History
When the topic of Hebrew words being embedded in the Yamato language gets brought up, the question that is often raised is, "How did this people end up traversing the Asian continent to finally land in Japan"? What follows is the explanation of how this happened.The story begins with the fall of Samaria, the capital of the Northern Kingdom of Israel. This took place after a 3 year siege when the Assyrian army overran the defenses of Samaria in 722 B.C. The siege began during the reign of the Assyrian King Shalmaneser V, but he died in the midst of the siege, and his successor Sargon II took the reigns and completed the dissolution of the Northern Kingdom, exiling the remaining population that survived the siege.
The Assyrian Exile
Although there were multiple cities to which the exiles of Samaria were deported, the two groups that ended up being formed as a result were the Cimmerians and the Scythians.1 The Cimmerians where placed on the Assyrian frontier to man the forts taken from Urartu. The Scythians were placed initially in the cities of the Medes, but eventually left the confines of the city for greener pastures.
The Urartian Conflict
According to the Assyrian records, the Cimmerians assisted Sargon II in the Battle of Uishdish west of Lake Urmia. They subsequently invaded the Urartian cities, and this is where the mixing of Hebrew and Urartian languages occurred.Cimmerians and Scythians
Herodotus makes mention of these two groups a couple centuries after they appear on the Assyrian stage in his The Histories, Book IV. Unfortunately, the Herodotus account only gives the western side of the story as it was the only area in which the Greeks had purview. It is worth noting as well that the account was made two centuries after the fall of Assyria by which time both the Cimmerians and Scythians had already expanded deep into the Eurasian Steppe. The names for these two groups as we know them by their English terms come from the Greek descriptions "Kimmeroi" and "Scuth". Kimmeroi coming from the Assyrian name "Gimiri", describing the people residing in the "land of Gamir", south-west of Lake Urmia where the Assyrians placed them. Scuth means "tent" in Greek and it is likely attributed to the Scythians leaving the Median cities and choosing flexibility and mobility of tent living instead with the horses they sequestered from the Median horse trade. The same group were known as "Saka" to the Persians.Although the Scythians as a group retained their Saka identity for several centuries, depite their many offshoots (e.g. Sarmatians, Massagaetae, Alans, Vandals, etc.), the Cimmerians who ventured east past the Urals were never known by the name Cimmerian to the nations that interacted with them. Cimmerian was a label applied to them by the Assyrians and never used by the Cimmerians themselves. The Chinese had various names for the nomadic tribes that ventured north of their borders, but the predominant one which emerged was Xiongnu (also known as Huns in the West). Others were the Donghu, the Xianbei and various other tribes designated by the Chinese as barbarians.
A survey of history and the migrations of peoples for the past 27 centuries confirms that the Cimmerians, Scythians and their descendants did have a significant impact on world history, toppling empires along their path. Starting with Xiongnu in the east (being the reason China built the Great Wall), the Huns of their western branch in the west (with Attila indirectly bringing about the end of the Roman Empire), the Tartars, the Turks, the Mongols throughout the dark and middle ages, and Northern Europe in the imperial age.
Migration
Although a very simplistic view of the Cimmerian and Scythian migration, as both groups and their descendants traversed back and forth along the Eurasian Steppe, intermixed amongst themselves and the other local populations they encountered and permiated throughout the European and Asian continents, the below map illustrates the macro-level migration pattern and where the bulk of the descendants ended up. Some Cimmerian contingents stayed in the Pontic Steepe and the Urals, while the rest went east, and some Scythians did venture to the Altai mountains and venture south, some making it as far as India. But the Cimmerians descendants stayed predominantly in East and Central Asia, while the Scythians eventually drove west into North, West and Central Europe. Many of the Cimmerian descendants congregated in the area of the Altai mountain region, but the group that constituted what would eventually become known as the Yamato people continued on to the end of the continent, traversed the Korean peninsula and eventually landed on the Japanese archipelago.
Cimmerian Descendants
Image from Maximilian Dörrbecker (Chumwa), CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
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Language
The Cimmerians mixed in with the Urartian population but kept the Hebrew vocabulary. The Scythians, on the other hand, who were at first embedded in the cities of Medes, picked up the Median language in its entirety and retained only traces of Hebrew words sprinkled within their language. The Scythians are often mistakenly labelled as an Iranic people, because the language spoken was of Median, but the male offspring were of Hebrew descent, as were the Cimmerians.As mentioned previously, the Cimmerian language was the original language from which the Ural-Altaic family of languages eventually splintered off (the Yamato Language being an early offshoot). The Scythian language was an Indo-European language that is primarily the proto-Celtic / proto-Germanic / proto-Slavic language from which most North and Western European languages derive their root. The modern day descendants of the Cimmerians in Asia are those speaking the Ural-Altaic languages. A good reference to reverse engineering some of the original Cimmerian words is the Etymological Dictionary of the Altaic Languages.
Below are examples of Altaic words of Hebrew origin:
| Altaic | Meaning | Hebrew |
| aka | brother | ak |
| alaku | walk | halak |
| baka | watch | pakath |
| cera | snow | sheleg |
| ama | mother | eme |
| apa | father | av |
| kore | freeze (cold) | qor |
| ipi | mouth | peh |
| kapa | payback, atonement | kaphar |
| keca | side, shoulder | katheiph |
| kero | cut down | karath |
| maru | many, abundance | malo |
| miuri | water | mayim |
| na | I, myself | ani |
| palca | to be ashamed | bosh |
| seme | fat | shemen |
| siuku | copulate | shakav |
| tapa | worship, pray | tephillah |
| tialo | hang | talah |
When we look at the Ural-Altaic language family we have to remember that a lot can happen in 27 centuries. The English language looks nothing like it did when the first Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain. Many changes can occur especially on the Eurasian Steppe where successive empires rise and fall every few of centuries. People migrate, mix and adapt, their language along with it. So looking at languages as static things where one neighbouring population has a direct hierarchical relationship with the language of another is probably not the right approach. A better approach might be to look at the source of the family and see how the descendant languages independently evolved over time.
So to better understand Ural-Altaic language family, I propose going back to the original source, the Cimmerian language - which was a hybrid of Ancient Hebrew and Urartian. Granted all the pieces are not readily available to fully reconstruct the entire language, as our knowledge of Urartian is limited, but we know enough about the lexicon, which was diligently written down and transmitted over the ages. We can also look at the respective grammars of the descendant languages (and possible languages in the vicinity that impacted those if we are able to trace them) and see if we can project back to what the original grammar of the language might have been. In the same grain, we should look at the Indo-European languages and their early offshoots (e.g. Scythian) and their decendants to see where we find the influences on our Ural-Altaic descendant languages. Words like "bone", "name", or "killeth" in English which we find in Japanese respectively as "hone","na" and "korosu". In doing this we will find that our modern day nations and languages are more interrelated than we had originally thought.
Japan, after the initial Yamato landing, being surrounded by ocean, was not as susceptible to external influences to its language and culture as its counterparts on the continent. The only exception being the import of Chinese literature, philosophy and religion via the Korean Kingdom of Paekche prior to its demise at the hands of the Tang dynasty. As such, the core Yamato language remained pretty much unscathed from foreign influences and continued to exist in parallel to Chinese language that was in vogue among the Japanese literati. This is why I believe the Yamato language is a treasure trove, because it is likely the closest language we have to the original language spoken by the Cimmerians.
Horse and Wagon
The three year siege of Samaria left an indelible impression on the survivors of the tribe of Ephraim. They and their descendants, Scythians and Cimmerians, were determined to never again be held up and constrained behind the confines of city walls, awaiting certain death and destruction at the hands of the invading army. Instead they preferred to remain flexible and mobile with all the challenges and freedoms that would entail. Living in tents and moving their settlements wherever they went by horse and wagon was to be the mode of life for them for many centuries to follow. The sedentary populations they would encounter wherever they went considered them barbaric nomads. But a quick survey of the relics of Scythian Art can attest that they brought nomadic barbarism to a whole new level. Mobility was their freedom, and they would not trade that in for any cultured city dwelling offer anywhere. Even Darius, the King of Persia, was frustrated in his attempt to engage the Scythians in a direct confrontation owing to their mobility.2The Urartian horses were highly prized by the Assyrians.3It was during the Cimmerian counter-offensive into the Urartian cities that they were able to sequester the horses from the Urartians. This was the key to their freedom and mobility.
The Yamato tribes arrived to the shores of the Japanese archipelago on horseback as first suggested by Professor Namio Egami describing them as the "kiba minzoku" (horseback riding peoples). It is very likely that they arrived in Japan before the formation of the Xiongnu confederacy that began in the Altai region. We find many of the ancient relics of continental Asia in the Japanese burial sites. Things like the slab grave kurgans (called Kofun in Japan) found on the Eurasian steppe, the corded ware Jomon pottery, and the even Kurgan stelae similar to those found in Central Asia.
I will expand more on this section as time permits, but for now I have left the above summary of who the Cimmerians were, how they got there, and who were their descendants.
1 Cam Rea, "March of the Scythians", Location 184, further quoting Anne Kristensen "Who were the Cimmerians, and where did they come from?: Sargon II, the Cimmerians, and Rusa I", 1988, p. 92.
2Scythian campaign of Darius I
3Economy of Urartu