Barbarians of The Dark Forests

[mmadsen]

...and btw who are the Kimmereier? (I never heard of them before)

In English: Cimmerians. D&D fans should recognize that as the name Robert E. Howard chose for Conan's nationality, but he didn't just make it up. Herodotus mentions the Cimmerians in his History:

Scythia still retains traces of the Cimmerians; there are Cimmerian castles, and a Cimmerian ferry, also a tract called Cimmeria, and a Cimmerian Bosphorus. It appears likewise that the Cimmerians, when they fled into Asia to escape the Scyths, made a settlement in the peninsula where the Greek city of Sinope was afterwards built. The Scyths, it is plain, pursued them, and missing their road, poured into Media. For the Cimmerians kept the line which led along the sea-shore, but the Scyths in their pursuit held the Caucasus upon their right, thus proceeding inland, and falling upon Media. This account is one which is common both to Greeks and barbarians.

 

[SHARK]

Greetings!

Kimmerier? Just a guess, but I'd say they were the Cimmerians, as discussed in Jean Markale's books on the Celts, and also in History of Classical Warfare. The Cimmerians were I believe a Celtic tribe originally from northern Belgium and Germany. On the other hand, they may have been a an indigenous tribe of Old Europe, before the invasion of the Indo-Europeans, of which the Celts and the Germans are both members of, and cousins.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

 

[mmadsen]

Webster's Dictionary
Barbarian - A member of a people or culture thought of as being primitive, uncivilized, or savage.

To the Greeks, anyone who didn't speak Greek was a "barbarian" -- a foreigner or "gaijin" -- whose speech sounded like the nonsense syllables "bar-bar-bar". That's the etymology I've heard.

 

[Darraketh]

The Cimmerians lived in an area south of the Black Sea in what is now Turkey around the year 670 BC

They were contemporaries with the Syths to the north, the Assyrian Empire to the south and the Lydians, Greeks and Spartans to the west. This was also a time when Egypt was divided between the Assyrians in the north and the Nubians in the south.

The Cimmerians were originally a pastoral people but quickly adopted the Sythian style of fighting as the hordes of Syths forced them southward. In turn the Cimmerians broke the Kingdom of Van to the east then turned west and destroyed the Phrygians.

Source: "The Penguin Atlas of Ancient History" Colin McEvedy copyright 1988, ISBN 0-14-051151-2