The Buddha grew up in an aristocratic republic that voted with wooden chips
Siddhartha Gautama is often called a prince, but his people, the Shakyas, had no king in the usual sense. They ran an oligarchic republic from an assembly hall at Kapilavastu, where hereditary clan chiefs debated war and peace, elected a first among equals, and voted by raising hands or passing wooden chips.
The Shakyas lived in the Terai, the strip between the Himalayan foothills and the Gangetic plain, with the kingdom of Kosala to the west and south and their kin the Koliyas across the Rohini river to the east. Their name may come from a root meaning able or worthy, or from a tree they venerated. They sat on the cultural margins of the region scholars call Greater Magadha, and many of their villages bore names from Munda languages, as did their legendary founder Okkāka.
Government rested with an Assembly of clan heads titled rājās, a status passed to the eldest son. A smaller council handled day-to-day business, and an elected chief, compared by historians to a Roman consul, presided. At sessions, four recorders sat at the corners of the hall to take down each speech and then compared notes before a decision was announced. Society below the aristocracy included landholders and labouring servants, outside the fourfold caste scheme of Vedic India. Vedic texts looked down on the region; in one Buddhist sutta brahmins call the Shakyas fierce and violent.
In the fifth century BCE the aristocrat Suddhodana married Māyā, daughter of a Koliya noble, and their son became the Buddha, remembered as Śākyamuni, sage of the Shakyas. He is said to have ended an armed feud between Shakyas and Koliyas over the Rohini's irrigation water. After his death the Shakyas claimed a share of his relics.
Independence did not last. Already vassals of Kosala, they were conquered by its king Viḍūḍabha soon after the Buddha died; later Buddhist tales exaggerated this into extermination, but the clan in fact dissolved into Kosala's population. Some scholars, including Christopher Beckwith, link the Shakyas to Central Asian Scythians, a theory others reject for lack of evidence. Newars in Nepal and Tharu people still claim Shakya descent.
Source: Shakya
