The Budini was a group of people described by Herodotus and several later classical authors. Described as nomads living near settled Gelonians, Herodotus located them east of the Tanais river beyond the Sarmatians. Pliny the Elder mentions the Budini together with the Geloni and other peoples living around the rivers which drain into the Black Sea from the north. During the European Scythian campaign of Darius I, in which the Persian king invaded the Scythian lands of Eastern Europe, the Budini were allies of the Scythians. During the campaign, he captured and burnt down one of the Budini's large fortified cities. The Budini are also mentioned by Classical authors in connection with reindeer. Both Aristotle and Theophrastus have short accounts – probably based on the same source – of an ox-sized deer species, named tarandos, living in the land of the Budines in Scythia, which was able to change the colour of its fur to obtain camouflage. The latter is probably a misunderstanding of the seasonal change in reindeer fur colour.
Herodotus' description
Herodotus gives the following account:
Historicity, origin and location
The definitive origin or the ethnic composition of Budini - if they indeed existed as a singular entity Herodotus and later authors had described - remains unknown. The general consensus is that the Budini correspond to.
Slavic Origin
was the first to suggest that Budini correspond to, a view now held by the majority of historians. He considered the latter to be ethnically proto-Slavic, and, together with Boris Grakov, further theorised that, considering the probable, relatively large, population numbers of the Budini, which he inferred from the archeological evidence, the Budini must have inhabited a relatively large territory, likely stretching from Voronezhforest steppe to Poltava forest steppe. However, he also did not rule out a possible relation with proto-Balts. He also suggested the Budini had cults dedicated to Lada, a goddess of Balto-Slavic mythology. On the other hand,, who also argued that they were proto-Slavic, determined their location at the time of Herodotus to be between the middleDnepr and the upper reaches of Don river stretching further up to the limits of the Volga river basin. Zbigniew Gołąb argued that they were a confederation of people who spoke the Proto-Slavic language, from which Greeks inferred their name which was an exonym meaning "tribesmen" in their native language. Several historians and scholars such as Lubor Niederle and Pavel Jozef Šafárikbelieve that the Budini were a Slavic people, and that the etymology stems from the Slavic word for 'water' "Voda". Same as Votic, in Finnish Vatja or Russian Voga.
