The name Kimmerioi is mentioned once, and once only, in the Odyssey of Homer. On this solitary mention of the name it is said that the Cimmerii (Latin form; Cimmerians, English form) were a very ancient people, numerous and well known, and could not be of Israelitish origin.
Homer lived about the ninth century B.C., but the poems were probably not written down till a later date (The World’s Great Books, Vol. III, pp. 1871, 1875). The Kimmerioi of Homer were located by him in a land “covered in mist and cloud, nor does the sun, shining, look down on them with his rays, either when he mounts to the starry heaven, nor when he turns again to earth from heaven, but doleful night is spread over wretched folk” (Odyssey xi. 14 ff) . To get there, Ulysses—who had been sent by the enchantress Circe to consult the dead in Hades—set out from the Isle of Circe, which was itself a long way west of Greece, in the Mediterranean Sea. To reach it they went to “Oceanus.” In the plan of “The World according to Hecatleus,” in the History of Ancient Geography, by E. H. Bunbury, Oceanus was the encircling sea that ran round all known lands and seas and was outside the Mediterranean Sea, beyond the Pillars of Hercules. The obvious inference is that Cimmeria, which was over realms and seas, and on a distant shore from the “Isle of Circe”—to which Ulysses returned by the aid of Zephyrus (a west wind)—was certainly not in the Black Sea.