The History of the Anglo-Saxons Volume 1 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: thians themselves, that the Kimmcrians anciently possessed those regions in Europe which the Scythians were occupying in his time (1). And these Scythians were then spread from the Danube, towards the Baltic and the north. It cannot now be ascertained when the Kimmerians first passed out of Asia over the Bosphorus, which they named; but that they were in Europe, in the days of Homer, is obvious, because he men- lions them in his Odyssey (2); and he appears to have lived at least eight hundred years before the Christian era. That he was acquainted with the position of the Kimmerians, in the north-eastern parts of Europe, is three times asserted by Strabo (3). That the Kimmerians were inhabiting these places, about seven hundred years before our Saviour's advent, we have direct historical evidence; because it was above this period, if not before, that they were attacked by the Scythians in these settlements (4). Overpowered by this invasion, the Kimmerians of these districts moved from Europe into Asia Minor; and afflicted its maritime regions with calamities, from their warfare, which Ionia remembered with such horror, as to believe that they sprang from the infernal regions, to the neighbourhood of which even Homer consigns them (5). The part of the Kimmerian population, which the Scythians thus disturbed, was then occupying the peninsula, which from them obtained the name of the Kimmerian Ghersonesus, and its vicinity. Their name was also retained, after their departure, in the adjoining Bosphorus, in a mountain, and in a city on the peninsula, where the isthmus was protected by a ditch and a rampart. In these parts of Europe they had possessed great power, before the Scythians attacked them (6); and Herodotus says, that in his time, several Kimmerian walls and ports...