A people known mostly from others
The Cimmerians are described here as a “civilization” only for convenience. They were mounted nomads or semi-nomads, and nobody has found a Cimmerian city, a Cimmerian book or an inscription in their own language. Everything solid about them comes from outside sources: Assyrian royal records, a handful of Greek poets and, most fully, Herodotus. Where archaeology is involved, it is mostly a matter of arguing whether certain steppe finds can be linked to the name. This article sets out the written evidence and the Anatolian episode. How the Cimmerians lived and who they were is taken up in the companion piece on the people as steppe warriors.
The Assyrian evidence
The earliest reliable mentions are Assyrian. Texts of the late eighth century BCE refer to a people called the Gimirru or Gimirrai. One of the best-known references comes from the reign of Sargon II, around 714 BCE, when Assyrian reports describe the kingdom of Urartu being disrupted by the Gimirru. Later records of Esarhaddon, in the 670s BCE, name Cimmerian leaders and describe campaigns against them in the region of Cilicia and Tabal in southern and central Anatolia.
These sources are valuable because they are contemporary, but they are also narrow. They were written for kings who wanted to present military activity in a certain light, and they note the Cimmerians as a threat or an opportunity, not as a society. They also use the name for groups that may not have been related to one another. Readers familiar with Assyrian royal inscriptions will recognise the style: victories are stressed, and context is thin.
The Assyrian Empire mattered in another way. Because it had spies and officials watching the northern frontier, it recorded movements on the edge of the known world that would otherwise go unnoticed.
The account of Herodotus
Herodotus, writing around the middle of the fifth century BCE, tells a story about the origin of the Cimmerian move. According to him, the Cimmerians lived in the land north of the Black Sea until the Scythians, themselves pushed from further east, drove them out. He adds that the Cimmerians fled along the Black Sea coast into Asia Minor, and that the Scythians, a people later famous for mounted archer warfare, followed the wrong route and ended up in Median territory. Later Scythian history is better documented than Cimmerian history, which is part of why the older people are so hard to see.
He also mentions a tomb of the Cimmerian kings near the river Tyras, now the Dniester, and says place names such as the Cimmerian Bosporus recalled them. The story has the shape of a folk tradition, written down two centuries after the events. Historians treat the core idea, a displacement of steppe peoples, as plausible, but not every detail as reliable. The reasons for the movement, and the order of events, are not established.
The Anatolian episode
In Anatolia the picture, pieced together from Assyrian and Greek writers, is of raids in the late eighth and seventh centuries BCE. Cimmerian bands are said to have damaged the Phrygian kingdom, ravaged parts of the Lydian land and threatened Greek coastal cities. The Greek poet Callinus of Ephesus, writing in the seventh century, appears to refer to the danger of a Cimmerian attack, and Herodotus says the Lydian king Alyattes eventually drove them out.
A later tradition, given by Strabo, claims that the Phrygian king Midas killed himself during a Cimmerian invasion. That detail should be handled with care. It belongs to a late account, and its relation to Midas of the Assyrian texts, who is attested alive around 709 BCE, is not simple. The Lydians, for their part, are said to have lost their king Gyges in fighting with the Cimmerians, a story discussed in the overview of the Lydian kingdom.
Fixing dates with scientific methods
The Phrygian case shows why dating matters. Older books linked the destruction of the great citadel at Gordion to a Cimmerian attack of about 700 BCE. Newer work, using radiocarbon dating and tree-ring dating of timbers from Gordion, has moved a major destruction level earlier, to around 800 BCE, well before the Cimmerians appear in Assyrian texts. This does not remove the Cimmerians from Anatolian history, but it undermines the habit of blaming every burnt layer on them.
Archaeology and the identity problem
On the steppe, archaeologists have tried to link the Cimmerians with certain horizon groups of the early Iron Age north of the Black Sea, which are known by site names rather than ethnic labels. Some scholars accept a connection, others do not, and the arguments depend on pottery, weapons and horse equipment that could belong to many peoples. In Anatolia itself there is no distinctive set of finds that everyone agrees to call Cimmerian. Weapons and fittings of a steppe type have been found in several places, but they could reflect trade, mercenary service or later Scythian activity.
The language of the Cimmerians is also unknown. Some scholars think they spoke an Iranian language, while others suggest alternatives. Because nothing survives except a few personal names in Assyrian script, firm claims are not justified.
What can be said safely
The following points are reasonably secure. A people called Gimirru or Cimmerians appear in Assyrian records from about 714 BCE. They were active in Anatolia during the seventh century BCE. They affected the political balance between Phrygia, Lydia and the Greek coast. Beyond this the evidence thins quickly, and the idea of a unified Cimmerian nation, with a capital, borders and a lasting culture, is more a modern simplification than an ancient fact.