The Hebrew name Gomer is accepted by most historians to refer to the Cimmerians (Akkadian Gimirru, "complete"), who dwelt on the Eurasian Steppes[4] 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.[5] In his 1716 book Drych y Prif Oesoedd, Welsh antiquary Theophilus Evans posited that the Welsh people were descended from the Cimmerians and from Gomer;[6] this was followed by a number of later writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. The argument was based on the fact that the Welsh are called Cymry in the Welsh language (Cymraeg) and the assumption that this was derived from "Cimmerians".[6][7] 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").[7][8][9] 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)[10] 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.[11]
According to tractate Yoma, in the Talmud, Gomer is identified as the ancestor of the Gomermians, modern Germans.
