Cambra was the daughter of Belinus the Great, a legendary king of the Britons, and married to Antenor, the second King of the Cimmerians.
These describe how a people termed the Gimirri helped the forces of Sargon II to defeat the kingdom of Urartu.
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Scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries had relied upon Herodotus's account, but Sir Henry Layard's discoveries in the royal archives at Nineveh and Calah have enabled the study of new source material that is several centuries earlier than Herodotus's history.
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A "mythical" people also named Cimmerians are described in Book 11, 14 of Homer's Odyssey as living beyond the Oceanus, in a land of fog and darkness, at the edge of the world and the entrance of Hades.
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After their exodus from the Pontic steppe the Cimmerians probably assaulted Urartu about 714 BC, but in 705, after being repulsed by Sargon II of Assyria, they turned towards Anatolia and in 696–695 conquered Phrygia.
According to one Assyrian inscription, the Cimmerians (Gimirru) originally went forth from their homeland of Gamir or Uishdish on the shores of the Black Sea in "the midst of Mannai" around this time.
After successive attacks by Cimmerians, Lydians under Ardys, and Persians, it survived and prospered under the direction of its "sage," Bias, during the middle of the 6th century BC.
In 710 BC, the seven Greek kings of Ia (Cyprus) had accepted Assyrian sovereignty; in 709, Midas, king of Phrygia, beset by the nomadic Cimmerians, submitted to Assyrian rule and in 708 BC, Kummuhu (Commagene) became an Assyrian province.