Central Asia: Silk Road to Europe (video)

Nurettin Yilmaz (4/11/19); Amber Larson, Dhr. Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly Wiki edit

(Part 34, 2018) Nurettin Yilmaz's travel channel has more than 1,000 videos from ~80 countries.

Budini

Geographical range	Eastern Europe
Period	European Iron Age
Major sites	Bel'skoe site [ru] (link to Budini is not definitive)
Followed by	Severians

XIX century map based on Herodotus' Histories. Budini are located at the center top of the map, above the Black Sea.

The Budini (Ancient Greek, Βουδίνοι; Boudínoi) was a group of people (possibly a Buddhist tribe) described by Herodotus and several later classical authors.

Described as Scythian nomads living near settled Gelonians, Herodotus located them east of the Tanais River (which is usually assumed to correspond with modern Don River) beyond the Sarmatians.^[1]

Pliny the Elder mentions the Budini together with the Geloni and other peoples living around the rivers that drain into the Black Sea from the north.^[2]

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 burned down one of the Budini's large fortified cities.^[3]

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 (Land of Buddhists in Shakya Land?), which was able to change the color of its fur for camouflage. The latter is probably a misunderstanding of the seasonal change in reindeer fur color.^[4] More

Central Asia (Tajikistan highlights 2018)

(Wiki) Tajikistan is a mountainous, landlocked country in Central Asia with an area of 55,300 square miles and an estimated population of 8.7 million people in 2016.

It is bordered by Afghanistan on the south, Uzbekistan on the west, Kyrgyzstan on the north, and China on the east. The traditional homelands of the Tajik people include present-day Tajikistan as well as parts of Afghanistan and Uzbekistan.

Tajikistan is landlocked and is the smallest nation in Central Asia by area. It is covered by mountains of the Pamir range, and more than 50 percent of the country is over 9,800 feet (3,000 meters) above sea level. The only major areas of lower land are in the north (part of the Fergana Valley) and in the southern Kofarnihon and Vakhsh river valleys, which form the Amu Darya.

Tajikistan has a population of 8,734,951 (2016) of which 70% are under the age of 30 and 35% are between the ages of 14 and 30.

Tajiks who speak Tajik (a dialect of Persian) are the main ethnic group, although there are sizeable minorities of Uzbeks and Russians, whose numbers are declining due to emigration. The Pamiris of Badakhshan, a small population of Yaghnobi people, and a sizeable minority of Ismailis are all considered to belong to the larger group of Tajiks. All citizens of Tajikistan are called Tajikistanis.

In 1989, ethnic Russians in Tajikistan made up 7.6% of the population, but they are now less than 0.5%, after the civil war spurred Russian emigration. The ethnic German population of Tajikistan has also declined due to emigration: Having topped at 38,853 in 1979, it has almost vanished since the collapse of the Soviet Union.