Cimmerians

The Cimmerians were mounted nomads of the western Eurasian steppe. They held that country from about 1000 to 800 BC, in the centuries before the Scythians came.^[1] They are known from the outside. The Greeks called them Κιμμέριοι and the Assyrian records Gāmir(rē), and the Armenian and Georgian forms descend from one of those. Georgian made gmiri, “hero”, out of the name.^[1]

What they were is not settled. Their ethnic identity has yet to be determined. Some scholars go further and deny that the word names a people at all. On that view “Cimmerian” was an appellative for a mobile, mounted band of Iranian-speaking nomads of the Eurasian steppe.^[1] Either way the name belongs to the first age of the mounted raid. The Assyrian documents of the eighth and seventh centuries BC record Cimmerian attacks on the Near East. These are the earliest echo, in a settled archive, of the society then taking shape on the steppe.^[1]

They matter to the history of the steppe for what came after them rather than for themselves. The Scythians took the political supremacy of the western steppe from them, probably in the late ninth or early eighth century BC. Here begins the pattern by which one confederation displaces another and the displaced name disappears from the record.^[2] The same pattern governs the steppe for the next fifteen hundred years. The age before the Xiongnu sets it out.