Japheth/Gomer : Ashkenaz

The sons of Japheth:

Gomer, Magog, Madai, Javan, Tubal, Meshech and Tiras.

The sons of Gomer:

Ashkenaz, Riphath and Togarmah.                       Genesis 10 : 2-3

  Today we are going to look at Gomer's first son Ashkenaz , he is only mentioned once in the scriptures outside of the Table of Nations so let's take a look at it :

²⁷ “Lift up a banner in the land!  Blow the trumpet among the nations! Prepare the nations for battle against her;
   summon against her these kingdoms: Ararat, Minni and Ashkenaz. Appoint a commander against her;
   send up horses like a swarm of locusts. 

                                                                                                 Jeremiah 51 : 27

Here Ashkenaz one of the children of Gomer is listed with Ararat and Minni . We know that Ararat was a kingdom called  Urartu .

So we know where Ararat was . Minni sounds similar to Mitanni

The problem would be that Mitanni was around before Urartu. So Mitanni can't be the Minni talked about , but a couple of interesting things come from Mitanni : 1 . It is linked to the same language group ar Urartu and that is Hurro-Urartian  But looking at the time period of Jeremiah which would be roughly from 640 ad to 580 bc , one interesting name that comes up for Minni is Mannea .Perhaps the most interesting part of this kingdom is that it was defeated for good about 585 bc this would fit the time frame and located on lake Van it is near Ararat . So now we have Ararat and Minni most likely. What we learn about Minni is that they eventually fell to both the Assyrians and the Scythians. The Scythians are interesting because the Jews have long held that Ashkenaz is modern Germany , hence the name Ashkenazi Jews for Jews from there . What's real interesting about all this is that R1a is the Haplogroup most linked with the Scythians , this group has members of German , Slavs , Iranians , and Aryans of the Indo-European language group within it's ranks. Anciently the Scythians ruled the Eurassian steppes thanks to domestication of the horse. Ashkenaz's brother Togarmah is mentioned  in the scripture as handling horses : Ezekiel 27:14 We also see in the verse in Jeremiah that mentions Ashkenaz that horses are contained in the verse as well .Years later the Turks would replace the Scythians on the steps , it might be noted that the Turk's DNA group is next to impossible to find and usually they seem to be Haplogroup R1a the same group as the Scythians. All this circumstancial evidence could point to Ashkenaz actually being German Peoples, reading through the DNA paragraph
you will notice that R1a makes up 60 to 70% of modern German males , this is the same Haplogroup that makes up a good portion of Slavic peoples , Iranian peoples , Indo-Aryans , and many Turks along the steppes here is a map of distribution of 1 of it's subclades :

One final potential link of Ashkenaz with Indo-Iranian Peoples is that the Kingdom of Mitanni (the olderone) has evidence that it was ruled by a Indo-Iranian class over the common people that had the Hurro-Uratu languages


So in conclusion the evidence points most likely to Ashkenaz being R1a , but there is a possibility that he may have been the Hurro-Uratu language family , however the use of Horses by his brother and the geography just make it very difficult to view Ashkenaz as any group other than Scythians.