Category: Kimmerians

The Kimmerians were a feared eastern people who invaded western Anatolia in the mid-7th century BCE, famously sacking the Lydian capital of Sardis and the Greek city of Ephesos. They were remembered largely through the works of the early Ephesian poet Kallinos, who seems to have written at the time of the invasion. Kallinos was likely the source of a story told by Strabo in which the Kimmerians earlier invaded Phrygia and forced its Kind Midas, who reigned in the late 8th century BCE, to commit suicide. These Greek accounts are partly corroborated by Assyrian texts written at the time of the events, which refer to the Kimmerians as Gimri and mention their attack of Lydia and a later Assyrian defeat of the Kimmerians in Anatolia.

The story about the Kimmerians in the Arimaspeia referred to an even earlier event: a migration of Kimmerians to Anatolia. Assyrian texts from the reigns of Assyrian kings Sargon II and Esarhaddon (722 to 669 BCE) describe the Kimmerians living or active near the country of Mana in what is now northwest Iran, and Assyrian texts from the reign of Esarhaddon describe a people called Ishkuza, who can be identified with the Arimaspeia’s Skythians, invading Mana. Herodotos also told a second, similar account, not attributed to the Arimaspeia but probably also stemming from it, in which Skythians caused the Kimmerian migration by attacking the Kimmerins near the Araxes river (modern Aras), which flows by less than 200km to the north of ancient Mana.

By contrast other stories told by Herodotos placed the Kimmerians prior to the migration to Anatolia in what is now Ukraine, and that became the standard story in later Greek history.