By Craig M White
Part 2: Critiques, Etymology and the Weakness of Mainstream Narratives
Having discussed the background to the subject in Part 1, we now turn to the objections raised against a Cimmerian–Israelite identification by Caleb Howells.
Howells’ Four Criticisms
Caleb Howells, a historian and author with a degree in Education, advances four main arguments against the British-Israelite case:
- Name similarity is misleading. The Assyrian designation Bit Humri (“House of Omri”) refers to the royal dynasty, not to the ethnic identity of the Israelites. There is no evidence, Howells claims, that the Greeks ever applied the Assyrian term to the Israelites.
- Geographical origin. Classical Greek writers locate the Cimmerians north of the Black Sea, not in the Median cities where the Israelites were settled.
- Assyrian distinction. Assyrian records treat Bit-Humri and the Gimirri as separate groups.
- Late appearance of “Cymry.” The Welsh ethnonym Cymry does not appear in written sources until the early medieval period and is usually derived from a Brittonic word meaning “fellow-countrymen,” not from Kimmerioi.
Each of these points appears correct at first glance. Closer inspection reveals that they rest on assumptions that the classical and archaeological record itself does not fully support.
The Flimsiness of the Northern-Homeland Thesis
The dominant modern narrative is still based on Herodotus: the Cimmerians originally dwelt north of the Black Sea, were driven south by the Scythians, and only then entered Anatolia and the Zagros. Yet the earliest evidence from the Assyrian royal inscriptions of Sargon II (from 714 BC), Esarhaddon and Ashurbanipal places the Gimirri already in Transcaucasia and Mannaea without ever stating that they had recently arrived from the Pontic steppe. The inscriptions simply record them as a military power on the northern and north-eastern frontiers of Assyria.
Tim Bridgman, writing in Hermathena, No. 164 (Summer 1998, p. 46), is unusually candid: “The short answer to this question is that archaeology tells us next to nothing about the Cimmerians, since no archaeologist has ever been able to identify a Cimmerian material culture.”
Marek Olbrycht reaches a similar conclusion in his study “The Cimmerian Problem Re-examined,” Collectanea Celto-Asiatica Cracoviensia, 2000, p. 72: “the presently available archaeological materials do not allow any convincing hypothesis about the character of genuine Cimmerian culture. lt is due to the fact that archaeological interpretations depend on historical premises and the latter, relying on fragmentary and contradictory testimonies, still do not enable us to give definitive answers to certain important questions about Cimmerian history.”
Olbrycht notes that the first likely Cimmerian seat is in Transcaucasia and that their entry into that region from the northern steppes is only “in all probability” (p. 95). Daan Nijssen (“Cimmerians and Scythians. Herodotus Reconsidered,” Ancient World Magazine, 27 February 2018) goes further, arguing that Homer’s mythical Kimmeroi dwellers in perpetual mist at the edge of the world were later conflated by the Greeks with the historical Gimirri. The northern homeland, in other words, may be a literary construct rather than a historical memory.
Encyclopædia Britannica (2006) itself admits that “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.” The northern-origin thesis is therefore far less secure than popular presentations suggest!
How Far Back Can the Word Cymry Be Traced?
The earliest written occurrence of the ethnonym Cymry (or Kymry) appears in the Welsh praise poem Moliant Cadwallon, composed around 633 AD in honour of Cadwallon ap Cadfan of Gwynedd. The term is used again, with political force, in the prophetic poem Armes Prydein (c. 930 AD), where it unites the native Britons of Wales, Cornwall and the Old North against the Anglo-Saxons.
Linguists derive Cymry from Common Brittonic kombroges, “fellow-countrymen.” Dr John Davies (A History of Wales, p. 69) suggests the spoken form may have become current among the native Britons around 580 AD, when Anglo-Saxon expansion isolated the Welsh-speaking communities from their relatives in Cumbria and southern Scotland. For nearly a millennium the same spelling served for both the people (Cymry) and the land (Cymru); differentiation of the two spellings began only around 1560.
The late written attestation does not, of course, prove that the name itself is late. Oral ethnonyms can circulate for centuries before they are committed to parchment. The phonetic resemblance between Kymry / Cymry and the earlier forms Khumri, Gimirri, Kimmerioi and Cimbri remains striking, even if a direct linguistic descent cannot be demonstrated with the same certainty that exists for, say, the Sacae–Saxon equation.
Were the Cimbri Related to the Anglo-Saxons?
The Cimbri (Greek Kímbroi) first appear in the historical record during the Cimbrian War of 113–101 BC, when they and their allies threatened Italy and were finally destroyed by Marius at Vercellae. Roman and Greek writers locate their homeland in the Cimbric Peninsula (modern Jutland). Pliny the Elder records that the Greek geographer Philemon (c. 325 BC) already knew Cimbrian names for the northern seas, including Morimarusa (“Dead Sea”).
Linguists usually derive the name from a Germanic root meaning “people of the rim” or “coast-dwellers.” The chronological gap of roughly five centuries between the disappearance of the historical Cimmerians (after c. 600 BC) and the appearance of the Cimbri is frequently cited as proof against identity. The same geographical region of Jutland later produced the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who migrated to Britain in the fifth century AD. Bede (Ecclesiastical History 1.15) explicitly places the homeland of the Angli “from a land which is called Angulus, and which is said to have remained uninhabited from that time till the present day. It lies between the territories of the Jutes and those of the Saxons,” i.e., the same peninsula.
Aryeh Kaplan, in his commentary The Living Torah (p. 21), notes that some classical sources already identified the Cimmerians with the Cimbri of Jutland, “a nation of Teutonized Celts.” A modern popular history site (historyfiles.co.uk) cautiously asks whether the medieval linkage “remember[s] very vaguely the Cimmerian or Cimmerian-influenced migration into Jutland.” The possibility cannot be dismissed merely because of a five-century documentary silence; tribal identities have survived far longer gaps elsewhere in Eurasian history.
Part 2 has shown that the four objections advanced by Howells rest on a classical narrative whose archaeological and chronological foundations are themselves admitted by specialists to be fragile. The late written appearance of the name Cymry does not preclude an earlier oral existence, and the geographical overlap between Cimbri and later Anglo-Saxon homelands keeps open the possibility of ethnic continuity.
Editor’s Note: Mr. Craig White is a researcher, writer and archivist serving the Church of God. Please visit his website, www.friendsofsabbath.org for more information on his work.
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