became mons palatinus. Later, when it had been freshly laid out and surrounded by a wall, it was called Rome.