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CIMMERIANS AND SCYTHIANS

by

Brig.-Gen. W. H.
Fasken, C.B.

PREFACE

THE accompanying notes on “Cimmerians and Scythians” are largely the outcome
of the studies during this century—on this particular line—of Mr. H. A. Marchant
(171 Waldegrave Road, Brighton 6), whose work, Monumental Facts versus Historical Fiction, was
published by R. Banks & Son, Fleet Street, in
1909.

The original summary of those studies, with some additions and notes of my
own, I submitted to suitable authorities for criticism, and this paper is the
result of further research, suggested by their kindly advice and help.

I have found the article, “Kimmerier,” by Lehmann-Haupt, in Pauly’s Real-Encyclopädie der classischen
Altertumswissenschaften, Vol 21, 1921 (revised edition) most
helpful. I wish to thank Mr. C. J. Gadd of the
British
Museum for arranging to get me an
accurate translation, from the German, of this article (69 folio pages), and for
translating the quotations from the classics therein himself. Extracts and
paraphrases from this article I have marked (L.H.).

I have also made use of:

Higher Criticism and the Monuments (Sayce).

Scythians and Greeks (Minns).

The Fall of
Nineveh (Gadd).

Assyria and Babylonia
(Pinches).

Ancient Geography (Bunbury).

The Ancient History of the Near East
(Hall).

Historians’ History of the World (Vols. I, II and XXVII).

Mesopotamia (Delaporte).

Problems in
Biblical and Mesopotamian Ethnography (Gair).

W. H. FASKEN

CIMMERIANS AND SCYTHIANS

CIMMERIA

The name Kimmerioi is mentioned once, and once only, in the Odyssey of Homer.
On this solitary mention of the name it is said that the Cimmerii (Latin form;
Cimmerians, English form) were a very ancient people, numerous and well known,
and could not be of Israelitish origin.

Homer lived about the ninth century B.C., but the poems were probably not
written down till a later date (The
World’s Great Books, Vol.
III, pp. 1871, 1875). The Kimmerioi of Homer were
located by him in a land “covered in mist and cloud, nor does the sun, shining,
look down on them with his rays, either when he mounts to the starry heaven, nor
when he turns again to earth from heaven, but doleful night is spread over
wretched folk” (Odyssey xi. 14 ff) . To get there, Ulysses—who had been sent by
the enchantress Circe to consult the dead in Hades—set out from the Isle of
Circe, which was itself a long way west of Greece, in the Mediterranean Sea. To
reach it they went to “Oceanus.” In the plan of “The World according to
Hecatleus,” in the History of Ancient Geography, by E. H.
Bunbury, Oceanus was the encircling sea that ran round all known lands and seas
and was outside the Mediterranean Sea, beyond the
Pillars of Hercules. The obvious inference is that
Cimmeria, which was over realms and seas, and on a distant shore from the “Isle
of Circe”—to which Ulysses returned by the aid of Zephyrus (a west wind)—was
certainly not in the Black Sea.

William O’Connor Morris (“Ireland,” Cambridge Historical Series, 1896, p. 2) and Ridgeway (“Early Days
of Greece,” Ency. Brit.,
xi Edit., Vol. V)
both agree in the probability that Cimmerii, and Cimbri are one race. This
certainly points to Homer’s Cimmeria being in N.W. Europe. This, too, is confirmed in Dictionary of Classic Antiquities, by Dr. Oskar Seiffert, translated from
the German by Nettleship and Sandys,
1908: “The realm of Hades . . . in the Odyssey, its entrance, and outer courts,
are on the western side of the river Oceanus. . . . Here is the abode of the
Cimmerians, veiled in darkness and cloud, where the sun never shines.”

Duncker, in his History of Greece (Bentley, 1886, p. 193) says: “On
the northern shores of the Black Sea the Milesian sailors
found a much more severe winter than in their own home . . . and thought they
had found the end of the world, and the land of the wintry Cimmerians. . . . When, beyond the Black
Sea, a new expanse of water (the Sea of Azov)
disclosed itself, the mariners thought that they had at last reached Oceanus,
and the entrance to Maeotis received the name of Cimmerian Bosphorus.”
Especially as this seemed to be confirmed by: “on the western side of the Black
Sea lay, not far from the mouth of the Danube, an island, the white limestone
cliffs of which shone from afar: the Greeks called it ‘The White Island
(Leuke)’.”

A similar geographical blunder led our first Atlantic navigators to term the
American aboriginal an “Indian,” because they were under the impression that
they had sailed round the world and had come upon
India.

It looks as if the mythological Kimmerioi of Homer were in reality residents
of the White
Island north-west from
Greece, and
probably not, at that time, occupying the Crimea in the
east. There is, moreover, no mention of the Cimmerians among the people of Thrace,
nor in Scythia about the
Crimea, nor on any part of the Black
Sea until the seventh century B.C., when they are FOUND on the south
side of that water.

Lehmann-Haupt, in his article, “Kimmerier” (referred to in the preface),
argues that “Homer knew nothing actually of the Cimmerian invasions, but only
knew the Cimmerians in their northern homes” (§ 50). “Homer’s description does
not apply in the least to conditions in the Crimea, but
has in mind the long winter nights in the north to which the
long summer days correspond.” In confirmation, he cites Niebuhr (Bell.
Goth II, XV, p. 205), “where Precopius on the
basis of personal communications, made by reliable authorities from among the
Heruli (or Eruli), who still maintained connexion with those of their tribe who
had remained in Scandinavia, gives an intimate account of forty days’ light in
summer and forty days’ darkness in winter” (§ 55). Finsler’s Homer (1914) p. 25
says: “It has long been recognised that Odyssey x, lines 82-85, refer to the
long summer days {NOTE: “. . . we came to
(line 82) Telepylus of the Laestrygonians (83) where herdsman calls to herdsman
as he drives in his flock, and the other answers as he drives his forth. There a
man who never slept could have (85) earned a double wage, one by herding cattle
. . .” (Loeb Classical Library).} . . . vice versa,
the account of the country of the Cimmerians which was plunged in eternal night
supplies definite evidence of the long northern winter night; this country must
surely be Jutland, the Cimmerian peninsula” (§ 56).
“Homer’s description therefore does not fit the Cimmerians. It may well apply,
however, to the home of the Cimbri. . . .” (§ 57.) When, therefore, the Cimbri penetrated from their
northern homes as far as Italy and showed themselves to be a tribe of marauding
nomads, this circumstance led to the regarding of the Cimmerians of the Crimea
as a scattered branch of the Cimbri . . .” From Strabo
(VII, 2, 2. C. 293) it is learned that
Poseidonius also conjectured that “the Cimmerian Bosporus was named after them,
being equivalent to ‘Cimbrian,’ the Greeks naming the Cimbri ‘Kimmerioi’ (§
58).” A similar view is expressed in Plutarch (Caius Marius in the Vitae
Parallelae):
“Others, however, say that the Cimmerians who were first known to the
ancient Greeks were not a large part of the entire people . . . whereas the
largest and most warlike part of the people dwelt at the confines of the earth,
along the outer sea . . . From these regions, then, these Barbarians sallied
forth against Italy, being called at first Cimmerians, and then, not
inappropriately, Cimbri” (§ 58).

Sharon Turner, Arnold, Niebuhr, and Lappenburg all say
that Cimbri and Cimmerii were identical. Lehmann-Haupt cites Bury in The
Homeric and Historic Kimmerians
(Klio VI, 79-88), who discusses the extraordinary account by
Procopius of the island of
Brittia, based on local accounts,
which he inserted as a digression in his Gothic Wars (IV, 20). To this island the souls of
the dead are rowed over by inhabitants of the mainland facing it, who are
summoned to the task by nocturnal knocking at their doors. This spirit-island is
clearly characteristic, judging from the details concerning its inhabitants
(“and the names of these nations are Angili, Frissones, and Brittones, the last
named from the island itself”), Angles, Frisians and Britons. The details,
however, stopped Procopius (as Bury points out) from relating them to the
Britain he knew so well, and caused him to place this “double” of Britain
between that country and Thule (Scandinavia: Bury 80, 3) (L.
H., § 62).

Lehmann-Haupt concludes his long analysis (18 folio pages) of “The Cimmerians
in Homer and other Myth”: “Thus the information relating to the Cimmerians in
Odyssey XI only lacks any proper connection if, with Finsler, who himself relates it to Jutland, one
places it among the connected complex of data, all of which point to the
Black Sea” (§ 65).

There is, however, a considerable volume of opinion that Homeric geography
reflects Ionian geographical knowledge of the colonising period in Pontus, but
others regard most of the Homeric statements as reflecting an earlier phase of
navigation, and as mainly referring to regions west of Greece. The description
of the Ocean Stream certainly looks like an account of the tidal currents at
Gibraltar, and it is quite probable that early
adventurers passed out into the Atlantic, and reached a
cloudy and fog-infested climate.

THE SO-CALLED INDO-EUROPEAN
MIGRATION

Rogers, in Babylonia and
Assyria, says: “In the reign of Esarhaddon there was felt, for the first
time, in all its keenness, the danger of an overflow of the land by Indo-European
migrations.”

After giving the Scythians’ own account of their traditional history (H. IV,
5-7) and the Greek account (H. IV, 8-10) Herodotus continues (H. IV, 11 and 12):
“There is also another different story in which I am more inclined to put
faith than in any other.” Not a very convincing method of introducing a
statement of so-called history, not contemporary, but put together two or three
centuries after the events occurred, and aptly described by Minns as “a confused
account of happenings which it is almost impossible to credit.”

The story is familiar; the nomad Scythians, inhabiting
Asia, being hard pressed in war by the Massagetae, fled
away across the Araxes (here the
Volga) to the Cimmerian country
(Crimea and South Russia). On
their approach the Cimmerians got frightened. The King’s party wanted to fight,
the people wanted to retreat. They then divided into two equal forces and fought
together. “All the Royal tribe were slain, and the
people buried them near the river Tyras, where their grave is still to be seen.
Then the rest of the Cimmerians departed, and the Scythians, on their coming,
took possession of a deserted land.”

Then a strange thing happened; the Cimmerians (excluding, presumably, the
Royal tribe who had all been slain) fled, not in continuation of the line of the
momentum of the attack, that is from east to west, but
back, west to east, along the same track by which the attack had come. Then the
Cimmerians turned sharply to the right, by the coast of the Black
Sea, while their pursuers, the Scythians, over-shot them and keeping
the Caucasus on their right, proceeded inland and poured
into Media.

Edward Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, from Historians’ History
(II, p. 140), evidently
sees the absurdity of all this, and says: “About the eighth century, the
Scythian Scoloti, one of the Iranian nomadic tribes, ostensibly crowded out by
the Massagetae, crossed the Volga and the Don, and drove the
Cimmerians out of their abode. . . . In all probability they went over the
Danube into
Thrace,
being joined by Thracian tribes on the way” (my italics).

Bunbury (Ancient Geography,
I, p. 208) says: “It seems impossible to believe the story (by
Herodotus), thus told, or to connect it with the Cimmerian invasion of
Lower Asia.”

Again, Niebuhr has shown that there is great intrinsic improbability in
Herodotus’ narrative. He also thought that, they (the Cimmerians) must have come
to the Thracian Bosphorus, for they must have got into Asia
Minor somehow, to attack
Lydia.

Minns (Scythians and Greeks, 1913, p. 41) writes: “Mullenhoff (D.A. III,
p. 19, ff.) supposes that there never were any Cimmerians at all north of the
Euxine, that they are only known in Asia Minor, that their name was
traditionally assigned to the earthworks and settlements about the Bosphorus,
just as now, earthworks in Eastern Europe are assigned to Trajan, far beyond the
limits of the Roman Empire, and that they were really invaders from Thrace or
the parts beyond. . . . It is hard to think that Herodotus simply invented all
the story of the Cimmerians coming from the north side of the Pontus, though,
even so, it is at first sight difficult to see precisely how things happened;
how if the Cimmerians fled south-east, there should have been their Kings’ tombs
on the Tyras (Dniester). . . .”

That in the eighth century B.C., the Cimmerians, after losing half their
total strength about the Crimea, and after being pursued by the Scythians
through the Caucasus, should revive to such an extent that their pressure on
Urartu—a strong state which had lately defeated even the Assyrians under Sargon
(L.H., § 10)—was sufficient to cause (according to Lehmann-Haupt, § 9) their
great King Rusas I to commit suicide, is beyond the limit of credence. The more
one looks at a modern map of south-west Asia the more
fantastic the Herodotus story appears, especially if one uses—as the famous
Marquis of Salisbury advised for such studies—a large scale map.

THE ASSYRIAN
CAPTIVITIES

It is to be noted that accurately dated history, in these parts, commences
with the “limmu” of 893 B.C., the “limmu” being the magistrate appointed for the
year, and after whom the year was named. (Ancient History of the Near East,
Hall, p. 445.)

The first captivity of
Israel (Reuben,
Gad and half-tribe of Manasseh) was in 734 B.C. (cuneiform records of Tiglath
Pilezar) and not in 740 B.C. (Ussher). They were brought to Halah, Habor, Hara
and to the river of Gozan (Gozan was, probably, a district stretching across
Upper Mesopotamia) where, before long, they must have been coming into contact
with the fighting between Assyria and Urartu and her ally Minnai (Ararat and
Minni of Jer. li, 27) during the years 719-714 B.C. (L.H., § 7-9).

The second captivity of
Israel (the
remainder of the ten tribes) was carried out when Sargon captured
Samaria, after a three years’ siege
in 722 B.C. (Assyrian
monuments), and 721 (Ussher). Josephus Bk. ix, ch. 14 is headed: “How
Shalmanezer took Samaria by force and TRANSPLANTED THE TEN TRIBES INTO MEDIA, and brought the
nation of the Cuthæans into their country”; also in Section I of the same he
says: “Shalmanezer, the King of Assyria . . . besieged Samaria three years and
took it by force in the ninth year of the reign of Hoshea (actually taken by
Sargon after Shalmanezer’s death) . . . and quite demolished the government of
the Israelites, and transplanted ALL THE PEOPLE into Media and Persia, and
when he had removed these people out of this their land, he transplanted other
nations out of Cuthah (a place so called for there is still a river of that name
in Persia) into Samaria, and into the country of the Israelites. So the Ten
Tribes of Israelites were removed out
of Judæa.”

It is necessary to draw special attention to this because there is reiterated
argument that the removal was only partial.

From Problems in Biblical and Mesopotamian Ethnography
and Geography, by G. R.
Gair, we get the following:

(Page 12) “In the account of the first deportation of Israelites there is no
mention of Media at all. At the second and more important captivity the cities
of the Medes are distinctly mentioned. Yet Media was not conquered till about
715 B.C. In that year Sargon conquered the Medes as far as the
Elburz
Ranges
(Mt.
Demavend) and received the tribute of
28 chieftains. Again in 713 B.C., 46 chiefs were taken.”

(Page 17) Inscription of Khorsabad translated by
Oppert. “I besieged and occupied the town of
Samaria and took 27,280 of its inhabitants captive.”

(Page 18) If the ruling caste of the
Kingdom of
Samaria only were deported it seems
strange that the Assyrians went to such pains to repeople the land. We read in
2 Kings xvii, 24: “And the King
of Assyria brought men from Babylon and from Cuthah and from Ava, and from
Hamath, and from Sepharvaim and placed them in the cities of Samaria instead of
the children of Israel,” while on the columns of Khorsabad (Records of the Past,
translated by Dr. J. Oppert) referring to the year after the fall of
Samaria we read: “I marched against the tribes of Tasidi, of Ibadidi, of
Marsemani, of Hayapai, of the land (of Arabia). I pulled them out of their
dwelling and I placed them in the town of
Samaria.” From this inscription we
learn that seven years after the fall of
Samaria peoples from very distant
lands were being deported to that city—supplementary to those catalogued by the
Bible. (Page 20.) Also in connection with the
second revolt of Hamath in 715 B.C., in which Arpad, Simyra,
Damascus, and
Samaria, were involved, even if all
Israel were not
deported at the fall of Samaria in
721 B.C., the chances for the nationality surviving after this further result
were very slight. (Page 19).

In an article by Mr. H. A. Marchant, “The Riddle of History Solved” in the
Banner of Israel, XXXIII,
2nd June, 1909, we
read: “It must be remembered that when the Jews returned from
Babylon they did not accuse any of
the mixed medley who opposed them of being their brethren, Ephraim-Israel.”

The reason why the
monumental inscriptions do not mention any vast number of captives is that:

(1) Esarhaddon (681-668
B.C.) wilfully defaced Tiglath-Pilezer’s (745-727 B.C.) inscriptions, but such
as remain confirm the Bible.

(2) Shalmanezer (727-722
B.C.) was too busy fighting during his short reign to write inscriptions.

(3) The whole Phoenician
mainland was in revolt, and when the promised help from
Egypt did not
mature, they all, except Samaria,
submitted to Shalmanezer, but no record of captives was kept.

Further, the Bible says (2 Kings xvii, 18): “THERE
WAS NONE LEFT BUT THE TRIBE OF
JUDAH ONLY.”

It is also argued that when the Bible says (2 Kings xvii, 6 and xviii, 11) “in the cities of the Medes,” it
does not mean what it says.

We may therefore assume that large numbers of ten-tribed northern
Israel were
gathering, from 734 B.C. onwards, and multiplying exceedingly, according to
prophecy, about the Armenian plateau and the Zagros mountains. This is confirmed too in Tobit
VII, where it appears that certain
Israelites of the captivity, in
Nineveh, came to
Ecbatana. Also Diodorus (II, ch. 3)
refers to two colonies—which he calls Scythians, but evidently from the words
“despicable for their mean original” were captive Israelites—one out of
Assyria, the other out of Media.

In Aids to the Student
of the Holy Bible (Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1880), written by
many well known writers of that day (including the late Prof. Sayce), map 8
shows that the settlement of the Israelite exiles of the second captivity is
located in Media, in the very spot where the Umman-Manda
revolted in the days of Esarhaddon, after the Israelites had been located there
for about forty years. This will be dealt with later (see p. 22 last four
lines).

CAMPAIGNS AROUND
ASSYRIA AND IN
ASIA MINOR

From Klauber (cited by Lehmann-Haupt) we learn that Esarhaddon (who reigned
681-668 B.C.) addressed an appeal to the sun-god for help, when threatened by
Kashteriti (Manda) and Mamiti-Arsu (Mede), as brought to light by Knudson
(Leipzig, 1893), and by Klauber twenty years later.

(L.H., § 19): “Will Kashtariti and his warriors, or the warriors of the
Gimirrai (whom Lehmann-Haupt definitely equates with the Cimmerians) or the
warriors of the Media, or the warriors of the Mannai, or any enemy whatsoever,
succeed in their plan?” The “plan” is the taking of the Assyrian city of
Kishassu by storm. This with Kartam
and five other cities “on the eastern borders of Assyria”
(L.H., 19) was taken, according to the Babylonian Chronicle, during the invasion
of Assyria by the Cimmerians (Article in Bab. Assyr.
Geschichte by G. P. Tiele. Historians’ History, I, p. 423.) This campaign took
place in the district of Khubushkia (between the upper Zab and the
Tigris. Sayce; and C. P. Tiele, Bab. Ass. Gesch.), circa 677 B.C. (formerly given as 673 B.C., but Lehmann-Haupt gives
weighty argument for the earlier date). On the other hand,
Hall (The Ancient History of the Near East, p. 495) says that “the war
lasted for several years, ending in 672 B.C. with the reassured inviolability of
the northern frontier.” Esarhaddon’s appeal to the sun-god at the threat of
“revolt” {NOTE: It should be noted—from
Higher Criticism, Sayce, 6th
edit., p. 485—that the words used by Kashtariti,
in writing to Mamiti-Arsu, were “Let us revolt,” showing that the Cimmerians
were Assyrian subjects at the time, and were not, as has been supposed, taking
part in any so-called
Indo-European invasion.} by the Cimmerians and their allies was due to
fright, and, by giving an Assyrian Princess in marriage, he formed an alliance with Bartatua, King of the Ishguzai (Asguza, Ashkenaz,
Sayce, Higher Criticism, p. 484) with whose help the invasion was
finally defeated and Teushpa (Teispes, the reputed ancestor of Cyrus and Darius)
was killed (L.H., § 17).

Let us pause to consider who all these various people were:

Hall (op. cit., p. 495)
speaks of “The nomad tribes of the Gimirrai. These, the Gomer of the Hebrews, and the Kimmerians of
the Greeks.”

Sayce (op. cit., pp. 483-486)
speaks of “The Kingdom of Minni adjoined that of Ararat (Urartu) on
the south-east. Ararat, as we have seen, was the name given by the Assyrians and
Hebrews to the country called Biainas in the native inscriptions, the capital of
which was at Van, while the Minni of Scripture are termed Manna in
the Assyrian text, and Mana in those of Van.”

(Ibid) Saparda was in
Bithynia and
Galatia
(cuneiform tablet, 275 B.C.,
Dr. Strassmaier). Here was the
land of Sepharad in which was the captivity of
Jerusalem (Obadiah, verse 20). This contradicts Hall (op. cit.,
p. 483), who writes: “We are
not told that they were carried into captivity, but were regarded as spoil.”

The true Medes (Mada)
of the Assyrian inscription were, according to Sayce (Historians History, II, p. 584) “the Kurdish tribes
who lived eastward of Assyria, and whose territory
extended as far as the Caspian Sea. They were for the
most part Indo-European in language and Aryan in descent, {NOTE: According to modern ideas, there is an Aryan
language, but not an Aryan race.} and lived like the Greeks in small
states, each of which obeyed a city lord of its own.”

The Umman-Manda. A general designation
for nomadic northmen (umman . .
horde; manda . . full, numerous). Gadd in Fall of
Nineveh (p. 14,
footnote), says: “It is certainly used of the
Cimmerians, though apparently not of the actual Scythians (Asguzai, Isguzai).”

After this campaign, about the Zagros mountains and the Armenian plateau, the Cimmerians under Tugdamme (the Lygdamis of
Strabo), who, like Teushpa, appears as an Umman-Manda, engaged in a further
series of battles in Cappadocia and Cilicia, being finally driven across the
Halys (circa 673 B.C.).
Then began the campaign of the Cimmerians against
Phrygia, which they destroyed (L.H., § 28), and then
against Lydia
under Gyges (Assyrian “Gugu”), who first made his allegiance to Asshur-banipal,
and then revolted. Sardis was taken
by the Cimmerians, and Gyges killed (circa 652 B.C.) (L.H.). The Cimmerians then attacked the Greek coast cities
in conjunction with their related stock, the Treres, who had come across the
straits from the west, as stated by Callinus. Subsequently, the Cimmerians were
driven out of Western Asia Minor by Gyges’ son, Ardys,
and his grandson, Alyattes, and were met and defeated by the Assyrian army of
Syria, about the
Cilician Gates, when Tugdamme (Lygdamis) was killed and
his son Sandakshatra became their leader (Hall, op. cit., p. 509). Alyattes
ended his six years’ contest with the Cimmerians (Manda, as shown below) by
giving his daughter Aryanis to Astyages, the son of Cyaxares. (See below.)

Prior to the death of Ashur-banipal two invasions of Assyria had taken place:
one under Phraortes (circa
634 B.C.), which was defeated, and the other under Cyaxares
(Uvakh-shatara)—who reigned 634-594 B.C., or by another calculation 625-585
B.C.—(circa 630 B.C.),
in which Nineveh was besieged, but rescued by Scythians under Madyes, son of
Protothyes (the latter considered to be the same as Bartatua, King of the
Ishguzai) (H. II, 102 ff.).

From Gadd, Fall of Nineveh, we learn that Nabopolassar, Viceroy of
Babylon, revolted from Assyria some time between 620 and
617 B.C. In the summer of 614 B.C., Cyaxares marched upon
Nineveh, an
alliance was made between Media (Manda; see below) and
Babylon, formally sealed by the
marriage between Cyaxares’ daughter, Amytis, with Nebuchadnezzar. Thereby,
incidentally, Astyages (Cyaxares’ son; see above) became brother-in-law of
Nebuchadnezzar (Nabopolassar’s son). During 613 B.C. there
was a pause in the siege when the Medes (Manda) were engaged with Bactrian
Scythians (Scoloti), but these were eventually persuaded to join the
Manda-Babylonian alliance, and in July-August 612 B.C.
Nineveh fell.

MEDES
AND UMMAN-MANDA

Sayce (Higher
Criticism and the
Monuments, p. 519,
ff.) also deals with this question of the Medes and the Manda: “If it is
startling to learn that Cyrus was in reality an Elamite Prince, it is equally
startling to find that Istuvegu (Astyages) was King, not of the Medes, but of
the Manda. . . . Teuspa (Teispes), the leader of the Gimirrai, is called a Manda
by Esarhaddon, and an inscription of Assur-banipal, recently discovered by Mr.
Strong, returns thanks to the Assyrian gods for the defeat of that ‘limb of
Satan,’ Tuktammu, of the Manda, or Duktammu (possibly the Lygdamis of Strabo),
who led the Cimmerians into Kalikia (Cilicia), from thence they afterwards
marched westward and burned Sardis. At all events, we must see in him a
forerunner, if not a predecessor, of Istuvegu (the Astyages of the Greeks), who
governed the Manda in Ekbatana. Ekbatana, the modern
Hamadan, called Achmetha in the Old
Testament (Ezra vi, 2), the Hangmatana of the Persian
inscriptions, had been built in the territory of the old
kingdom of
Ellipi. Ellipi had been tributary to
Sargon, and in the time of Sennacherib we find it in alliance with
Elam. After this
it disappears from history. The Manda had descended upon it and made it the
chief city of their power. It would seem that the Manda of Ekbatana were the
Scythians of classical history. As we have seen, Teuspa the Kimmerian and his
people are termed ‘Manda’ by Esarhaddon and in the inscriptions of Darius; the
Gimirra Umurgah of the Babylonian text, correspond with the Saka Humavarka of
the Persian text. The Saka Humavarka are the Amyrgian
Sakae of Herodotus (VII, 64) who, he tells
us, were the Scythians of the Greeks. Totally distinct from the ‘Manda’ were the Mada, or Medes. Their land lay to the north-east of
Ekbatana, and extended as far as the shores of the Caspian
Sea. . . . When, in the generations that preceded Darius Hystaspes,
Cyrus became the founder of the Persian Empire the Medes
and the Manda were confounded one with the other. Astyages, the Suzerain of
Cyrus, was transformed into a Mede, and the city of
Ekbatana into the capital of a
Median Empire The illusion has lasted down to our own age. . . . It was not
until the discovery of the monuments of Nabonidus and Cyrus that the truth at
last came to light, and it was found that the history we had so long believed
was founded upon a philological mistake.”

It seems a pity that the late Professor Sayce did not go a step further to
state definitely that it was neither the Medes, nor the Umman-Manda of Abraham’s
time, that destroyed Assyria, but the new people Cimmerii, who had ousted the
Umman-Manda from their former ruling position in Media and had become in the
eyes of neighbouring countries, not in their own, Umman-Manda by affiliation.

CHRONOLOGY

The question of dates is important in connection with the Herodotus story.

The invasion of the Scythians (according to L.H., § 6) must have taken place
twenty-eight years before the fall of
Nineveh. This event is now fixed
definitely at 612 B.C., so that puts the commencement of the Scythian invasion
at 640 B.C., and as the Scythians were (according to the same story) pursuing
the Cimmerians at the time, the Cimmerians can only just have preceded them in
their flight over the Caucasus.

But, according to accurate dating by “Limmu” (see page II):

1.—It will be seen, from page 10, that the Cimmerians had exerted such
pressure on Urartu, about 715 B.C., as to be responsible (according to L.H., §
10, 11) for the suicide of Rusas I.

2.—The defeat and death of “Teushpa, the Cimmerian, a
nomad, whose country is far distant, I slew and destroyed in the district of
Hubushna (Khubashna, Khubushkia) with all his troop” in 677 B.C. (See page 14.)

From this it is apparent that the Cimmerians were fighting hard in Urartu and
on the north-east border of Assyria, thirty-seven to
seventy-five years before the date about which (according to the Herodotus
story) they were being pursued over the Caucasus by the
Scythians.

It is also to be noted that Lehmann-Haupt states that the Gimirrai, whom he
definitely equates with the Cimmerians, never appear in conjunction with the
Ishguzai (Scythians), but always together with other northerners, the Mannai,
Sapardai and Medians, as if allied, or at least making war in common, with them.

GOMER

Another important question is this: Was Gomer of Genesis x the same people as
the Cimmerians of later times? Scholars seem to think so. But is this justified?
Gomer, the wife of Hosea (Hosea i), even though a wife of whoredom, is unlikely
to be a descendant of Japhet, as she is intended to represent backsliding
Israel—in the parable of the relation of Yahweh to Israel—and therefore must be
reasonably expected to be a descendant of Shem, and not of Japhet. It is also
remarkable that this Hosea-Gomer seed was placed, after the ten tribes had been
taken captive by the Assyrians, in the very localities where the Cimmerians
revolted.

CIMMERIA
AND
SAMARIA

The northern kingdom of
Israel was called
Samaria (Ussher 975 B.C.—see 1 Kings
xiii, 32) long before Omri built its capital city
“Shomeron,” which the Greek Septuagint renders “Samareia.” Josephus, in Bk.
VIII, Chap. XII, 5, says that Omri called the city Samarion and that the Greeks
turned it into Samaria. The Bible
says that Omri called it Shomeron (1 Kings xvi, 24
margin).

The fear of the Syrians caused continuous emigration of
northern Israel
to the Isles of the West in Benhadad’s time (1 Kings xv, 20), and, when “the Lord began to cut
Israel short,”
in Hazael’s time (2 Kings x, 32). Further, northern Dan seems to have
disappeared before the advent of the Assyrians, as narrated in 2 Kings xv, 29. These movements were probably effected by means of
the maritime trade for tin, etc., through the
Mediterranean to the Scilly Isles and
Cornwall, long before the actual
captivities took place.

Rev. George Cooke, D.D., Regius Professor of Hebrew at
Oxford, in an article in the
Ency. Brit. 14th edition (XVII, 769) says: “A vivid description of the
Phoenicians’ trade at the time of
Tyre’s prosperity is given by
Ezekiel (xxvii, 12-25). . . . Between
Israel and
Phoenicia the
relations naturally were close: the former provided certain necessaries of life
and received in exchange articles of luxury and splendour (ibid. 16-18). . . .
It was the trade with Tarshish, i.e. the region of Tartessus in S.W. Spain,
which contributed most to the Phoenician’s wealth. . . . From Gadeira (now
Cadiz) the Sidonian ships ventured
further on the ocean and drew tin from the mines of N.W. Spain, or from the
richer deposits in the Cassiterides, i.e. the
Tin
Islands, now known as the Scillies.”

Also from an article by H. J. E. Peake, President of the Royal
Anthropological Institute of Britain (ibid., Vol. II, p. 248, “Archæology, Trade
Routes”): “From Sicily there are indications of trade in various directions . .
. as far as the coasts of Spain and Portugal. There is even reason for believing
that from Portugal a further line of coastal trade ran to Brittany and the
Channel Islands, and ultimately to Ireland and the west of Britain, as well as
to the amber coast of Denmark. These gold deposits and the tin lodes of
Cornwall, as well as certain copper
and, perhaps, gold deposits in
Wales were the
lures that tempted the first bronze traders to these countries. Thus it was that
within a very few centuries after the first use of this alloy (2200 B.C., ibid.,
p. 247) bronze was brought to the British Isles” (ibid., p. 252).

Further evidence of this westward movement is found in the existence of stone
circles, similar to that of Stonehenge, at ports of call
north and south of the Mediterranean, in
Spain, in
Brittany, and in about two hundred
places in
Britain.

Also from The British Museum Guide to Early Iron Age Antiquities
(1925) we learn that M. Salomon Reinach thinks that the Phrygians were here
(Britain) about
850 B.C., even before the Phoenicians. This is supported by the evidence of the
“Scyphus Cup,” said to have been found in the Thames between Putney and
Hammersmith, which has peculiarities marking it as coming from the neighbourhood
of Troy between 1000 and 700
B.C. (ibid., pp. 90, 91). While The British Museum Guide to the Antiquities
of the Bronze Age, 1920 (p.
151) indicates that the oldest route of intercourse between east and west was
from Hissarlik (second city of Troy) before 2000 B.C., through Spain, Portugal
and France (especially Brittany) to the British Isles and northern Europe.

CIMMERIANS
AND SCYTHIANS

It is a pity that scholars—when giving us history from the monuments—instead
of putting the monumental name in the text of a translation and what they
think it meant in a note, frequently put “Scythian” or “Barbarian” in the
text of the book or in the translation of the cylinder instead of the actual
name used.

In a paper of this sort there is no opportunity to give the requisite
background, in detail, for an examination of this question, but in chapters
VII and VIII of my book, Israel’s Racial
Origin and Migrations (1934), authority is given for the tradition that the
early colonies of Greece and Phrygia were furnished by Israelites from
Egypt—principally by the tribe of Dan—but Zara Judah cannot be excluded. This is merely to indicate the idea that at a very early date,
(between 1500 and 750 B.C.) the shores of the Aegean and
the Black Sea were largely populated with
Israel people,
many of whom had probably never even been into
Palestine. By the time that the
Cimmerian drama opens these Israelites would be known as Ionians and Thracians.

It really does seem as if, in the endeavour to get rid of the Old Testament,
modern critics omit to take any account of Israelites who were placed in
captivity in Assyria from 734 B.C. and onwards and in the
cities of the Medes from circa 715 B.C. onwards. These ten tribes of
Israel, whose fighting strength was over a million in David’s time (1 Chron.
xxi, 5, as compared with 800,000 by 2 Sam. xxiv, 9) must in the subsequent
centuries have multiplied enormously, till Josephus (xi, 5) could describe
them—at the period after the return of the Jews (Judah, Benjamin and Levi) from
the Babylonian captivity (518 B.C.)—as being beyond the
Euphrates, where their numbers had increased almost beyond
credibility.

Where were they and what were they now named? because from Ezek. xx, 39, it is obvious that the
Israel
name—which included “EL,” the name of God—was to be taken away and
Israel was to be
lost in a sea of names. Sir Henry Rawlinson says (in Ancient Monarchies,
II, p. 513) that the
opinion of Herodotus (IV, c. 11, 12) that the Scythians entered Asia in pursuit
of the Cimmerians is childish and may be safely set aside. Is it not possible
that it contains the germ of the actual course of events?

The Israelites were taken into captivity, from 734 B.C. onwards, and placed
partly in Assyria and partly in Media. The Cimmerians are
revealed by the monuments and made known by Rawlinson and Sayce. They are found
in the very localities about Urartu (Ararat) and in the Zagros mountains about
Kar-Kassi, north of Elam, where some of the ten tribes of Israel were placed
during the lifetime of the captives from Samaria (seep. 13, last two lines ff.).
The latter were known by the Assyrians even before their
captivity, as the Bit Khumri, as shown on the Black obelisk of Shalmanezer II
(860-825 B.C.) now in the British
Museum. This name originated from
Omri, who was King of Israel 929-918 B.C. (Ussher) (1 Kings xvi, 23, 28). From the days of Omri they must have been known
to the Assyrians as Khumri, which Pinches shows was actually pronounced Ghomri.

Now Diodorus Siculus, who wrote during the first century B.C. refers, in Bk. II, ch. 3, to two remarkable
colonies among the Scythians, “the one they brought out of Assyria, and settled
in the country lying between Paphlagonia and Pontus: the other one of Media,
which they placed near the river Tanais.”

Danvers (in Israel Redivivus, p. 97) says: “Thus Diodorus Siculus
identifies two colonies amongst the Scythians, who may have been Israelites of
the Assyrian captivity (see p. 13, end of last paragraph but one) and this
appears to suggest that the Israelites of the Assyrian captivity did migrate
from Asia into Europe with the Scythians, and were, for the time being, known by
that name.” Allatius (Allaci, Leone), too, states (ibid., p. 98) that the
districts of
Iberia and
Colchis “were peopled by Israelites from the banks of the
Chaboras.”

This does not infer that the Israelites up to the time of the end of the
Assyrian captivity period (circa
734-669 B.C.—65 years), or even up to the time of the Behistun
inscription (circa 515
B.C.) were known otherwise than as Saka (Persian) and Gimirra (Babylonian) but
it does infer that, later, when the Greek writers gave the general designation
of “Scythian” to all wandering tribes, Herodotus followed suit, and, not knowing
that the Saka (Gimirra) were Kimmerioi, called them Scythians, and also said
that the Persians called all the Scythians Saka, whereas they really called the
Cimmerians Saka. At a later stage, the Israelites were merged in the various
wandering tribes known as Scythians, and became known as such.

Dr. Donaldson in Varronianus (1844), p. 51, remarks that in the immense area to which the ancients gave the name of Scythia
we must distinguish between the Sarmatae or Sauromatae, who were mainly, or to a
large extent, Sclavonian; the Scythae, or Asa-Goths; the Sacae, or Saxons, who
were identical ultimately with the Daci, or Danes; and the Scolotae, or
Asa-Galatae, also called Cimmerii.

From 2 Esdras xiii, 40-46, we learn that the ten tribes took a journey of a
year and a half to Arsareth; Herodotus wrote about the migration of Scythian
people from the south of the Caspian to a country north-west of the Black Sea;
and as neither of them mentions any incursion of other peoples, in the same
direction and to the same districts, it’ is but a natural deduction that both
the accounts refer to the same people, notwithstanding that the one is called
Israelites and the other Scythians.

This does not appear more unreasonable than the tradition (among others)
which Herodotus is “inclined to,” of events which happened two hundred years and
more previous to his date of writing, especially bearing in mind that Herodotus
committed the anachronism of applying the generic term “Scythian” to the
particular people certainly known, at the time he was writing about, as Saka.

The fact seems to be that no Assyrian, Babylonian or Persian wrote
“Scythian.” They wrote Umman-Manda, Zab-Manda, Mada, Gimmirra, Saka. It was the Greeks who introduced the word Scythian. The
days of Assyria,
Babylon and
Persia were all
over and the Greek period was well advanced before you find the Greek name
Scythian on any monumental inscription (Ency. Biblica, Vol IV, p. 4330).

Let us try to clear up this question of names:

1.   From p. 7, Lehmann-Haupt (§ 58)
quotes Strabo VII. 2, 2. C 293, who cites Poseidonius as
saying, “the Cimmerian Bosporus was named after them (Cimbri), being equivalent
to Cimbrian, the Greeks naming the Cimbri ‘Kimmerioi’.”

2.
Rogers (in his
History of Babylonia and Assyria, II, pp. 286-293) says in a note: “The
name Manda in the Babylonian text applies to the same people
that were called Sakae or Scythians by the Greeks.”

3.   C. P. Tiele, in an article from
Babn. Assy. Gesch. (Historians’
History, I, p. 422) says: “Cimmerians or, more accurately, the
Umman-Manda.”

4.   Pinches says that the Manda were
in Media in the time of Abraham. Therefore if the Cimmerians are now the Manda
they must have ousted the Umman-Manda from their former ruling position in Media
and had become in the eyes of neighbouring countries, not in their own,
Umman-Manda by affiliation. Here we have the old story, the conqueror taking the
name of the conquered. As Minns says in Scythian and Greeks, p. 40: “All
history tells us, easily as nations change their language, they change their
names still more easily.”

5.   From p. 14 it will be seen that
Lehmann-Haupt (op. cit., § 19) definitely equates the Gimirrai and the
Cimmerians; and on page 15 Hall (op. cit., p. 495) equates the Gimirrai with
Gomer of the Hebrews and with the Kimmerioi of the Greeks.

6.   From p. 17, Sayce says that Teuspa
or Teispes, the leader of the Gimirrai is called a Manda by Esarhaddon, and he
quotes from the Darius inscription (Behistun) that the Gimirra Umurgah of the
Babylonian text corresponds with the Saka Humavarka of the Persian text. Also that the Mada (or true Medes) were totally distinct from the
Manda.

7.   Finally, Omri built Shomeron, and
the Assyrians wrote Omri as Khumri (as shown on the Black obelisk now in the
British
Museum). Pinches
(in his Assyria and Babylonia, p. 339) says: “Omri was likewise
pronounced in accordance with the older system before the ‘Ghain’ became ‘Ayin.’
Humri shows that they said at that time ‘Ghomri.’” By the time of Esarhaddon
this was written Gimmerai.

CONCLUSION

The arguments put forward suggest:

1.   A western Cimmeria—possibly
Jutland or
Britain—of which
Homer had heard only vaguely.

2.   An eastern Cimmeria, subsequently
developed by later waves of the same Iranian-Thracian people, actually
Israel.

3.   That the whole edifice of the
story by Herodotus is based on an extremely shaky foundation.

4.   That there is no evidence whatever
for the Cimmerians being found in Assyria, Armenia, or Asia Minor, until after
the smashing-up of the kingdom of Beth-Khumri and the transportation of the
Khumri people to those very localities.

5.   That it was the earlier captivity
of Israel which
was long engaged in the fighting with Assyrians, about Urartu, till (according
to Esdras) they went to Arsareth.

6.   That it was the later captivities
of Israel (721,
715 B.C. and onwards) which
ousted the original Umman-Manda from the leadership of Media, and became
affiliated as Umman-Manda themselves. After their defeat in 677 B.C., and the
death of Teushpa (Teispes), their leader in the field, they were driven into
Asia Minor, as Cimmerians, by the Assyrians under
Esarhaddon, aided (then) by Ishguzai (Scythians), and subsequently engaged in
years of fighting with the Lydians.

7.   That the Ishguzai under Bartatua
were genuinely a tribe of Scythians.

8.   That the Scythians under Madyes
who attacked Cyaxares during the first abortive siege of
Nineveh, may also have been
Ishguzai, but they were more probably Bactrian Scythians (Scoloti) from western
Asia. These were subsequently persuaded to join Cyaxares
for the final capture of
Nineveh, and it was probably these
who ruled Asia for 28 years, whether before, during, or
after, the siege of Nineveh (if at
all?), no one seems able to say.

9.   That there is no evidence whatever
that the Japhetic Gomer of Genesis x and the (presumably) non-Israelite Gomer of
Ezekiel xxxviii, 6, are the same as the symbolic Gomer of Hosea, which
represents backsliding (Shemitic—not Semitic)
Israel.

10. That the later Gomer of Hosea may
genuinely mean Cimmerian. According to Pinches they were called Ghomri in
Hosea’s day.

To sum up. I suggest the following explanation of
the ideas examined in this paper:

The indications of Homer’s geography seem to show that the Cimmerians which
he had heard of were filtrations of the people from Samaria, who from the time
of Omri c. 918 B.C. (Ussher) were known as Khumri (as shown in the Black
Obelisk), whence—it is suggested—that the name Cimmerii is derived. These
Cimmerians were beyond Oceanus in a wintry land north-west of
Greece, and were
actually on the shores of the North Sea or in
Britain.
Subsequent to the earlier Homeric writings the Milesian sailors discovered the
Sea of Azov, and, thinking that they had reached Homer’s
“land of wintry Cimmerians,” named its entrance the “Cimmerian Bosphorus.” The
report of the doings of the Cimmerians in the east, in the eighth and seventh
centuries B.C., reverberated throughout the known world, the geography of which
was little known, and may have induced Aeschylus (writing in the fifth century
B.C.), who was a poet and not a geographer, to locate the Cimmerians in the
Crimea. It is quite possible that there were some Cimmerians there by that time.
Herodotus (484-425 B.C.), on the other hand, had to account for the actual
presence of Cimmerians in Asia Minor, in the seventh century B.C., so the story
of the Cimmerians, started by Homer in his description of their wintry abode
north-west of Greece, and carried on by the Milesian sailors
naming the Crimea the Bosporus Cimmerius, led to Herodotus accepting the story
to which he “inclined.” This seems to be a notable instance of what Sayce (Higher Criticism and the Monuments,
p. 529) describes as a history that has no perspective, though it is
based on facts, and blends into one picture manifold events and personages of
the past.

Both Esdras and Herodotus describe the same actual event. The former
(correctly) calls the people, who passed over the
Caucasus,
Israel, whereas
Herodotus accepted the story, which was an inversion of what took place more
than two hundred years before he wrote. The Cimmerians were not driven from the
Crimea through the Caucasus by the
Scythians. The Israelites in the form of Sakae, Cimmerians, and Gimirrai, went
from the Armenian table-land to Arsareth (Scythia) and other Cimmerians already
there (about the Crimea) gave way—as described on page 79 of my book,
Israel’s Racial Origin and Migrations (1934)—part moving into Thrace and
part rejoining the Cimmerians still remaining in Asia Minor.

The confusion of events in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C., was largely
added to by the fact that the (Eastern) Cimmerians had settled in what used to
be the land of ancient Gomer, which in the time of Dungi (probably third
millennium B.C.) was (from the description given) in Northern Media, possibly
south of the Caspian. They therefore became “Gomer,” just as the Teutons have
become Germans, and the Angles and Scots have become Britons. Thus the
Cimmerians, the seed of Hosea’s wife of whoredom—Gomer of Hosea 1—actually the
captive Israelites, became identified with the Gimmirai, who were supposed to be
derived from the inhabitants of Gomer, but were really the same people.