This seems to be all that we can as yet restore of the movements of the Q Wiros, though there is a sequel to be added later; we must turn now to the problem of the P speaking people. We have seen that about the time that the Celts were leaving the mountain zone for the west, bands of Wiros from the plain, passing through the Moravian gate, across Galicia and Podolia, reached the rich valley of the Koban to the north of the Caucasus mountains. Here they learned the use of iron from their humble neighbours on the other side of the mountains, who were perhaps the Chalybes, and made for themselves steel blades for their swords. It was during their sojourn here that they must have mixed with other Wiros who were still roaming the steppes of this region, and who were almost certainly of Iranian speech, which was spoken in this area in the time of Herodotus, and still survives among the Ossetes[493] in the Caucasus mountains. They may, too, have come into contact and intermarried with other folk, who were perhaps not Wiros. For some reason, which I do not pretend to explain, their speech, which on their arrival must have been allied to Thracian, changed its phonological laws, and they acquired the habit of labialising the Qu of their original tongue. Rostovtzeff has suggested that these Koban Wiros were the Cimmerians,[494] and since, as we have seen, these P speaking people appear a few years later in Gaul, and again are found approaching, if they do not actually reach, the peninsula of Jutland, it seems reasonable to believe that the statement of Posidonius,[495] which has received Ridgeway’s approval,[496] is correct, and that the Cimmerians of Russia and of the west,[497] as well as the people who gave their name to the Cimbric Chersonese are all one P speaking people, and that we must include in their number the Brythonic Cymry of Britain, in spite of what Rhys has written to the contrary.[498] Whether the name was originally _com-brox_, _compatriots_, or not, I must leave to philologists to determine, but if Rhys’ etymology is correct, these compatriots were those who set out from the Koban to conquer the greater part of Europe. If this be so the statement quoted by Pliny from Lycophron that the Cimmerii were a people living around Lake Avernus[499] may not be a poetic fable, as has been supposed, but may show us that some of the Villa-nova invaders of Italy retained for a time the common name which survives in Wales to-day. Thus I am assuming that the words κιμμέριοι, κίμμεροι, Cimbri Cymry are all one, and suggest the use of the term Kimri[500] for the whole group.