The Scythians have not only a great abhorrence of all foreign customs, but each province seems unalterably tenacious of its own.[d]
THE CIMMERIANS
The Cimmerians belong partly to legend, partly to history. We know even less of them than of the Scythians. The name Cimmerians appears in the Odyssey—the fable describes them as dwelling beyond the ocean-stream, immersed in darkness and unblest by the rays of Helios. Of this people as existent we can render no account, for they had passed away, or lost their identity and become subject, previous to the commencement of trustworthy authorities; but they seem to have been the chief occupants of the Tauric Chersonesus (Crimea) and of the territory between that peninsula and the river Tyras (Dniester), at the time when the Greeks first commenced their permanent settlements on those coasts in the seventh century B.C. The numerous localities which bore their name, even in the time of Herodotus, after they had ceased to exist as a nation—as well as the tombs of the Cimmerian kings then shown near the Tyras—sufficiently attest this fact; and there is reason to believe that they were (like their conquerors and successors the Scythians) a nomadic people, mare-milkers, moving about with their tents and herds, suitably to the nature of those unbroken steppes which their territory presented, and which offered little except herbage in profusion. Strabo tells us (on what authority we do not know) that they, as well as the Treres and other Thracians, had desolated Asia Minor more than once before the time of Ardys, and even earlier than Homer.[c] Historical knowledge of the Cimmerians may be briefly summed up:
About 660 B.C. the Assyrian empire was mightier than ever. A brother of the king ruled in Babylon; the host of petty princes in Egypt were tributary; Syria, Mesopotamia, the eastern mountain lands, and even the frontiers of Armenia and Asia Minor had been directly incorporated with the empire. There seemed to be no reason to fear a dangerous uprising anywhere. A few decades later the proud structure had disappeared from the earth. Though the conquered nations had contributed in part to its fall, both the first impulse and the decisive blows were given from without by a great migration of nations. We find the evident effects of them everywhere; but their course in detail is almost completely veiled in darkness.
The first great wandering started from the northern coast of the Black Sea. About the eighth century the Scythian Scoloti, one of the Iranian nomadic tribes, ostensibly themselves crowded out by the Massagetæ, crossed the Volga and the Don, and drove the Cimmerians out of their abode. Apparently a remnant of the original population remained in the Crimea (this name is itself derived from that of the Cimmerians); but the great mass left home with wives and children. In all probability they went over the Danube into Thrace, being joined by Thracian tribes on the way; and the passage of the Thynians and Bithynians across the Bosporus, and their settlement in the ancient territory of the Bebrykians (as far as the Sangarius), are also connected with these movements.
About 700 B.C. the Cimmerians, together with the Thracian tribes that had joined them, invaded Asia Minor, devastating and plundering the land far and wide. It was a migration like that of the northern tribes which passed through Syria in the twelfth century, and that of the Galatians into Asia Minor in the third century, who ravaged there just as the Cimmerians did. The invading tribes were doubtless accompanied by wives and children, and carried all their possessions with them.
The isolated notices of the invasion which are all that we possess cannot be determined chronologically. Aristotle records that Antandrus, the Lelegian city on the southern slope of Mount Ida, was in the possession of the Cimmerians for a hundred years. Thracians are also said to have occupied Abydos before its colonisation from Miletus.
They also made their way farther to the east. Sinope is called the principal seat of the Cimmerians; they are said to have slain here the leader of the Milesian settlement, Abrondas (?). When they entered Phrygia, it is said, the last king, Midas, the son of Gordius, killed himself by drinking the blood of a bull. After that the Phrygian kingdom disappears from history.
From here, then, they presumably first came into contact with the Assyrians. King Esarhaddon tells, before his Cilician campaign, of a fight in the unknown district of Khubushna with “the Teuspa of Gimir [Hebrew Gomer], … whose dwelling is far.” This battle, the scene of which can only be sought in Cappadocia, must be put about 675 B.C.