Cimmerians and Amazons

Thank you for the interesting information, George.
(Unfortunately, Oleg Trubachov died in March 2002)

Just an unlearned guess follows :)

Bellerophon is famous due to victories over his enemies: Chimera, Amazons
and Solims.
It happens rather often in myths when several images or events merge
together, or, in opposite, one image or event splits and is presented as
several different stories.
Let's assume that all the Bellerophon's enemies represent the same or a few
closely related items. What could we say about their ethnic attribution?

Amazons
1) Older pictures of Amazons show them as riders dressed in long trousers.
Please note that nobody else in the Near East was able to ride in that time
(before the Trojan war). And naturally nobody else wore long trousers
because only horse(wo)men need them. Plus, Amazons had a cap of Iranian
type. The next folk appeared in the Near East which had these peculiarities
(riders, long trousers, caps of this form) were Cimmerians. However all the
ancient Iranian tribes had this set of features.

2) Lysias said that Amazons were the first to mount horses and to use iron.
Until the fall of the Hittite empire the iron metallurgy was the monopoly of
Hittites, who adopted it from Hatti. The territory of Amazons was very close
to the Hattic ethnic territory so Amazons might adopted this technology from
them like Hittite.

3) I hope that professional linguists will correct my attempt to give the
Iranian etymology of the Amazons word:
"Ama" - from Aryan *ama 'force, power' (Old.Ind. a_ma 'force of impact',
Avestan ama 'force of impact, man power')
"Zon" - from IE *gWen 'woman' (cf. Persian zan 'woman')
[or perhaps corrupted Iranian *zantu 'tribe' ?]
Thus the Iranian meaning of the word could be 'mighty women'

Chimera
It is a monster with Eastern roots and a distinctive metallurgical smell:
http://www.unifi.it/unifi/surfchem/solid/bardi/chimera/origins.html
(By the way, to kill Chimera Bellerophon had to mount Pegasus like an
Amazon)
Could not the words Chimera and Cimmerians have the same origin?

Solims
It is very temptative to compare Solims with Sarmatians.

What do we get if our approach is correct and we may summarize all these
data?
Amazons have Iranian origin and represent the very first Iranian wave which
came in Asia Minor before the Trojan war.
They belong to the same branch as Cimmerians who came again actually to the
same place in a few centuries.
Cimmerians themselves belong rather to Sarmatian, than to Sacian/Scythian
subdivision of Eastern Iranians.

Alexander

----- Original Message -----
From: "george knysh" <gknysh@...>
To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
Sent: Thursday, February 13, 2003 1:27 AM
Subject: Re: [tied] The Cimmerians


>
> --- Piotr Gasiorowski <piotr.gasiorowski@...>
> wrote:
> >
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: <bugalowbil@...>
> > To: <cybalist@yahoogroups.com>
> > Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2003 7:11 PM
> > Subject: [tied] The Cimmerians
> >
> >
> > > Do we know anything at all about the language of
> > the Cimmerians? Many thanks.
> >
> > Hardly anything at all. No linguistic material has
> > survived apart from just a few (probably garbled)
> > personal names that sound vaguely Iranian. That
> > could be a local fashion, however, rather than proof
> > that the Cimmerians were Iranian-speaking.
> >
> > Piotr
>
> *****GK: The most recent archaeology of the historical
> "Cimmeria" (which is construed as the area
> subsequently occupied by the Paralata (Par-arya-ta) or
> "Royal" Scythians) identifies it as a Late Zrubna
> (Srubnaya) culture, with two components: one deriving
> from the earlier (local) Zrubna culture (which has
> roots going back to the mid-IInd mill. BC) and
> another, analyzed as a "recent" (i.e. ca. 900 BC)
> arrival from southern Siberia. Terenozhkin and
> Chlenova have rather convincingly linked this second
> group with the descendants of the Andronovo steppe
> culture. Rostovtzev's old theory about the Thracian
> character of the Cimmerians' language can probably be
> laid to rest, though Oleg Trubachov is not yet
> prepared to do so. There is more. Recent archaeology
> also holds that most "Cimmerians" did not migrate, but
> stayed behind and mixed with the incoming Scythians.
> So while the linguistic evidence is inconclusive, as
> Piotr noted, the convergence of linguistic data
> (meagre enough) and archaeological data makes it
> fairly likely that the Cimmerians spoke an Iranic
> dialect. This would have facilitated the swift
> dissolution of the masses which remained into the
> ethnos of eastern Scythia (by Herodotus' time there
> were only "Scythians" around in old "Cimmeria").
> Beside the names of rulers, their ethnonym and
> constructions stemming therefrom have survived. There
> is still some debate about the etymology. They are the
> Biblical "Gomer" of course (Gen.10).*****
>
>
>
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