Episode 8: Kimmerians: Through the Caucasus

 We finally start the narrative and introduce our first named historical group: the Kimmerians.  

Transcript

Welcome back to the Nomads and Empires podcast, episode 8. The story above is one of the only pieces of information we know about the Kimmerians, and it is a tragic experience that also heralds many motifs we’ll see across steppe history. The emergence of an eastern invader displacing groups on the western steppes is one that we’ll see throughout history, and this may be the first recorded instance of such an event. However, before we dive further into that, we need to start off with a few preliminary ideas.  

As you can tell from the introduction, the history of the Kimmerians is one that is shrouded in mystery and confusion. What we do know is tragic, but there is a lot that we don’t know, and today, we’re going to fully dive into these considerations and provide some context before moving along with the narrative. To that end, I think the first set of questions that we need to ask ourselves are as follows:

One: who were the Kimmerians, and two: why are they relevant to our story?

The first answer is fairly simple. According to Ancient Greek sources, the Kimmerians were a steppe people who seem to have originated from the Pontic steppe and were relevant sometime between the 1200s BCE to the late 700s BCE. They may have practiced a nomadic lifestyle based on animals like cattle and horses. They were evidently a stratified society, one with a ruling elite and a large commoner base, a dynamic reminiscent of those social changes we discussed in the last episode. And of course, like many other groups, they would eventually be pushed out of the steppe by another group from the lands to the east. 

This leads us to our second question. Why are they relevant to our story? Well, the Kimmerians are a steppe group, so of course we would talk about them, but there’s a little more to this than meets the eye. You see, in the traditional narrative, the Kimmerians are essentially our first named steppe group to appear in the historical record. Yes, we’ve talked about archeological cultures like the Talgar, Karasuk, and Andronovo, but these are simple distinctions based on common traits derived from archeological evidence. We do not have written records from historical groups describing a named Sintashta or a known Mikhailovka. These are names that have been placed onto such groups by relatively modern scholars and researchers. The Assyrians, the Babylonians, and so on didn’t name these precursor groups.

The Kimmerians are a different story. The Kimmerians may very well be the first named group to appear in the historical record. Sure, there are some Chinese sources that talk about nomadic groups that preceded the Xiongnu and Yuezhi, but these groups still fall a little later than that of the Kimmerians. When you open most books about the Eurasian steppe, the eastern portion typically starts with the Xiongnu, which means such narratives really start around the third century BCE. You’ll notice that this podcast hasn’t really talked about the lands of Mongolia since episode 2, and this is partly why. We will get there and we will address the possible predecessors of the Xiongnu, but I want to save that discussion for later down the line. Meanwhile, if we consult works like that of Rene Grousset or that of Christopher Beckwith, we find that the first group to be mentioned on either end of the Eurasian steppe to be the Kimmerians. UNESCO’s “History of Civilizations,” has a preface that recounts the history of the region, and behold, the first peoples to be mentioned are the Kimmerians, and so if we approach the Eurasian steppe from what I call the traditional narrative, the Kimmerians seem to be the first named group with some sort of written record. 

So let’s discuss what we broadly know about the Kimmerians. In the traditional narrative, we are told that the Kimmerians resided in the steppes of modern day Ukraine. This was an area that, for a long time, was one of mystery to their Hellenistic contemporaries, a place that evidently struck fear into many hearts. The Odyssey of Homer provides us with one of the earliest descriptions of the Kimmerians, dating at an earliest to the eighth century BCE.

“There lie the community and city of Kimmerian people, hidden in fog and cloud, nor does Helios, the radiant sun, ever break through the dark, to illuminate them with his shining, neither when he climbs up the starry heaven, nor when he wheels to return again from heaven to earth, but always a glum night is spread over wretched mortals.”

Despite such mysterious illustrations, we do have other scant details. According to ancient sources, these Kimmerians appear to have lived in the area peacefully. Kimmerian society, as we hinted at before, was divided into a class of commoners and a class of noble elites. And then, one day, a nomadic peoples appeared on the eastern borders: the Scythians. These Scythians invaded the Kimmerians, causing many to panic. The Kimmerians deliberated as a group on possible solutions. At some sort of great meeting, two factions emerged. The commoners feared the Scythians and were resolved to flee. They urged caution, wishing to save their lives even if it meant abandoning their lands. The nobles, the so-called princes of the Kimmerians, refused. They would not surrender or bend the knee to these invaders, and instead wished to fight. And so, the Kimmerian population sundered into two sides.

The princes and their compatriots readied for war, and rallied forth against the invading Scythians. The commoners, meanwhile, began their preparations for fleeing. On the banks of the Tyras River, or the Dniester as it’s known today, the Kimmerian princes met the Scythians and a great battle was conducted. Every single Kimmerian combatant was slain. 

Witnessing this defeat and the impending Scythian onslaught, the commoners quickly buried their princes and began a long and arduous journey south. Some, probably the most stubborn of the group, stayed behind and may have become subjects to the Scythians. Those Kimmerians that had fled marched through the Caucasus Mountains, hugging the Black Sea coastline. They continued on into Anatolia, pursued every step of the way by Scythian marauders. However, this push south led the Kimmerians to slowly change. Where they had once been a conquered people, they slowly began to conquer territory themselves. As they continued their march south, the Kimmerians captured many cities and many peoples, including the lands of Sardis. From there, the Kimmerians would become a regular fixture, a sizable player in the world of the Ancient Near East. They would fight great empires like the Assyrians and became infamous throughout the region and its geopolitics. 

And yet back on the steppes, now dominated by the Scythians, it seems that the Kimmerian legacy would continue. As one ancient source from the 400s BCE tells us:

“Even today in this Scythian country there are Kimmerian walls, a Kimmerian ferry, a part of the country called Kimmeria, and what is called the Kimmerian Bosporus.”

This is, of course, the narrative of the Kimmerian peoples as described by the Greek historian Herodotus. It is, perhaps, the most famous narrative of the Kimmerians, and surprisingly an interpretation that has largely survived among scholars. I want to give a critique on this narrative, as the historical context of Herodotus’s own work may highlight a different light for these events. But, let’s push this analysis for a second, and instead let’s take this account at its face value.

We are told that a nomadic peoples once resided on the Pontic steppe. These peoples were attacked by invading Scythians and forced south into the Caucasus and to Anatolia and the Ancient Near East. Do we have any evidence for this? Well… maybe.

If we are to assume Herodotus’s words as accurate, then our search for the historical Kimmerians begins with the area of the Pontic steppe. Here, we do have archeological evidence for a group known as the Chernogorovka culture, a people that resided in the area between the years 900-750 BCE. This Chernogorovka culture was then followed by the Novocherkassk culture, though many scholars debate whether or not these two cultures followed one another in a sequence or were contemporaneous with one another. Both of these cultures exhibited some practices that resembled other steppe groups of their day. We have a number of burial mounds found in the forest steppes, with a good concentration of them appearing along the banks of rivers like the Danube and Dniester. These burial sites were small, much smaller than what we’d see with the Arzhan kurgans in Tuva. According to scholars, these were only a meter high and around 15 to 30 meters wide and they contained a number of archeological goods like pottery vessels and cups decorated with a number of geometric shapes. Chernogorovka burials contained pottery with “strokes, rhombuses, grids and slanting lines, the imprints of indented patterns, and patterns consisting of inverted commas, of round stamps.” Novocherkassk burials contained similar pottery styles, but we also find a number of metal goods like that of iron knives, bronze arrowheads, and gold jewelry. 

An important note to make is that these cultures are clearly pre-Scythian. The Scytho-Siberian art style that we mentioned in the previous episode, and it’s recognizable animal motifs, had yet to emerge here, and that is a pretty important point to make. As you heard, our common motifs were not animalistic, but rather geometric. 

If we take the Chernogorovka and Novocherkassk cultures as being pre-Scythian, then these cultures may very well be the Kimmerians. Slowly throughout the 9th and 8th centuries BCE, we start to find graves and monuments that contain artifacts connected to the central steppes and with very Scythian motifs. As professor Barry Cunliffe describes, “among the new items of material culture introduced are distinctive daggers, horse gear (including bits with stirrup-shaped terminals), characteristic arrowheads, stelae carved in the manner of deer stones, and animal art.” Such items, Cunliffe points out, can be traced to the Altai-Sayan. 

But before we get ahead of ourselves, we must now ask ourselves another important question. Can we definitively place the Kimmerians within the Chernogorovka and Novocherkassk cultures? This certainly is an attractive option. As Herodotus says, the Kimmerians had resided in the Pontic region before the Scythians, and we noted that these two cultures do somewhat predate the emergence of the Scytho-Siberian art style by a few centuries. There are some complications with this theory, with the largest issue being this. If the Kimmerians derived from say the Novocherkassk, why is it then that we have no archeological artifacts of Novocherkassk peoples in the areas that the Kimmerians supposedly migrated to? We have found no artifacts from the Novocherkassk in places like the Caucasus, Anatolia, or the Middle East. Instead, and do keep this in mind, many of the artifacts that we find in the area are Scythian, and these artifacts can generally be traced back to this period of time.

Clearly, this is a major hole in this explanation, and before we push on, I think it’s important to consider our sources a little critically, and it’s now time to bash on Herodotus. In particular, we have to understand that within the historiography of this era, so much of our information relies on Herodotus, and that’s not necessarily a good thing. To that end, I want to read this quote by the scholar Anne Katrine Kristensen, who I think really captures this particular problem:

“In Greek tradition as recorded by Herodotus, the original haunts of the Cimmerians was a question which seems to have presented no problem… The tradition recorded by Herodotus and other classical authors was practiced unanimously accepted up to the middle of the 19th century.”

So what then should we make of this? First, we should consider the historiographical timeline. Herodotus lived centuries well after the Kimmerian migrations and their time in the Ancient Near East. The History of Herodotus dates to the fifth century BCE, a complicated time in which the Greek world was in direct conflict with the Persian Empire. It was also a time in which the Scythians had firmly rooted themselves on the Pontic steppe and within the politics of the Hellenistic world. In this time, the Scythians were well known to the Greek peoples, especially because of interactions along the Black Sea coast, in large part because of colonies like that of Tyras and Chersonesus. 

Herodotus himself heralded from the city of Halicarnassus, a city located in southwestern Anatolia. Halicarnassus was a cosmopolitan city, one that would’ve put Herodotus in direct contact with peoples from across the known world. It seems that Herodotus would then travel across the Greek world, visiting places in Egypt and the coasts of the Black Sea. At some point, Herodotus would spend time at the city of Olbia, a Greek colony located on the Black Sea coast in modern Ukraine. There, Herodotus would get a firsthand perspective of Greek and Scythian relations. In addition, he would’ve had the opportunity to conduct interviews with various individuals, including both Greeks and Scythians. This would explain why Herodotus would have several explanations on the origins of the Scythians and why Herodotus can directly state to us which explanations came from Greeks and which came from the Scythians.

There’s a lot that Herodotus got right and there’s a lot that Herodotus got wrong. We have archeological digs that confirm many details that Herodotus mentions in his work, and we’ll do a deeper dive of this once we touch on the Scythians. For this current discussion, we should recognize that Herodotus’s sources would’ve had a distinct perspective. By this point, there were no living Kimmerians who spoke to Herodotus. Those who could speak of the Kimmerians were either Scythians or Greeks, and what information they may have possessed must be examined critically. 

It is therefore interesting to consider the Kimmerians as an initiating force for both the Greeks and the Scythians. According to some traditions, one of the first Greek colonies on the Black Sea was the city of Sinope, and it would also be one of the first to be destroyed, and indeed, it would be destroyed by the Kimmerians. In chapter 2 of The History of Herodotus, we are given a brief description of some of the earliest evils to affect the Greek world. We’re told that a man named Croesus was “the first man to begin unjust deeds against the Greeks,” but as deftly pointed out by Professor Christopher Pelling, Croesus was not actually the first. 

Here, we have the Kimmerians being listed as one of the primordial forces to cause destruction onto the Greco-Hellenistic world. Here, the perspective of Herodotus should be kept in mind. As Professor Pelling points out, much of The History of Herodotus utilizes a rhetorical eastern/western division, something that derives directly from the Greco-Persian wars of the fifth century, and thus there is an incentive for Herodotus to utilize this directional division to cast groups in a specific light. The whole of the land of Asia, according to Herodotus, was the land of barbarians, and importantly, the land that “the Persians claim… as their own.” And though Herodotus continues to act as if he is an unbiased historian, one that is willing to give the Persian perspective, it is evident from the text that Herodotus is trying to identify the Persians in a specific light by creating these connotations. And so, when Herodotus talks about the Kimmerians as this primordial evil, their invasion of the Ancient Near East, and the destruction of the colony of Sinope, we must remember this as simply an extension of the dichotomy between Greece and Persia, between west and east.

And so, why does this matter? Even if Herodotus was biased, surely his work is still informative. I already admitted that a lot of Herodotus’s descriptions of Scythian traditions matches with our own modern evidence. However, in recognizing that Herodotus may have had his own biases and agendas, we can more critically examine the origins of the Kimmerian peoples. 

As Anne Katrine Kristensen pointed out, the traditional narrative is based around some evidence, yes, but also based on assumptions that heavily rely on Herodotus’s work as being accurate, and given the discussion we’ve just had, let me say this: 

What if the traditional narrative is wrong? 

Clearly, we must consider other options before making a definitive statement. For instance, the Roman historian Strabo actually makes the claim that the Kimmerians were a Thracian group and some individuals like our friend Rene Grousset have supported this idea. Grousset for instance reports that the Kimmerians may have come from Hungary or Romania.

This particular idea, that of the Kimmerians being a Thracian group, is generally not accepted. There may have been a sort of Thraco-Kimmerian culture, one that contained elements of both groups, but there isn’t much evidence asserting that the Kimmerians originated from the regions associated with the Thracians. In the areas of Hungary and the Danube, we do find archeological materials like that of daggers and horse gear that may have originated from the east. In the Hungarian plain, we know of a group known as the Mezőcsát culture, and some burial sites contained horses and equipment that are related to those found on the steppes. Scholars like Professor Cunliffe speculate that rather than being a place of origin, the lands of the Danube and Hungary may represent the final extension of the Kimmerians, an area of cultural transmission between many groups that included indigenous ones, Germanic ones, and Kimmerian ones.

Let’s examine another possibility. In a work entitled Who were the Cimmerians, and where did they come from?, Anne Katrine Kristensen conducts a deep dive into the origins of the Kimmerians based on a set of evidence I’ve yet to bring up. In actuality, we don’t just have Greek sources talking about the Kimmerians. That’s right. Herodotus is not our only source here. Within the lands of Mesopotamia are a number of clay tablets that date to the Neo-Assyrian Empire. Such records are especially important because they also directly mention the Kimmerians and date well before Herodotus’s day. Kristensen and other scholars have utilized this set of evidence to trace new possibilities for the origins of the Kimmerian peoples, and we are posed with one damning question:

What if they never came from the steppe? 

In this assessment, we are told that the Kimmerians were already quite established in the lands near the city of Urartu by the 8th century BCE. While the traditional narrative paints a vivid picture of a steppe peoples attacking Urartu from the north, having crossed through the Caucasus, Kristensen explains that these Assyrian records indicate that the Kimmerians came from the south. Once more, we have to consider important details we mentioned before. If we strictly follow the story of Herodotus, the Kimmerians were a pre-Scythian people and therefore, we may assume that the Kimmerians derived from the Chernogorovka and Novocherkassk cultures. Again, it must be emphasized that we have no artifacts from these cultures in either the Caucasus or further south, such as near Urartu. Kristensen further elaborates on this point, explaining that “admittedly, archeologists have attributed remains from a variety of bronze-and early iron-age cultures to the north of the Black Sea to the Cimmerians, but with no other justification than that ancient writers had placed them there.”

And so, according to this explanation, the Kimmerians were perhaps a native peoples of the Ancient Near East. We have Assyrian intelligence records that directly provide geographic information. In one tablet dated to around 714 BCE, an individual named Ashurresuwa tells the Assyrian king Sargon II that “Guriania is a district between Urartu and Cimmeria.” This particular description has allowed a number of scholars to extrapolate where the Kimmerian homeland may be. While a number of competing explanations have been introduced, each of these explanations reject a Pontic steppe origin. Instead, this homeland, known as Gamir in these Assyrian texts, may have been located somewhere to the south of Lake Urmia, putting the Kimmerians within a near reach of Urartu.

And yet, despite all of this, you probably know where I’m going with this. There are arguments against this Near Eastern origin as well. Encyclopedia Iranica actually says that this explanation has no basis at all, arguing instead that the earliest Greek discussions on the Kimmerians may be based on lost texts that date well before any of the Assyrian records. The Encyclopedia also points out that Scythian objects are found in the Caucasus, which tracks with the idea that the Scythians followed the Kimmerians throughout the 8th century BCE.

Before we continue on and on with competing explanations, rebuttals, counter arguments, and so on, I think it’s time to put a lid on this discussion. To my mind, any of these explanations could be valid, and this demonstrates the problem of trying to identify people who we frankly have so little information about. But, let me offer my favorite perspective, one that incorporates many of these ideas. So, if we cross out a Thracian example, don’t really align with a Near Eastern answer, and are skeptical of a Chernogorovka and Novocherkassk explanation, what else can represent the origins of the Kimmerians? According to Professor Barry Cunliffe, we have this:

It may be that the Kimmerians were an Indo-Iranian group, an extension of the Scythians, in that both groups have some origination from the lands of the central steppes and of the Altai-Sayan region. Like we mentioned in the last episode, as populations in these areas expanded, bands of riders made their way westward, and the progenitors of the Kimmerians may have consisted of the earliest of such groups. These nomadic groups would’ve made their way into the lands of the Black Sea steppes and intermarried with groups like that of the Chernogorovka and Novocherkassk. Others from this initial expansion may have continued onward into Hungary, Poland, and the Danube valley. The introduction of these nomadic bands would’ve led to cultural mixing, and this could be the start of the Scytho-Siberian artstyle that we’ve talked about before. To speculate even further, it may be that these nomadic warriors became the ruling elite, as Herodotus did tell us about such class divisions within Kimmerian society. In summation, the Kimmerians may have been a mix of Scytho-Siberian, Novocherkassk, and Chernogorovka cultures. 

We don’t really need to talk about the specific dates here. At some point, whether or not this occurred in the 8th century, another population wave of nomadic peoples entered the Pontic steppe, AKA the Scythians. In this model, the arrival of the Scythians mostly represents the emergence of a later group of such long-standing population flows. The Kimmerians were pushed out of their homeland, with some groups migrating further into the Hungarian Plain and Thrace, thereby creating this potential Thraco-Kimmerian culture we discussed. Other Kimmerians likely stayed on the steppes, becoming engulfed into Scythian society, while others fled south through the Caucasus. The lack of artifacts from the Chernogorovka and Novocherkassk cultures south of the Pontic steppe is no longer a problem if we assume the Kimmerians and Scythians as essentially being culturally similar, and that the Scythian artifacts we do find in the Caucasus and Near East can be ascribed to both groups. 

And so, the Kimmerians having crossed through many domains, would become known by many polities in the world of the Ancient Near East. It’s possible that after their many years of wandering, they settled in the lands of Gamir, an area near Guriania. Then, in the year 714 BCE, a group of Kimmerians were spotted near the city of Urartu, a settlement located in the Armenian highlands near Lake Van. They then began to loot and raid the surrounding area, and as such, they would come face to face with the great Near Eastern powers of the day. They would soon cross swords with the great Neo-Assyrian Empire, an act that would etch the Kimmerian name in blood and infamy. 

We can really sum up these events as follows: “The details of these early migrations will remain unknown but the reality is likely to have been complex, with some bands moving fast over long distances, others stopping on the way to establish themselves in favoured locations. Battles will have been fought, the winners becoming the dominant elite and imposing the names of their lineages on the local populations. Those who became the Kimmerians on the Pontic steppe were probably just one of the warrior bands on the move.”

And so, with all of that said, I think it’s time to talk about the year 714 BCE. Next time, we move on to our first major event, our first historical battle, our first instance where the sedentary world was forced to confront the quote on quote nomadic hordes. Next time on the Nomads and Empires podcast, we will talk about the fall of Urartu. 

Otherwise, that’s it. Today was definitely a fun and complicated episode, I know. It was one that took an incredibly long time to research and navigating the different explanations was tough even for me. If, at any point, you noticed a key mistake or error on my part, don’t hesitate to correct me! In general, you can reach out to me on Twitter at NomadEmpiresPod or via my email nomadsandempires@gmail.com. And with that said, thanks again, hope you enjoyed the episode, and see you next time on the windy plains of the everlasting steppe!

Music:
As History Unfolds - Christoffer Moe Ditlevsen (Epidemic Sound)