The Ordos culture (simplified Chinese: 鄂尔多斯文化; traditional Chinese: 鄂爾多斯文化; pinyin: È'ěrduōsī Wénhuà) was a material culture occupying a region centered on the Ordos Loop (corresponding to the region of Suiyuan, including Baotou to the north, all located in modern Inner Mongolia, China)[3] during the Bronze and early Iron Age from c. 800 BCE to 150 BCE.

[4] The Ordos culture is known for significant finds of Scythian art and may represent the easternmost extension of Indo-European Eurasian nomads, such as the Saka,[5][6][7] or may be linkable to Palaeo-Siberians or Yeniseians.

The Ordos Plateau was covered by grass, bushes, and trees and was sufficiently watered by numerous rivers and streams to produce rich grazing lands.

[11] Some authors date the arrival from the north and west of these nomads practicing mounted warfare to the 4th century BC, corresponding roughly to the period of the conquests of Alexander the Great in Central Asia.

The Ordos culture of about 500 BCE to 100 CE is known for its "Ordos bronzes", blade weapons, finials for tent-poles, horse gear, and small plaques and fittings for clothes and horse harness, using animal style decoration with relationships both with the Scythian art of regions much further west, and also Chinese art.

[6][7] Because the people represented in archaeological finds tend to display Europoid features, also earlier noted by Otto J. Maenchen-Helfen,[22] Iaroslav Lebedynsky suggests the Ordos culture had "a Scythian affinity".

[26] Recent archeological and genetic data suggests that the Western and Eastern Scythians of the 1st millennium BC originated independently, but both combine Yamnaya-related ancestry, which spread eastwards from the area of the European steppes, with an East Asian-related component, which most closely corresponds to the modern North Siberian Nganasan people of the lower Yenisey River, to varying degrees, but generally higher among Eastern Scythians.

[12] The motif of the "raptor-headed creature" is earlier documented from the Pazyryk culture, and is part of a Eurasian symbolic system known from around the 7th century BC and identified in Saka burial sites.

[6] However, the art of the Ordos culture appears to have similarities to that of the Donghu people (Chinese: 東胡), a Mongolic-speaking nomadic tribe located to the east, suggesting that the two had close ties.

The Ordos culture covered, geographically, regions later occupied by the Han, including areas just north of the later Great Wall of China and straddling the northernmost hook of the Yellow River.

[55] Belt plaques in the shape of a kneeling horse in gilded silver, were made in North China for Xiongnu patrons in 3rd-1st century BCE.

[56][57] Belt buckles with animal combat scenes were made in the 2nd-1st century BCE, mainly by North China workshops for the Xiongnu.