Scythian Buddha, post-Yamnaya culture

Who were these blue-eyed people like the Buddha living in Central Asia near Iranian Aryans?

Who were the Scythians who could make gold jewelry like this comb? (Solokha, 4th cent. BC)

Buddhist coin, gold kapana, circulating in Scythia/India

The distinct caps

When the Buddha-to-be, the Bodhisatta, was a boy, he grew up spoiled in a Scythian warrior culture. He had a white pony named Kanthaka. He was married off at 16 to his extraordinarily beautiful 16-year-old cousin, Princess Bimba (known to the world by the moniker Yasodhara). He learned to ride, shoot with bow and arrow, play and compete with other Scythian boys, and was educated in all the arts and sciences of the day by royal tutors, likely Brahmins and other instructors. All of this would be extraordinarily unlikely for a Nepalese or Indian boy, but it was common for a Central Asian, a Gandharan, a proto-Afghan. Similar to the Scythians of Central and North Asia are another culture designated by recent studies by Western scholars of the Yamnaya (named by Russians to refer to their burial pits, tumuli, kurgan, barrow tombs, their "stupas" of sorts).

Scythians (Barry Cuneliffe)

The Buddha was not from India. He was an outsider, a foreigner. First of all, there was no "India" at the time. There may have been a "Great Bharat" (Maha Bharata) at some time in the past, but not until the Buddhist Emperor Ashoka united disparate kingdoms and republics into a united empire two centuries after the life of the Buddha did anything like modern India come to be.

It was perhaps bigger in the past, extending into Pakistan and Afghanistan (until 1947's Partition that divided India between Hindu-majority and Muslim-majority areas (Pakistan, Kashmir, Bangladesh). The Buddha was from ancient Gandhara (in a region that is now Afghanistan), part of what the ancient Greeks called Scythia.

This was the Indo-Scythian land of the Sakas (Shakyas). These formerly nomadic horse-riding warriors (not caste kshatriyas) were very strange compared to the people of Magadha and neighboring kingdoms where Prince Siddhartha Gautama, renouncing his kingdom of Kapilavastu, went in search of spiritual answers, namely, "What do we suffer, and what can be done about it." The Magadhis and people we would today label as Indians spoke poorly of the barbarians in the Northwest frontier. They did things that ran contrary to the post-Indus Valley Civilization peoples guided by Brahmin priests and their Vedas and countless creeds, belief systems, and practices.

Female Scythians, warrior princesses

For one, they (Scythians in general throughout Central Asia, not South Asia and Indo-Scythians from around ancient Gandhara by Taxila, Pakistan, and modern Sakastan/Afghanistan/Sistan Baluchistan):

• did not adhere to the Vedic/Brahminical caste system
• did not revere Brahmins as but ruled by kings and warriors
• did not subjugate women, who were fellow warriors
• did not keep sexual standards as the east did, marrying among cousins [like British and other royals]
• and so on as befits an exceedingly "proud," nomadic, horseback extended family clans in there mahajanapada or "country" (foothold of the clan).
  

What was the Buddha's country?

The Shakyan Clan was one of these Aryan peoples, living in what is now the Stans, the steppe of Central Asia all the way up to Ukraine and down to Persia/Iran, or land of Iranians/Ariyans.

Dr. Ranajit Pal, Ph.D.

This is not the story we are told, but it is very well explained by maverick Indian historian Dr. Ranajit Pal, Ph.D. and aligns with the facts we have from the texts about how the Buddha was regarded, particularly by the founder of Hindu-ism (Indus-ism) as a systematic religion under the Brahmins and extending their lineage back thousands of years to the ancient Vedas [much like Jews due to push themselves back as a group into Sumerian times and the precursors of the Bible stories].

The video above shows how these family clans, these Scythian-like people venturing to the steppe, like Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes on the eastern end of Asia in and around Mongolia.

Territory of the Indo-Scythians in and around Gandhara and expanding into South Asia

Super Afghan stupa carved out of stone

• One of the most distinguishing aspects of the Buddha and Buddhism and what he perceived to be his (Solar Race, Aryan) lineage and their traditions is the stupa or burial mounds. These barrows, tumuli, kurgans, burial mounds have an ancient history. The Buddha continued it. One Ukrainian scholar even saw fit to declare that the Buddha was from Ukraine nearer to North Asia than Central Asia, and while this may sound ludicrous and self-aggrandizing, there are indications that he was more a part of that ancient Scythian, for lack of a better more comprehensive designation, tradition than anything "Indian." But the Indo-Scythians abutted the kingdoms that later became India, and it is said that the Buddha's clan, the Sakas or Shakyas (Shakyian/Scythians) invaded and took over and occupied Bihar (now a state in India so named because of the large number of Buddhist vihars or abbeys built throughout the land), where their leader had his great enlightenment in Bodh Gaya.
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The Yamnaya

Wiki edit by Wisdom Quarterly

Devoted Scythian couples with the Buddha (center), Scytho-Parthian, Kushan (wiki)

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The Yamnaya culture [a] or the Yamna culture [b], also known as the Pit Grave Culture or Ochre Grave Culture, is a late Copper Age to early Bronze Age archeological culture of the region between the Southern Bug, Dniester, and Ural rivers (the Pontic–Caspian steppe), dating to 3300–2600 BCE [2].

It was discovered by Vasily Gorodtsov following his archeological excavations near the Donets River in 1901–1903. Its name derives from its characteristic burial tradition: Я́мная (Romanization Yamnaya) is a Russian adjective that means "related to pits (yama)," as these people used to bury their dead in tumuli (kurgans) containing simple pit chambers.

Research in recent years has found that Mikhaylovka, in lower Dnieper river, Ukraine, formed the Core Yamnaya culture (c. 3600–3400 BCE) [3]. The Yamnaya economy was based upon animal husbandry, fishing, and foraging, and the manufacture of ceramics, tools, and weapons [4].

Exotic nomadic Eurasians with wagons

The people of the Yamnaya culture lived primarily as nomads, with a chiefdom system and wheeled carts and wagons that allowed them to manage large herds [5].

They are also closely connected to Final Neolithic cultures, which later spread throughout Europe and Central Asia, especially the Corded Ware people and the Bell Beaker culture [5], as well as the peoples of the Sintashta, Andronovo, and Srubnaya cultures.

Back migration from Corded Ware also contributed to Sintashta and Andronovo [6]. In these groups, several aspects of the Yamnaya culture are present [c].

Yamnaya material culture was very similar to the Afanasevo culture of South Siberia, and the populations of the two cultures are genetically indistinguishable [1]. This suggests that the Afanasevo culture may have originated from the migration of Yamnaya groups to the Altai region or, alternatively, that both cultures developed from an earlier shared cultural source [7].

Genetic studies have suggested that the people of the Yamnaya culture can be modelled as a genetic admixture between a population related to Eastern European Hunter-Gatherers (EHG) [d] and people related to hunter-gatherers from the Caucasus (CHG) in roughly equal proportions [8], an ancestral component which is often named "Steppe ancestry," with additional admixture from Anatolian, Levantine, or Early European farmers [9, 10].

Genetic studies also indicate that populations associated with the Corded Ware, Bell Beaker, Sintashta, and Andronovo cultures derived large parts of their ancestry from the Yamnaya or a closely related population [1, 11, 12, 13].

According to the widely-accepted Kurgan hypothesis of Marija Gimbutas, the people that produced the Yamnaya culture spoke a stage of the Proto Indo-European language, which later spread eastwards and westwards as part of the Indo-European migrations. More: Yamnaya culture

• Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson, Pat Macpherson (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly Wiki edit