Gomer - Traditional Identifications

Traditional Identifications

Josephus placed Gomer and the "Gomerites" in Anatolian Galatia: "For Gomer founded those whom the Greeks now call Galatians, but were then called Gomerites." Galatia in fact takes its name from the ancient Gauls (Celts) who settled there. However, the later Christian writer Hippolytus of Rome in c. 234 assigned Gomer as the ancestor of the Cappadocians, neighbours of the Galatians. Jerome (c. 390) and Isidore of Seville (c. 600) followed Josephus' identification of Gomer with the Galatians, Gauls and Celts.

The Hebrew name Gomer is widely considered to refer to the Cimmerians (Akkadian Gimirru, "complete"), who dwelt on the Eurasian Steppes and attacked Assyria in the late 7th century BC. The Assyrians called them Gimmerai ; the Cimmerian king Teushpa was defeated by Assarhadon of Assyria sometime between 681 and 668 BC.

The Cimbri were a tribe settled in Denmark ca. 200 BC, who were variously identified in ancient times as Cimmerian, Germanic or Celtic. In later times, some scholars connected them with the Welsh people, and descendants of Gomer. Among the first authors to identify Gomer, the Cimmerians, and Cimbri, with the Welsh name for themselves, Cymri, was the English antiquarian William Camden in his Britannia (first published in 1586). In his 1716 book Drych y Prif Oesoedd, Welsh antiquary Theophilus Evans also posited that the Welsh were descended from the Cimmerians and from Gomer; this was followed by a number of later writers of the 18th and 19th centuries.

This etymology is considered false by modern Celtic linguists, who follow the etymology proposed by Johann Kaspar Zeuss in 1853, which derives Cymry from the Brythonic word *Combrogos ("fellow countryman"). The name Gomer (as in the pen-name of 19th century editor and author Joseph Harris, for instance) and its (modern) Welsh derivatives, such as Gomeraeg (as an alternative name for the Welsh language) became fashionable for a time in Wales, but the Gomerian theory itself has long since been discredited as an antiquarian hypothesis with no historical or linguistic validity. According to tractate Yoma, in the Talmud, Gomer is identified as the ancestor of the Gomermians, modern Germans.

In 1498 Annio da Viterbo published fragments known as Pseudo-Berossus, now considered a forgery, claiming that Babylonian records had shown that Comerus Gallus, i.e. Gomer son of Japheth, had first settled in Comera (now Italy) in the 10th year of Nimrod following the dispersion of peoples. In addition, Tuiscon, whom Pseudo-Berossus calls the fourth son of Noah, and says ruled first in Germany/Scythia, was identified by later historians (e.g. Johannes Aventinus) as none other than Ashkenaz, Gomer's son.