Budini
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Budini, an ancient nation in the NE of the Scythia of Herodotus (iv.21, 108, 109). Herodotus wrote:
The Budini for their part, being a large and numerous nation, is all mightily blue-eyed and ruddy. And a city among them has been built, a wooden city, and the name of the city is Gelonus. Of its wall then in size each side is of thirty stades and high and all wooden. And their homes are wooden and their shrines. For indeed there is in the very place Greek gods’ shrines adorned in the Greek way with statues, altars and wooden shrines and for triennial Dionysus festivals in honour of Dionysus...
Above the Sauromatae (Sarmatians), possessing the second region, dwell the Budini, whose territory is thickly wooded with trees of every kind. The Budini are a large and powerful nation: they have all deep blue eyes, and bright red hair. The Budini, however, do not speak the same language as the Geloni, nor is their mode of life the same. They are the aboriginal people of the country, and are nomads; unlike any of the neighbouring races, they eat lice. Their country is thickly planted with trees of all manner of kinds. In the very woodiest part is a broad deep lake, surrounded by marshy ground with reeds growing on it. Here otters are caught, and beavers, with another sort of animal which has a square face. With the skins of this last the natives border their capotes: and they also get from them a remedy, which is of virtue in diseases of the womb...Beyond the Budini, as one goes northward, first there is a desert, seven days' journey across...
Later located eastward probably on the middle course of the Volga about Samara. They are described as light-eyed and red-haired, and lived by hunting in their thick forests. The 1911 Britannica surmises that they were Finns of the branch now represented by the Votiaks and Permiaks, forced northwards by later immigrants. In their country was a wooden city called Gelonos, inhabited with a "distinct race", the Geloni, who according to Herodotus were Greeks that became assimilated to the Scythians. Later writers add nothing to our knowledge, and are chiefly interested in the tarandus, an animal which dwelt in the woods of the Budini and seems to have been the reindeer (Aristotle ap. Aelian, Hist. Anim. xv. 33).
[edit] References
- This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
- Pliny the Elder, Naturalis Historia, book 4, XII, 88
