Note 466 — Chapter XVII · LYDIANS. — MEDES. — CIMMERIANS. — SCYTHIANS.

The locality which Herodotus assigns to the Budini creates difficulty. According to his own statement, it would seem that they ought to be near to the Neuri (iv, 105), and so in fact Ptolemy places them (v, 9) near about Volhynia and the sources of the Dniester.

Mannert (Geographie der Griech. und Römer, Der Norden der Erde, v, iv, p. 138) conceives the Budini to be a Teutonic tribe; but Paul Joseph Schafarik (Slavische Alterthümer, i, 10, pp. 185-195) has shown more plausible grounds for believing both them and the Neuri to be of Slavic family. It seems that the names Budini and Neuri are traceable to Slavic roots; that the wooden town described by Herodotus in the midst of the Budini is an exact parallel of the primitive Slavic towns, down even to the twelfth century; and that the description of the country around, with its woods and marshes containing beavers, otters, etc. harmonizes better with southern Poland and Russia than with the neighborhood of the Ural mountains. From the color ascribed to the Budini, no certain inference can be drawn: γλαυκόν τε πᾶν ἰσχυρῶς ἐστὶ καὶ πυῤῥόν (iv, 108). Mannert construes it in favor of Teutonic family, Schafarik in favor of Slavic; and it is to be remarked, that Hippokratês talks of the Scythians generally as extremely πυῤῥοί (De Aëre, Locis et Aquis, c. vi: compare Aristot. Prob. xxxviii, 2).

These reasonings are plausible; yet we can hardly venture to alter the position of the Budini as Herodotus describes it, eastward of the Tanais. For he states in the most explicit manner that the route as far as the Argippæi is thoroughly known, traversed both by Scythian and by Grecian traders, and all the nations in the way to it known (iv, 24): μέχρι μὲν τούτων πολλὴ περιφάνεια τῆς χώρης ἐστὶ καὶ τῶν ἔμπροσθεν ἐθνέων· καὶ γὰρ Σκυθέων τινες ἀπικνέονται ἐς αὐτοὺς, τῶν οὐ χαλεπόν ἐστὶ πυθέσθαι, καὶ Ἑλλήνων τῶν ἐκ Βορυσθένεός τε ἐμπορίου καὶ τῶν ἄλλων Ποντικῶν ἐμπορίων. These Greek and Scythian traders, in their journey from the Pontic seaports into the interior, employed seven different languages and as many interpreters.

Völcker thinks that Herodotus or his informants confounded the Don with the Volga (Mythische Geographie, sect. 24, p. 190), supposing that the higher parts of the latter belonged to the former; a mistake not unnatural, since the two rivers approach pretty near to each other at one particular point, and since the lower parts of the Volga, together with the northern shore of the Caspian, where its embouchure is situated, appear to have been little visited and almost unknown in antiquity. There cannot be a more striking evidence how unknown these regions were, than the persuasion, so general in antiquity, that the Caspian sea was a gulf of the ocean, to which Herodotus, Aristotle, and Ptolemy are almost the only exceptions. Alexander von Humboldt has some valuable remarks on the tract laid down by Herodotus from the Tanais to the Argippæi (Asie Centrale, vol. i, pp. 390-400).