Cimmerians: inhabited the region north of the Caucasus and the Black Sea during the 8th and 7th centuries BC, in what is now Ukraine and Russia.
Scythians: When Herodotus wrote his Histories in the 5th century BC, Greeks distinguished Scythia Minor, in present-day Romania and Bulgaria, from a Greater Scythia that extended eastwards for a 20-day ride from the Danube River, across the steppes of today's East Ukraine to the lower Don basin. The Don, then known as Tanaïs, has served as a major trading route ever since.
Ten Lost Tribesthematics: Several theories claim that the Scythians and/or Cimmerians were in whole or in part the Lost Tribes of Israel. [Brit-Am ] believes that the Khazars were descended from the Ten Tribes and quotes Jewish and non-Jewish sources that were contemporaneous with them.
Apocryphal accounts concerning the Lost Tribes, based to varying degrees on biblical accounts, have been produced by both Jews and Christians since at least the 17th century. An Ashkenazi Jewish tradition speaks of these tribes as Die Roite Yiddelech, "The little red Jews", cut off from the rest of Jewry by the legendary river Sambation, "whose foaming waters raise high up into the sky a wall of fire and smoke that is impossible to pass through".
Sambation: [Legendary] river, which flows with rocks for six days a week, completely surrounded a land inhabitied by Jews who could not ever leave, for by doing so, Shabbat would be desecrated.
In the earliest references, such as the Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the river is given no particular attributes, but later literature claims it rages with rapids and throws up stones six days a week, or even consists entirely of stone, sand and flame. For those six days the Sambation is impossible to cross, but it stops flowing every Shabbat, the day Jews are not allowed to travel; some writers say this is the origin of the name.
Sambation was also a popular subject in medieval literature,
In modern literature, the Sambation appears prominently in Umberto Eco's novel Baudolino, whose protagonists manage to cross the raging river of stones - but find on the other side, not the Lost Ten Tribes but the Kingdom of Prester John of Christian myth.