# Humanities & Anthropology > History & Civilisations >  Who were Cimmerians?

## Cyrus

I'm a historian from Iran and my book titled "Himmerland, the Cradle of Persian Civilization" has been published here in Persian, I think everyone knows that Cimmerians were an Iranian people who lived in the north and east of Europe and migrated to Iran in the 8th century BC, do you know another thing about them that I don't know?!

----------


## mihaitzateo

That is a very good question.
There were either a Germanic speakers tribe, but I have no idea what branch of Germanic they were speaking, if it was West or East,less likely Norse.
They could have been also part of the large Gauls/Keltoi ethnicity which had different languages.
I do not know how early Gauls/Keltoi had their languages.
Cimmerians could have also been Thracian speakers.
Or they could have been Iranian speakers.

----------


## bicicleur

I'm sure you know more than me.

----------


## Cyrus

> That is a very good question.
> There were either a Germanic speakers tribe, but I have no idea what branch of Germanic they were speaking, if it was West or East,less likely Norse.
> They could have been also part of the large Gauls/Keltoi ethnicity which had different languages.
> I do not know how early Gauls/Keltoi had their languages.
> Cimmerians could have also been Thracian speakers.
> Or they could have been Iranian speakers.


What a multicultural nation they were! It can be true that they lived in different Germanic, Celtic and Thracian lands but they were an Iranian-speaking people, of course Persian (Cimmerian) is actually a Thraco-Iranian language, mostly because different sound changes in this language, for example we see *_ḱ>s_ in Indo-Iranian but _*k>θ_ in Thraco-Iranian or *_ǵ>z_ in Indo-Iranian but *_ǵ>ð_ in Thraco-Iranian, ... compare Old Persian _daθa_ "ten" but Indo-Iranian _dasa_, Greek _déka_, ...

I think you are a Romanian, ancient Persians considered the northern part of Romania as one of their original lands, it is interesting to read it: http://www.livius.org/articles/perso...a-inscription/

One of the most remarkable inscriptions from Antiquity is the following fragmentary text, written in Persian cuneiform script, found in 1937 on a clay tablet in Gherla, and published in 1954:

[...] king [Darius] son of Hystaspes [...]
[...] did [...]

This is of course not a text full of very important information, but the fact that it exists is remarkable, because Gherla is in the northwestern part of modern Romania.

Although this is the only Achaemenid royal inscription that was ever found in Europe, it is not without parallel. The Greek researcher Herodotus of Halicarnassus tells us that Darius, after conquering eastern Thrace (in c.514), visited the source of a river and left the following inscription:

"The head-springs of the Tearus give the best and fairest water of all rivers; and to them came (leading an army against the Scythians) the best and fairest of all men, Darius, son of Hystaspes, of the Persians and of all the continent king."

----------


## Angela

I would suggest reading academic papers instead of talking through your hats.

See: https://www.eupedia.com/forum/thread...ght=Cimmerians

----------


## Sile

> I'm a historian from Iran and my book titled "Himmerland, the Cradle of Persian Civilization" has been published here in Persian, I think everyone knows that Cimmerians were an Iranian people who lived in the north and east of Europe and migrated to Iran in the 8th century BC, do you know another thing about them that I don't know?!


Are the circassians ( the indigenous people of the cimmerian lands) the forefathers of the cimmerians ?........................90% blue eyed people

----------


## Cyrus

> Are the circassians ( the indigenous people of the cimmerian lands) the forefathers of the cimmerians ?........................90% blue eyed people


I don't know about circassians but ancient Persians had mostly blonde hairs and blue eyes, reliefs of ancient Elamite and Persian immortal warriors of the Achaemenid empire from the palace of Darius the Great in Susa:

----------


## Anfänger

> I don't know about circassians but ancient Persians had mostly blonde hairs and blue eyes, reliefs of ancient Elamite and Persian immortal warriors of the Achaemenid empire from the palace of Darius the Great in Susa:


Are you sure ? Do you have any sources ? Cause most are depicted brown eyed and dark haired also the skin color is darker when compared to modern Iranians. When the Persians arrived in Persis/Pars Province they probably had been overwhelmingly dark haired and brown eyed. Even in the Andronovo Culture, most likely the cultural sphere of the so called "Aryans", you have just 50-60% blonde/red haired and blue/green eyed individuals.

----------


## Sile

> I don't know about circassians but ancient Persians had mostly blonde hairs and blue eyes, reliefs of ancient Elamite and Persian immortal warriors of the Achaemenid empire from the palace of Darius the Great in Susa:


Persians..where once called Parsi , they lived in modern Tajikstan circa 1000BC.......they then migrated to Iran ( Persia )
So they are originally , South-Central Asians

----------


## halfalp

> Are you sure ? Do you have any sources ? Cause most are depicted brown eyed and dark haired also the skin color is darker when compared to modern Iranians. When the Persians arrived in Persis/Pars Province they probably had been overwhelmingly dark haired and brown eyed. Even in the Andronovo Culture, most likely the cultural sphere of the so called "Aryans", you have just 50-60% blonde/red haired and blue/green eyed individuals.


50/60% of Blonde Hairs is almost the same as today most european countries you know, Danemark have 68% of Blonde Hairs, while Finland have 80. So if Andronovo had 60% of blond hairs, it's actually a lot.

----------


## JajarBingan

> I'm a historian from Iran and my book titled "Himmerland, the Cradle of Persian Civilization" has been published here in Persian, I think everyone knows that Cimmerians were an Iranian people who lived in the north and east of Europe and migrated to Iran in the 8th century BC, do you know another thing about them that I don't know?!


Well, I didn't read enough about Cimmerians personally, but recently researchers discovered the remains of several Cimmerians in Moldova.
From a genetic point of view, they looked quite Asiatic for modern Iranians. They resemble speakers of Eastern Iranic languages more.

----------


## Archetype0ne

> Well, I didn't read enough about Cimmerians personally, but recently researchers discovered the remains of several Cimmerians in Moldova.
> From a genetic point of view, they looked quite Asiatic for modern Iranians. They resemble speakers of Eastern Iranic languages more.


Do we poses any tested DNA / testable DNA?

----------


## Archetype0ne

> I don't know about circassians but ancient Persians had mostly blonde hairs and blue eyes, reliefs of ancient Elamite and Persian immortal warriors of the Achaemenid empire from the palace of Darius the Great in Susa:


Can not say anything about Cimerians... But that is absolutely beautiful art. How old is it?

----------


## Anfänger

> 50/60% of Blonde Hairs is almost the same as today most european countries you know, Danemark have 68% of Blonde Hairs, while Finland have 80. So if Andronovo had 60% of blond hairs, it's actually a lot.


Yes, i also thought that the proportion of blondes resembles kinda the average of modern germans or dutch people.
My point was that the Andronovo culture is not equal to Persians of the Achaemenid Empire. Before the Persians arrived in Persis/Pars they met and mixed with mostly dark haired and dark eyed people. First they heavily mixed with the people of the Bactria Margiana Archaeological complex for about thousand years and then they migrated to modern northern Iran there they also lived for about 200 hundred years where they would also get mixed with caucasian like people and then they moved to the South where they met the Elamites with whom they for sure heavly mixed and then gave rise to the first Persian Empire at about 500 BC.
I am not saying that there were not fair people when the First Persian Empire was established but they were definitely not the majority. The Greeks would have noticed if the Persians were unusually fair compared to their neighbours and written it down like they did for the Scythians, Tharicians and others.

----------


## Aspurg

The two tested samples from Chernogorovka were basal R-Z93* as well as importantly Q-Y558. Might be related to Azeri Q-F1827. The culture is authentic Cimmerian, as before there was an N-Y6503* in a Cimmerian related culture from Hungary combined with autosomal data it is clear Cimmerians did exist (as opposed to some attempts to portray them as "mythical") as an interesting population with significant Inner Asian admixture. Cimmerians then became entangled with several Thracian groups and thats why one can see today some of that genetics in the East, and why their archaeological horizon was so often labeled "Thraco-Cimmerian".. What hasn't been done yet is testing of some related Thraco-Cimmerian cultures, which is interesting for me because that's what I descend from, my ancestors claimed to descend from a clan which descended of a tribe in turn descended of one of these groups.

About Persians, they descend from a nomadic population that settled. It's obvious what Proto-Persians should have had: under R-Z2122 there is clear evidence that CTS6 was established in Iran almost 3000 ybp.. These were settled former nomads who founded a civilization. They ofc must have carried other lineages as well, but for now CTS6 seems "certain".

----------


## Ygorcs

> Yes, i also thought that the proportion of blondes resembles kinda the average of modern germans or dutch people.
> My point was that the Andronovo culture is not equal to Persians of the Achaemenid Empire. Before the Persians arrived in Persis/Pars they met and mixed with mostly dark haired and dark eyed people. First they heavily mixed with the people of the Bactria Margiana Archaeological complex for about thousand years and then they migrated to modern northern Iran there they also lived for about 200 hundred years where they would also get mixed with caucasian like people and then they moved to the South where they met the Elamites with whom they for sure heavly mixed and then gave rise to the first Persian Empire at about 500 BC.
> I am not saying that there were not fair people when the First Persian Empire was established but they were definitely not the majority. The Greeks would have noticed if the Persians were unusually fair compared to their neighbours and written it down like they did for the Scythians, Tharicians and others.


That's exactly what I think. Persians in the Achaemenid Empire were definitely _not_ the same as their (partial) ancestors of the Andronovo horizon, their movements certainly changed not only their culture, but also their genetic makeup, especially because they came to inhabit very populous and - most importantly - very civilized places compared to theirs.

As far as I know, the ancient sources do not mention Iranians as being very distinctive from their Greeks or Semitic neighbors to warrant authors' writing about their exotic looks. The ancient Persian art also does not depict a particularly "fair" population.

____________________

As for Cimmerians, as other members above have already said, they looked a bit like the eastern Scythians in that they were mainly West Eurasian, with lots of R1a-Z93, but with quite significant East Eurasian input autosomally and even in Y-DNA lineages. I think that, if they were not themselves Iranic (some authors speculated they were like a missing link between Daco-Thracian and Indo-Iranian speakers), they must've mixed extensively with the eastern, prumably Iranic or even (earlier) Indo-Aryan, populations along the centuries to get all that eastern influence.

----------


## JajarBingan

> Do we poses any tested DNA / testable DNA?


Yep

Population
Region
Anatolia_N
 CHG
WHG
EHG
Levant_N
Iran_N
East Asian
SSA
AASI
SUM


Cimmerian_Moldova_357
Europe_Northeast
29.6%
8.0%
0.0%
46.8%
0.0%
8.4%
7.2%
0.0%
0.0%
100.0%

Cimmerian_Moldova_358
Europe_Northeast
25.6%
11.4%
0.0%
28.4%
1.0%
21.8%
11.8%
0.0%
0.0%
100.0%

Cimmerian_Moldova_359
Europe_Northeast
10.4%
13.8%
0.0%
42.0%
0.0%
0.0%
33.8%
0.0%
0.0%
100.0%

----------


## Cyrus

> Are you sure ? Do you have any sources ? Cause most are depicted brown eyed and dark haired also the skin color is darker when compared to modern Iranians. When the Persians arrived in Persis/Pars Province they probably had been overwhelmingly dark haired and brown eyed. Even in the Andronovo Culture, most likely the cultural sphere of the so called "Aryans", you have just 50-60% blonde/red haired and blue/green eyed individuals.


There are actually many evidences, for example we read in the famous Cyrus Cylinder which is considered as the world's first charter of human rights: "he looked out in justice and righteousness for the *black-headed people* whom he had put under his care.", "Cyrus assiduously looked after the justice and well-being of the *Black-Headed People* over whom he had been made victorious." ... https://www.britishmuseum.org/resear...27188&partId=1

Of course the aboriginal people of Iran who had mostly black hair have been always in majority, but you can still find many people in Iran who seem to be descendants of ancient Cimmerians (Persians) immigrants.

----------


## Cyrus

> Persians..where once called Parsi , they lived in modern Tajikstan circa 1000BC.......they then migrated to Iran ( Persia )
> So they are originally , South-Central Asians


Persianization of Tajiks dates back to the Middle ages, there is absolutely no evidence which shows Persian, Kurdish, Median and other western Iranian languages were spoken in the east of Iran in the ancient times, we read nothing about these people in Avesta and other eastern Iranian sources.

----------


## Cyrus

> Well, I didn't read enough about Cimmerians personally, but recently researchers discovered the remains of several Cimmerians in Moldova.
> From a genetic point of view, they looked quite Asiatic for modern Iranians. They resemble speakers of Eastern Iranic languages more.


Of course eastern Iranian people such as Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans and etc also lived in Moldova, in fact it was one of the major lands of Scythians, Persianization of them seem to be possible too.

----------


## Cyrus

> Can not say anything about Cimerians... But that is absolutely beautiful art. How old is it?


It dates back to 6th century BC, more than 2,500 years ago.

----------


## halfalp

> Yes, i also thought that the proportion of blondes resembles kinda the average of modern germans or dutch people.
> My point was that the Andronovo culture is not equal to Persians of the Achaemenid Empire. Before the Persians arrived in Persis/Pars they met and mixed with mostly dark haired and dark eyed people. First they heavily mixed with the people of the Bactria Margiana Archaeological complex for about thousand years and then they migrated to modern northern Iran there they also lived for about 200 hundred years where they would also get mixed with caucasian like people and then they moved to the South where they met the Elamites with whom they for sure heavly mixed and then gave rise to the first Persian Empire at about 500 BC.
> I am not saying that there were not fair people when the First Persian Empire was established but they were definitely not the majority. The Greeks would have noticed if the Persians were unusually fair compared to their neighbours and written it down like they did for the Scythians, Tharicians and others.


I think more realistically than mixing, the Indo-Iranians elite would never impact that much the physionomy of early Iranians and Indians. Fair features are mainly found in very mountaneous area ( Kurdistan, Pamir, Karakoram, Hindu Kush ). Were the low demography density would help to maintain those fair features. I think both ancient and modern Iranians ( by the time where they were already Indo-Europeanized ), the ratio of blond hairs might have been something like 1/30, still noticeable in big cities, but not in the overall population. This ratio might even be bigger in India with a 1/60 ( i just randomly made those numbers dont take them as facts ).

----------


## Archetype0ne

Heads up: I went completely off topic into color theory in this post, simply based on the color of the art which I found beautiful... so bare with me. Sorry to the Cimmerians and to the uninterested readers.


https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-Colour-Blue-in-Antiquity

http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/arti...ur-palette.htm 


"Blue was a latecomer among colours used in art and decoration, as well as language and literature.[25] Reds, blacks, browns, and ochres are found in cave paintings from the Upper Paleolithic period, but not blue. Blue was also not used for dyeing fabric until long after red, ochre, pink and purple. This is probably due to the perennial difficulty of making good blue dyes and pigments.[26] The earliest known blue dyes were made from plants – woad in Europe, indigo in Asia and Africa, while blue pigments were made from minerals, usually either lapis lazulior azurite." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue#In_the_ancient_world)




That blue pigment... was one of the most expensive / rare up until 15-16th century (IIRC), and had to be *mined.*

Whoever the people that made that art.

a) They had mining technology, ie meaning that they probably had some connection to the caucasus/caspian bronze age. Far fetch but speculate with me for a second.

b) They were traveling extensively, and most likely trading with other people, since that particular blue pigment was rarer than gold at the time, and highly sought after.




Other cool "advanced looking" art:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1...k_anagoria.jpg

1600 BC / Nebra / Germany

Description
*English:* The Nebra Sky disk; Mittelberg near Nebra (Germany), ca. 1600 BC.; Special exhibition "Beyond the Horizon - Space and Knowledge in the Old World cultures" at the Pergamon Museum (22.06 -. 30.09.2012)





"The style in which the disk is executed was unlike any artistic style then known from the period, with the result that the object was initially suspected of being a forgery, but it is now widely accepted as authentic.The Nebra sky disk features the oldest concrete depiction of the cosmos yet known from anywhere in the world. In June 2013 it was included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register and termed "one of the most important archaeological finds of the twentieth century."[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disk

PS Random Thought: Investigate if Ancient Languages even had a word for blue... or why today some languages do not even make the distinction blue / green linguistically.
(http://thechromologist.com/no-word-blue-mystery-historys-missing-colour/)
^ Very nice read.

"The origins of this theory come from the work of William Gladstone, who before he became Prime Minister of Britain was a scholar reading Homer’s _The Odyssey_. A simple exercise in counting the references to colours in the work threw up some surprises. Black appeared around 200 times, white 100, but elsewhere colours were either barely mentioned or seemed slightly odd. Sheep were violet, honey was green. And most mysteriously of all, the sea is described as “wine-dark.” Evocative, certainly, but why not blue?"

"Further study of numerous ancient Greek texts revealed no reference to the colour blue at all. Following on from this discovery Lazarus Geiger decided to expand colour research across a number of ancient languages, studying Icelandic sagas, the Koran, ancient Chinese stories, and an ancient Hebrew version of the Bible. Not only did he find no reference to blue in these texts either, but he noticed wider patterns around how colour language has developed, common to all languages."

"He found that across all languages the first colour words to emerge were for black and white, closely followed by red (the colour of blood, he theorised). Red is followed by yellow and green, with blue and green remaining indistinguishable in language until a much later point. The first ancient culture to develop a word for blue on its own was in Egypt – surely no coincidence that this was also first place that produced a blue dye."



"In some modern languages the blind-spot over blue remains, with blue and green being confusingly interchangeable in Japan, where traffic lights turn ‘blue’. However a fascinating experiment with the Himba tribe in Namibia suggests that having no word for a colour may indeed limit our ability to see it. The Himba have no word for blue, and no distinction between green and blue. Researcher Jules Davidoff devised a test where members of the tribe were asked to pick the odd one out of a circle of coloured squares. In one set of green boxes a single blue one was very hard for them to identify. However a set of green squares with one subtly different green square was easily spotted. The Himba have many words for green…"




(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction_in_language)


Useless Trivia:
(AL)(verdhë) is (EN)(yellow) and (AL)(gjelbert) is (EN)(green). In Italian however... (IT)(verde) is (EN)(green) while (IT)(giallo) is (EN)(yellow) / Just some trivia I always found peculiar.

----------


## Jensen

I can inform you a bit about the cimbri (latin name.) They come from "Himmerland", Moraene hills in the middle of Jutland, Denmark. The Cimbri certianly migrated, south through Europe. Reached France and Spain, fought the Romans and were annihilated in about 200 bc. I have never head of them going to Persia, The goths however were at the Black Sea.

----------


## tyuiopman

> I can inform you a bit about the cimbri (latin name.) They come from "Himmerland", Moraene hills in the middle of Jutland, Denmark. The Cimbri certianly migrated, south through Europe. Reached France and Spain, fought the Romans and were annihilated in about 200 bc. I have never head of them going to Persia, The goths however were at the Black Sea.


The Cimmerians made it as far as eastern Turkey and Armenia, where they established some cities (possibly Gyumri, Armenia, possibly Til-Garimmu and Gamirk, both of which were somewhere in Turkey) and battled the Assyrians in northern Mesopotamia. They helped to overthrow Urartu. They may have been the Gomer of the Bible. However, I'm not sure that they made it to Iran.

----------


## spruithean

> I can inform you a bit about the cimbri (latin name.) They come from "Himmerland", Moraene hills in the middle of Jutland, Denmark. The Cimbri certianly migrated, south through Europe. Reached France and Spain, fought the Romans and were annihilated in about 200 bc. I have never head of them going to Persia, The goths however were at the Black Sea.


The Cimbri of Cimbrian War fame were annihilated, yes, and most certainly did not migrate to Persia, some report Cimbri still living in Jutland circa 1 AD, whether they were literally Cimbri is up for debate (we know Saxons settled land which was once inhabited by the Frisii, and eventually they acquired the name _Frisian_, despite the discontinuity). The Goths were not originally from the Black Sea, a relatively recent mtDNA based paper established a connection between Iron Age Jutland and Iron Age Wielbark males (the female samples showed affinity with Neolithic Farmer populations). The paper can be read (and downloaded) here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-43183-w




> The Cimmerians made it as far as eastern Turkey and Armenia, where they established some cities (possibly Gyumri, Armenia, possibly Til-Garimmu and Gamirk, both of which were somewhere in Turkey) and battled the Assyrians in northern Mesopotamia. They helped to overthrow Urartu. They may have been the Gomer of the Bible. However, I'm not sure that they made it to Iran.


Jensen was talking about the Cimbri, who really shouldn't be confused for Cimmerians.

----------


## tyuiopman

> Jensen was talking about the Cimbri, who really shouldn't be confused for Cimmerians. 
> [/FONT]


Yes. Separate people. I thought that Jensen was equating them with the Cimmerians, but it wasn't Jensen who did so initially--it was Cyrus.

----------

