Editor’s Note: Mr. Craig White is a frequent contributor to World News and Prophecy Review. We deeply appreciate his research, archives and historical analysis of the modern era of the Church of God. Many Bible students have pondered what happened to the Northern Kingdom, or commonly referred to as “Israel”, located in Samaria, distinct from the separate nation of Judah, located in Jerusalem and surrounding areas. To know ‘who’ Israel was after the separation of the tribes, after Solomon and their modern descendants is an important element in Bible Prophecy. More of Mr. White’s work is available at: FOS | Friends of Sabbath
By Craig M White
This series is a condensed version of the paper The Cimmerian Link to the ‘Lost’ Tribes of Israel available online here.
Part 1: Origins, Captivity and the Early British-Israelite Case
This first instalment examines the Assyrian deportation of the northern tribes of Israel, the sudden appearance of the Cimmerians (Gimirri) in the same geographical area, and the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century British-Israelite scholarship that proposed a continuous ethnic link between the two.
Introductory Remarks
A generation now rising within the Churches of God appears to accept, almost without scrutiny, the conclusions of mainstream academic writers who dismiss any connection between the deported Israelites and later north-western European peoples. Much of that academic literature is based on leftwing ideology. The result is a slow-moving erosion of confidence in the traditional teaching that the lost tribes of the northern kingdom can still be identified among the nations of north-western Europe which lead to this doctrine being watered-down and eventually shelved. This series is written as a corrective. It concentrates on only one of the crucial links – the Cimmerian, and subjects both the classical and the Assyrian evidence, together with the British-Israelite literature that first explored the question, to fresh examination.
The reason for the study was a short YouTube presentation by the historian Caleb Howells entitled “Did the Lost Tribes of Israel Migrate to Britain?” Howells’ four objections will be answered in Part 2. Before those objections can be investigated and countered, the background must be set out clearly.
The Assyrian Captivity in North-Western Iran
The Biblical record is straight forward: “In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria, and he carried the Israelites away to Assyria and placed them in Halah, and on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes” (2 Kings 17:6). Assyrian royal inscriptions locate these places in the Zagros highlands and the Urmia basin of north-western Iran precisely the region in which the Cimmerians (Assyrian Gimirri or Gimirrāya) first appear in the official annals around 714 BC, only eight years after the fall of Samaria.
An independent Jewish recollection of the same events is preserved in the apocalyptic work 2 Esdras (4 Ezra), composed shortly after the destruction of the Second Temple. The text states that the tribes “formed this plan for themselves, that they would leave the multitude of the nations and go to a more distant region, where no human beings had ever lived. And they went in by the narrow passages of the Euphrates river. Through that region there was a long way to go, a journey of a year and a half; and that country is called Arzareth” (2 Esdras 13:40–45, NRSV). Whatever the precise location of “Arzareth,” the passage demonstrates that, almost two millennia ago, Jewish tradition still remembered an organised northward or north-westward migration of the deportees.
Further, John Hulley, writing in Origin of Nations (Vol. 1, No. 3, May-July 1995, pp. 12–18), suggested that the legendary Sambatyon river of later rabbinic lore may preserve a memory of the Bosphorus strait, whose currents can reverse or pause under certain conditions. Hulley
regarded the identification as circumstantial, yet it illustrates how ancient memory of a northward crossing from Asia into Europe continued to circulate.
Cimmerians and Scythians: Linguistic and Archaeological Kinship
Modern scholarship generally classifies both the Cimmerians and the early Scythians as speakers of closely related Eastern Iranian dialects. Askold Ivantchik observes that Cimmerian personal names “are purely Iranian and belong to the eastern branch of Old Iranian” (Les Cimmériens au Proche-Orient, pp. 53-79). János Harmatta reaches the same conclusion in UNESCO’s History of Humanity (p. 182). Archaeologically the material cultures of the two groups in the North Pontic region are virtually indistinguishable; Maurits van Loon described the Cimmerians as “Western Scythians” (Reallexikon der Assyriologie, pp. 167-68).
Yet the ancient sources consistently treat them as distinct political entities. Herodotus (Histories 4.11–12) speaks of the Scythians driving the Cimmerians westward, while the Assyrian annals of Sargon II, Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal list the Gimirrai and the Iškuzai (Scythians) as separate powers (Daniel Luckenbill, Ancient Records of Assyria and Babylonia, Vol. 2, pp. 207, 557). The Encyclopædia Iranica summarises the consensus: the Cimmerians were Iranian nomads closely related to the Scythians, yet cousins rather than identical peoples.
Genetic studies confirm the ethnic complexity hidden under the umbrella term “Scythian.” Damgaard et al., analysing 137 ancient genomes from the Eurasian steppes (Nature, No. 557, 2018, pp. 369-74), demonstrate that various peoples (Mongoloid, Slavic and Germanic/Nordic) adopted Scythian cultural traits at different times. The same caution must therefore be applied when modern writers speak of “the Cimmerians” as a single, homogeneous nation.
British-Israelite Literature of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
From the 1840s onward a succession of British-Israel writers argued that the Assyrian deportees re-emerged in history as the Cimmerians (Gimirri/Khumri) and certain western Scythian groups, and that these peoples ultimately became the ancestors of the Cymry or Welsh, the Cimbri of Jutland, and some north-western European nations.
Rev. John Wilson’s Lectures on Our Israelitish Origin (1840, expanded through the 1870s) first systematically identified the Assyrian Khumri/Gimiri with the Greek Cimmerii and then with the Cimbri and Cymry. Colonel John Gawler’s pamphlet Our Scythian Ancestors Identified with Israel (1875) focused on the Sacae/Saka as “Isaac’s sons.” Edward Hine’s popular Forty-Seven Identifications (1874-78) made the Cimmerian–Cymry equation a central pillar of the movement. Walter Milner’s Israel’s Wanderings; or The Scüths, the Saxons, and the Kymry (1881) remains one of the fullest nineteenth-century syntheses, assembling classical quotations from Herodotus, Strabo, Diodorus, Pliny and Tacitus. John Harden Allen’s Judah’s Sceptre and Joseph’s Birthright (1902) reinforced the same narrative for an American audience.
Non-Israelite Historians Who Supported the Cimmerian–Cymry Link
British-Israel writers did not invent the Cimmerian -> Cimbri -> Cymry link; they inherited and expanded it from earlier continental and British scholarship. Amédée Thierry’s multi-volume Histoire des Gaulois (first published 1835) identified the Cimmerians with the Cimbri and early Celts. Robert Morgan’s The British Kymry (1857) argued that the Kymry had been known successively as Cimmerioi, Cimbri, Umbri and Kymry. Samuel Lysons in Our British Ancestors (1865) maintained that Cimmerians and Gauls were the same people, the Welsh being the surviving Cymry.
Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons (1852) similarly linked the Cimmerii, Cimbri and Cymry as branches of one migratory stock and traced the Saxons to the Sakai (Sacae). On page
87 of Volume 1 he wrote: “Sakai-suna, or the sons of the Sakai, abbreviated into Saksun, which is the same sound as Saxon, seems a reasonable etymology of the word Saxon.” Turner’s pages 74–80 examine the possible identity of Cimmerii, Cimbri and Cymry; pages 87–89 develop the Sacae–Saxon argument. These non-British-Israelite authorities provided the British-Israel movement with information that the latter infilled with Biblical, Classical and Assyrian detail.
The first instalment has therefore established three points: (1) the timing of and the geographical ‘coincidence’ of the Israelite deportation with the first appearance of the Gimirri; (2) a continuous nineteenth-century scholarly tradition, both inside and outside British-Israel circles, which connected Cimmerians with Cymry and Cimbri; and (3) the recognition by modern linguists and archaeologists that Cimmerians and western Scythians were closely related Iranian-speaking peoples.
Part 2 will examine the objections to this identification and will test the basis the of evidence on which those objections are based upon.
World News and Prophecy Review