Cimmerians

Earliest ancestor (82nd Great Grandfather): Antenor I, King of the Cimmerians (? - c. 443 BC)

The Cimmerians or Kimmerians (Greek: Κιμμέριοι, Kimmerioi) were ancient equestrian nomads of Indo-European origin. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, of the 5th century BC, the Cimmerians inhabited the region north of the Caucasus and the Black Sea during the 8th and 7th centuries BC, in what is now Ukraine and Russia. The archeologist Renate Rolle and others have argued that no one has demonstrated with archeological evidence the presence of Cimmerians in the southern parts of Russia or elsewhere.

Scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries had relied upon Herodotus's account. But, Sir Henry Layard's discoveries in the royal archives at Nineveh and Calah have enabled the study of new source material that is several centuries earlier than Herodotus's history.  The Assyrian archeological record shows that the Cimmerians, and the land of Gamir, were located not far from Urartu, (Urartu was an Iron Age kingdom centered around Lake Van in the Armenian Highland), south of the Caucasus.  Military intelligence reports to Sargon in the 8th century BC describe the Cimmerians as occupying territory south of the Black Sea.

Origins

The Cimmerians are believed to have been Indo-European. Their language is regarded as related to Iranian or Thracian. They appeared to have had an Iranian ruling class.

Although the 2006 Encyclopædia Britannica reflects Herodotus, stating, "They [the Cimmerians] probably did live in the area north of the Black Sea, but attempts to define their original homeland more precisely by archaeological means, or even to fix the date of their expulsion from their country by the Scythians, have not so far been completely successful,"  recent research by academic scholars have made use of documents dating to centuries earlier than Herodotus, such as intelligence reports to Sargon, and note that these identify the Cimmerians as living south rather than north of the Black Sea.

A few stone stelae found in Ukraine and the northern Caucasus have been connected with the Cimmerians and the Srubna culture. They are in a style clearly different from both the later Scythian and the earlier Yamna/Kemi-Oba stelae.