Josephus placed Gomer and the "Gomerites" in
Anatolian
Galatia: "For Gomer founded those whom the
Greeks now call
Galatians, but were then called Gomerites." Galatia in fact takes its name from the ancient
Gauls (
Celts) who settled there. However, the later Christian writer
Hippolytus of Rome in assigned Gomer as the ancestor of the
Cappadocians, neighbours of the Galatians.
Jerome () and
Isidore of Seville () followed Josephus' identification of Gomer with the Galatians, Gauls and Celts. According to tractate
Yoma, in the
Talmud, Gomer is identified as "Germamya". The Muslim historian
Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Tabari () recounts a Persian tradition that Gomer lived to the age of 1000, noting that this record equalled that of
Nimrod, but was unsurpassed by anyone else mentioned in the
Torah. The
Cimbri were a tribe settled on
Jutland peninsula in Germania (now Denmark) , who were variously identified in ancient times as Cimmerian, Germanic or Celtic. In later times, some scholars connected them with the
Welsh people, and descendants of Gomer. Among the first authors to identify Gomer, the Cimmerians, and Cimbri, with the Welsh name for themselves,
Cymri, was the English antiquarian
William Camden in his
Britannia (first published in 1586). In his 1716 book
Drych y Prif Oesoedd,
Welsh historian
Theophilus Evans also posited that the Welsh were descended from the Cimmerians and from Gomer; this was followed by a number of later writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. 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"). 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) 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. In 1498
Annio da Viterbo published fragments known as
Pseudo-Berossus, now considered a forgery, claiming that Babylonian records had shown that
Comerus Gallus, i.e. Gomer son of Japheth, had first settled in Comera (now
Italy) in the 10th year of
Nimrod following the dispersion of peoples. In addition,
Tuiscon, whom
Pseudo-Berossus calls the
fourth son of Noah, and says ruled first in Germany/Scythia, was identified by later historians (e.g.
Johannes Aventinus) as none other than
Ashkenaz, Gomer's son. ==Gomer's descendants==