What is "cimmeria"

Cimmeria may refer to:

• Cimmeria, an ancient name of Crimea, a peninsula in the northern part of the Black Sea
• Cimmerians, an ancient people who lived in the North Caucasus in the 8th and 7th century BC, usually associated with the ancient Cimmeria or Crimea
• Cimmeria (continent), an ancient microcontinent separating the ancient Paleo-Tethys and Neo-Tethys oceans
• Cimmeria (Conan), a fictional country in the Conan the Barbarian stories created by Robert E. Howard
• Cimmeria (poem), a poem by Robert E. Howard
• Cimmeria (Calvino), a fictional country in If on a winter's night a traveler by Italo Calvino
• Cimmeria (Stargate), a fictional planet in the Stargate setting
• Terra Cimmeria, a region on Mars

Cimmeria is a fictional land of barbarians in the Hyborian Age, and the homeland of Conan the Barbarian in the works of Robert E. Howard.

"Cimmeria" is a poem by Robert E. Howard about the fictional country Cimmeria, created by Howard as part of his Hyborian world which is the setting for his character Conan the Barbarian. In the poem, Cimmeria is described as a "land of Darkness and deep Night", a gloomy place with dark woods, dusky silent streams and a leaden cloudy sky.

According to Howard, the poem was "Written in Mission, Texas, February 1932; suggested by the memory of the hill-country above Fredricksburg seen in a mist of winter rain".

Cimmeria was an ancient continent, or, rather, a string of microcontinents or terranes, that rifted from Gondwana in the Southern Hemisphere and was accreted to Eurasia in the Northern Hemisphere. It consisted of parts of what is today Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Tibet, Shan–Thai, and Malaya. Cimmeria rifted from the Gondwanan shores of the Paleo-Tethys Ocean during the Carboniferous-earliest Permian and as the Neo-Tethys Ocean opened behind it, during the Permian, the Paleo-Tethys closed in front of it. Cimmeria rifted off Gondwana from east to west, from Australia to the eastern Mediterranean. It stretched across several latitudes and spanned a wide range of climatic zones.