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| The '''Ancient Macedonians''' were the inhabitants of ] in ancient times. In Greece today people start from assumption of the "Greek identity of Macedonia as an obvious historical fact". Identifying the Greeks from the ethnic and linguistic point of view with the ancient Macedonians, the current Greek regime accuses "Skopje" of encroaching upon the name Macedonia and on a part of a cultural heritage which belongs only to the Greeks. In fact this is nothing more than their conviction which for years now has been handed out to young people in Greek schools from their earliest years and, most recently, has been propagated throughout the entire world. The thesis of the "Greek identity of Macedonia" is not scientifically supportable. We shall concentrate here on the earliest period. | |||
| The '''Ancient Macedonians''' were the inhabitants of ] in ancient times. Historians generally agree that the ancient Macedonians—whether they spoke a ] or a distinct language—were absorbed into the ]-speaking population in ] times. Whether the ancient Macedonians were an ethnically ] themselves continues to be debated by historians, linguists, and lay people. | |||
| In Greek scholarship, in numerous articles and books, the historical facts which go against the thesis of a "Greek Macedonia" are passed over. It is universally known that the classical Greek authors did not recognize the Macedonians as their fellow-countrymen, calling them barbarians, and they considered Macedonian domination in Greece as an alien rule, imported from outside by the members of other tribes, the, as Plutarch says, allophyloi. This historical right and this "Greek identity of Macedonia" have for a long time been "proved" with the hypothesis that the ancient Macedonians were a Doric tribe and their language a Doric dialect. Since this could not be supported by definite facts from historical sources, and even less by archaeological or linguistic proofs, not long ago official Greek scholarship discarded this hypothesis. After the deciphering of Linear B in 1952, and more particularly after 1970. when the luxurious edition of The History of the Greek Ethnos' was published, Greek linguists and historians went far into the past to seek for foundations for their thesis of a "Greek Macedonia". Although none of the Mycenaean scholars in the world takes seriously their hypothetical interpretations of Mycenaean texts, they nevertheless wish to discover in them "proofs" that the ancient Macedonians were Indo-Europeans, Proto-Hellenes, and that their language was the oldest, purest and most conservative Greek dialect which at the same time cast a new light on the oldest history of the Greek ethnos. This thesis reached its culmination at the beginning of the 1980's when an unusual jubilee under the title of "4,000 Years of Greek Macedonia" was celebrated with great pomp. The theory thus constructed has pretensions to scholarship but in fact starts out from pre-suppositions which are not supported by a single historical fact. | |||
| ==Origins== | |||
| The history of the ancient Macedonians over a lengthy period of 1,600 years (2,200-600 B.C.) has been reconstructed on the basis of a prejudgement that they could have been nothing other than Greeks. It should be noted that no text whatsoever has been preserved in the ancient Macedonian language. Only about a hundred glosses are known, from which it is not possible to reconstruct the language. For more than 150 years these words have been a subject of comparative linguistic studies, but quite a large number of these remain with only a hypothetical explanation or even with no explanation at all. While earlier on Doric forms were being sought in the Macedonian glosses, Greek linguists are now investing great efforts in revealing archaic Aeolian. Arcado-Cypriot and Mycenaean parallels. In fact the sparse linguistic material is extremely complex and heterogeneous. It is clear that among the glosses there are borrowings from Greek which in antique times was a language of great prestige; the Greek words, however, have been adapted according to a different, non-Greek phonetic system, le Gk. kephale "head", etc.] But at the same time there are among the glosses such words as are not found in Greek but have parallels in other Indo-European languages, As proof of the cognation of the ancient Macedonians with the Greeks a photograph has been presented of the inscription from Vergina with Greek names. It should be mentioned that the majority of the names of Macedonians from the ancient period are those of members of the ruling dynasty or the aristocracy who consciously identified with the sphere of Hellenic culture so that it is in no way strange that the names of the majority of them are Greek. But alongside them are to be found Macedonian names which cannot be explained by means of Greek etymology. | |||
| Among the scholars of antiquity, the only attested record on the origin of ancient Macedonians is found in the Histories of ]. He writes in his first book that the Macedonians were a Greek tribe left behind during the great ]: | |||
| <blockquote> | |||
| …for during the reign of Deucalion, ] was the country in which the ] dwelt, but under ], the son of ], they moved to the tract at the base of ] and ], which is called Histiaeotis; forced to retire from that region by the Cadmeians, they settled, under the name of Macedonians, in the chain of ]. Hence they once more removed and came to Dryopis; and from Dryopia having entered the ] in this way, they became known as ]. (''Histories'', 1.53.1) | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| On the origins of the Macedonian Royalty, ] holds a record () about the youngest of three brothers from ], and how he, through his skill in accepting omens, tricked an oppressive monarch out of his kingdom. The story apparently describes the genealogical connexion between the Macedonian royal house (or Macedonians in general) and legendary Greek heroes. This theory was widely accepted among the scholars of antiquity. | |||
| With regard to their religion which, it is maintained, was the same as that of the Greeks, it should be borne in mind that the names of the divinities were translated into Greek in accordance with their functions, just as the names of the Greek divinities were altered by Roman authors writing in Latin: Jupiter in place of Zeus,-Minerva for Athena, Venus for Aphrodite, etc. From an analysis of the ancient Macedonian glosses it can be concluded that ancient Macedonian was an Indo-European language distinct from Greek. The well-known French Indo-European scholar A. Meje says that Greek is no closer to ancient Macedonian than is any other Indo-European language. In his classification of the Indo-European languages, J. Pokorny with complete justification puts Macedonian together with Phrygian in his Indo-European etymological dictionary. In support of the thesis that the ancient Macedonians were Greeks it is stressed that Philip 11 and Alexander the Great not only behaved as Greeks but were incarnations of the idea of a united Greek state. The state which was ruled by Philip 11 and Alexander the Great, who subdued the Greek city-states and extended their frontiers to Central Asia, is nowhere called a Greek state. Educated by the great Greek philosopher Aristotle, Alexander highly valued classical Greek education and spread it to Central Asia. He abandoned, moreover, the dogma of the "difference" between Greeks and barbarians. He introduced into his policy a new spirit of the equality of all peoples, a spirit alien even to his teacher, who had prepared him for leadership of the Greeks and mastery of the barbarians. In accordance with his cosmopolitan ideology, Alexander showed an extraordinary broadmindedness both towards the Greeks and towards the other Balkan and Asiatic peoples. With this approach he laid the foundations of Hellenism too, which was a mixture of Greek philosophic and educational ideas with the cultural and religious understandings of the peoples of the east. Alexander spread Hellenism in the Greek language, which he considered to be the language of culture, but his mother tongue was not understood by the Greeks: a fact of which there are explicit proofs.") | |||
| It is widely suggested today that Macedonians were originally a Greek tribe that was until the 5th century BC relatively isolated from the bulk of Greek civilization. This is derived from studies on early Macedonian religious, political and cultural traditions which could be safely recognisable as Greek and traced back to Homeric times. During their isolation Macedonians inevitably received Thraco-Illyrian influences and, as in the case of the ], they were highly regarded by many Greeks as "foreigners" or even "barbarians". (Britannica, Wilcken, Friedell, Abel, Hammond). That assumption seems to be in agreement with Herodotus' theories regarding the Doric origin of ''Macednoi'', as well as the 5th century ] characterisation "''Yauna Takabara''" (Greeks wearing hats). | |||
| Greek scholarship passes over with an underestimation the historic fact of the migration of peoples which fundamentally redrew the ethnic map of Europe, and especially of the Balkans, during the early Byzantine period. Macedonia has been represented as a buffer protecting Hellenism from the waves of the barbarians throughout the centuries. The Slavonic element in Greece is either denied or minimized and it is well known that the Byzantine historian Constantine Porphyrogenitus openly says that the whole of Hellas had been Slavicized - It is likewise a known fact that the Slavonic tribes of the Ezerites and the Milingi were independent in the Peloponnese in the 7th and 8th centuries and did not pay tribute to Byzantium. If such facts are borne in mind, it is not difficult to understand whether Macedonia at that period was really a "bastion of Hellenism". | |||
| Besides the theory which regards Macedonians as a ]-speaking tribe (Masson, Hammond), the Macedonians were sometimes spoken of as a tribe of ], the land north-east of Greece, akin to the Thracians.(Sir William M. Ramsay). Rather than a Greek origin, some argue that the ancient Macedonians had an ] or ] origin. It is also possible that the ancient Macedonians underwent ] syncretizing Greek as well as Illyrian, and Thracian elements (cf. Borza, et al.). | |||
| There have been protests in Greece that we have not used toponyms from the Aegean part of Macedonia in the forms which were given to them by decree after 1913 and more especially in 1926 because this has called Greek sovereignty into question. Demelios Georgakas" notes that even today in the Peloponnese no matter in which direction one moves one cannot go three miles without encountering a Slavonic place-name. Similar statements have been made by Ph. Malingudis. If there are so many Slavonic place-names in the Peloponnese, how many more are there in the Aegean part of Macedonia where the Slavonic tribes dwelt? And today Slavs have been living there for a period of 1,400 years. What is more natural than that the Balkanized Slavs who have lived so long and continuously in Macedonia should be called Macedonians and their language Macedonian. During the period of Thucydides (11, 99) the population of Northern (Upper) Macedonia was distinguished from the Macedonian conquerors; but even those from Upper Macedonia were likewise called Macedonians. It is very unscholarly to speak of a homogenization of just one nation in these regions of the Balkans. | |||
| The controversy surrounding whether ancient Macedonia should be considered a ] state is addressed variously: based on ancient sources, and on linguistic evidence. Neither approach is conclusive, Herodotus seems to assert that the Macedonian aristocracy was of ] origin while Macedonian people were of ] stock. While, according to Strabo (Book VII. Chapter VII. 8. ], ], ]) we are told the rulers of ] (a barony in the west of Macedonia) claimed that the Dorian tribe ] of ] were their ancestors. Linguistics seems to point inconclusively to either Macedonian as an archaic form of Greek, Macedonian as part of a Graeco-Macedonian (Hellenic) subfamily of Indo-European, or Macedonian as an independent member of the ] ]. | |||
| ⚫ | ==References== | ||
| ⚫ | <references/> | ||
| ⚫ | == See also == | ||
| This controversy concerns the early kingdom before the time of Philip II exclusively. It is undisputed that Macedon was heavily Atticized from the time of ] (see ]). However there are indications that even during the early kingdom, before the time of King Philip II, there were Hellenic influences in the Macedonian kingdom. King ] established the new capital at ], a festival in honor of ] at ] (a city right next to ]), and welcomed Southern Greek intellectuals into the kingdom. Athenian playwriters such as ] and ] and the famous painter ] all were influencial in the early Kingdom. Euripides wrote his last two tragedies at ]' court. <ref></ref> | |||
| ⚫ | *] | ||
| In book eight, Herodotus counts the allied Macedonians as part of the Greek fleet. ] (lived 59 BC-14 AD) in his '']'' (31.29) is quoting a Macedonian ambassador from the late 3rd century BC, implying that Macedonians had been a Greek-speaking tribe: | |||
| :''The ], the ], the Macedonians, men of the same language, are united or disunited by trivial causes that arise from time to time; with aliens, with barbarians, all Greeks wage and will wage eternal war; for they are enemies by the will of nature, which is eternal, and not from reasons that change from day to day.''--- | |||
| ==Culture== | |||
| {{sect-stub}} | |||
| ==Language and writing== | |||
| :''See main article: ].'' | |||
| ], inscribed ΒΑΣΙΛΕΩΣ ΦΙΛΙΠΠΟΥ - King Philip's]] | |||
| The tongue of the area's inhabitants prior to the ] is attested in some hundred words from various glosses (mainly those of ], ] AD), as well as placenames (]) and personal names (]). It was later replaced by Koine Greek, but according to some estimates may have continued in use by the rural population until after the turn of the era.<!-- What estimates? Alexander_007's cookbook? This definitely needs a source as it is being repeated in several articles for some time now. -->{{fact}} | |||
| Although the vast majority of the attested words can be confidently identified as Greek, there are few words that are not easily identifiable as Greek. Most notably, many words systematically show voiced stops where voiceless aspirates would normally be expected in a Greek dialect, e.g. in Macedonian '']'' vs. mainstream Greek ''Pherenikē''. If these words are representative of the Macedonian language, then it had not participated in at least one sound change that is common to every other known Greek dialect and is often regarded by linguists as in fact a defining constitutive criterion of Greek speech. (However, in isolated instances, deviant voiced stops in the place of voiceless aspirates are not unknown in Greek dialects; an example is the contraction '''{{Polytonic|κέβλη}}''' ''kéblē'' or '''{{Polytonic|κεβλή}}''' ''keblē'' for the standard '''{{Polytonic|κεφαλή}}''' ''kephalē'', 'head'.) | |||
| There is some disagreement about the role of ] dialect in Macedonia. A number of Doric inscriptions from classical Macedon are known, such as the ], and it must be remembered that some Greek writers considered the Macedonians akin to Dorians. However, these inscriptions do not display the same phonological features that are thought to have been typical of the "Macedonian" as reconstructed from the lexical evidence. No inscriptions in a non-Greek language with these features have been found. A fragment of a ] Athenian comedy by the poet ], ''"Macedonians"'', also contains a sentence of apparently dialectal Greek speech that may be meant to represent the speech of a Macedonian.{{fact}} It is therefore disputed whether Doric Greek was just a second language spoken side by side with Macedonian proper by some parts of the population (Borza 1999), or whether Macedonian was itself a variety of Doric Greek, in which the lexical elements with the non-Greek phonological features represented only a layer of alien admixture or a secondary local development (Masson 1996).<ref></ref> Beginning from the ], Macedonia became more and more closely associated with southern Greek cultural and political development, resulting in the adoption of the ] dialect (see ]). | |||
| The late ], a historian, also supports that Macedonian was a Greek dialect: | |||
| <blockquote> | |||
| "What language did these `Macedones' speak? The name itself is Greek in root and in ethnic termination. It probably means `highlanders', and it is comparable to Greek tribal names such as `Orestai' and `Oreitai', meaning 'mountain-men'. A reputedly earlier variant, `Maketai', has the same root, which means `high', as in the Greek adjective makednos or the noun mekos... At the turn of the sixth century the Persians described the tribute-paying peoples of their province in Europe, and one of them was the `yauna takabara', which meant `Greeks wearing the hat'. There were Greeks in Greek city-states here and there in the province, but they were of various origins and not distinguished by a common hat. However, the Macedonians wore a distinctive hat, the kausia. We conclude that the Persians believed the Macedonians to be speakers of Greek. Finally, in the latter part of the fifth century a Greek historian, Hellanicus, visited Macedonia and modified Hesiod's genealogy by making Macedon not a cousin, but a son of Aeolus, thus bringing Macedon and his descendants firmly into the Aeolic branch of the Greek-speaking family. Hesiod, Persia, and Hellanicus had no motive for making a false statement about the language of the Macedonians, who were then an obscure and not a powerful people. Their independent testimonies should be accepted as conclusive." | |||
| </blockquote> | |||
| Over 6000 Macedonian inscriptions have been found until now. All of them are identified as a form of a Greek dialect. | |||
| ==Ancient Olympics== | |||
| A series of passages in book five of Herodotus' ''Histories'' (5:22) are seen by some classical scholars that the Macedonians were customarily excluded from panhellenic events such as the ], entry to which apparently was confined to Greeks. In ], the Macedonian king Alexander I attempted to participate in the Olympic Games, and met with resistance by competitors, who regarded him as a non-Greek. According to Herodotus, Alexander argued that his family was of ultimately Greek ("Argive") descent, and he was finally admitted on these grounds. Some scholars regard this episode as evidence that in fact Macedonians could be regarded as Greeks, while others contend that probably the decision was politically motivated and based more on the alleged mythical ancestry claimed by the king than on a genuine perception as Greeks of the Macedonians as a whole. Alexander apparently remained the only Macedonian participant for a long time. Within the next century, the only others were king Archelaos Perdikas (]) and, another 50 years later, Philip II (], ] and ]). From the age of Alexander the Great onwards, Macedonian participation in the Olympic Games became common. | |||
| ⚫ | ==References== | ||
| ⚫ | <references/> | ||
| ⚫ | == See also == | ||
| ⚫ | *] | ||
| *] | |||
| *] | |||
| *] | |||
| *] | |||
| *] | |||
| *] | |||
| *] | |||
| *] | |||
| ] | ] | ||
| ] | |||
| ] | |||
| ] | |||
Revision as of 01:14, 29 October 2006
The Ancient Macedonians were the inhabitants of Macedon in ancient times. In Greece today people start from assumption of the "Greek identity of Macedonia as an obvious historical fact". Identifying the Greeks from the ethnic and linguistic point of view with the ancient Macedonians, the current Greek regime accuses "Skopje" of encroaching upon the name Macedonia and on a part of a cultural heritage which belongs only to the Greeks. In fact this is nothing more than their conviction which for years now has been handed out to young people in Greek schools from their earliest years and, most recently, has been propagated throughout the entire world. The thesis of the "Greek identity of Macedonia" is not scientifically supportable. We shall concentrate here on the earliest period.
In Greek scholarship, in numerous articles and books, the historical facts which go against the thesis of a "Greek Macedonia" are passed over. It is universally known that the classical Greek authors did not recognize the Macedonians as their fellow-countrymen, calling them barbarians, and they considered Macedonian domination in Greece as an alien rule, imported from outside by the members of other tribes, the, as Plutarch says, allophyloi. This historical right and this "Greek identity of Macedonia" have for a long time been "proved" with the hypothesis that the ancient Macedonians were a Doric tribe and their language a Doric dialect. Since this could not be supported by definite facts from historical sources, and even less by archaeological or linguistic proofs, not long ago official Greek scholarship discarded this hypothesis. After the deciphering of Linear B in 1952, and more particularly after 1970. when the luxurious edition of The History of the Greek Ethnos' was published, Greek linguists and historians went far into the past to seek for foundations for their thesis of a "Greek Macedonia". Although none of the Mycenaean scholars in the world takes seriously their hypothetical interpretations of Mycenaean texts, they nevertheless wish to discover in them "proofs" that the ancient Macedonians were Indo-Europeans, Proto-Hellenes, and that their language was the oldest, purest and most conservative Greek dialect which at the same time cast a new light on the oldest history of the Greek ethnos. This thesis reached its culmination at the beginning of the 1980's when an unusual jubilee under the title of "4,000 Years of Greek Macedonia" was celebrated with great pomp. The theory thus constructed has pretensions to scholarship but in fact starts out from pre-suppositions which are not supported by a single historical fact.
The history of the ancient Macedonians over a lengthy period of 1,600 years (2,200-600 B.C.) has been reconstructed on the basis of a prejudgement that they could have been nothing other than Greeks. It should be noted that no text whatsoever has been preserved in the ancient Macedonian language. Only about a hundred glosses are known, from which it is not possible to reconstruct the language. For more than 150 years these words have been a subject of comparative linguistic studies, but quite a large number of these remain with only a hypothetical explanation or even with no explanation at all. While earlier on Doric forms were being sought in the Macedonian glosses, Greek linguists are now investing great efforts in revealing archaic Aeolian. Arcado-Cypriot and Mycenaean parallels. In fact the sparse linguistic material is extremely complex and heterogeneous. It is clear that among the glosses there are borrowings from Greek which in antique times was a language of great prestige; the Greek words, however, have been adapted according to a different, non-Greek phonetic system, le Gk. kephale "head", etc.] But at the same time there are among the glosses such words as are not found in Greek but have parallels in other Indo-European languages, As proof of the cognation of the ancient Macedonians with the Greeks a photograph has been presented of the inscription from Vergina with Greek names. It should be mentioned that the majority of the names of Macedonians from the ancient period are those of members of the ruling dynasty or the aristocracy who consciously identified with the sphere of Hellenic culture so that it is in no way strange that the names of the majority of them are Greek. But alongside them are to be found Macedonian names which cannot be explained by means of Greek etymology.
With regard to their religion which, it is maintained, was the same as that of the Greeks, it should be borne in mind that the names of the divinities were translated into Greek in accordance with their functions, just as the names of the Greek divinities were altered by Roman authors writing in Latin: Jupiter in place of Zeus,-Minerva for Athena, Venus for Aphrodite, etc. From an analysis of the ancient Macedonian glosses it can be concluded that ancient Macedonian was an Indo-European language distinct from Greek. The well-known French Indo-European scholar A. Meje says that Greek is no closer to ancient Macedonian than is any other Indo-European language. In his classification of the Indo-European languages, J. Pokorny with complete justification puts Macedonian together with Phrygian in his Indo-European etymological dictionary. In support of the thesis that the ancient Macedonians were Greeks it is stressed that Philip 11 and Alexander the Great not only behaved as Greeks but were incarnations of the idea of a united Greek state. The state which was ruled by Philip 11 and Alexander the Great, who subdued the Greek city-states and extended their frontiers to Central Asia, is nowhere called a Greek state. Educated by the great Greek philosopher Aristotle, Alexander highly valued classical Greek education and spread it to Central Asia. He abandoned, moreover, the dogma of the "difference" between Greeks and barbarians. He introduced into his policy a new spirit of the equality of all peoples, a spirit alien even to his teacher, who had prepared him for leadership of the Greeks and mastery of the barbarians. In accordance with his cosmopolitan ideology, Alexander showed an extraordinary broadmindedness both towards the Greeks and towards the other Balkan and Asiatic peoples. With this approach he laid the foundations of Hellenism too, which was a mixture of Greek philosophic and educational ideas with the cultural and religious understandings of the peoples of the east. Alexander spread Hellenism in the Greek language, which he considered to be the language of culture, but his mother tongue was not understood by the Greeks: a fact of which there are explicit proofs.")
Greek scholarship passes over with an underestimation the historic fact of the migration of peoples which fundamentally redrew the ethnic map of Europe, and especially of the Balkans, during the early Byzantine period. Macedonia has been represented as a buffer protecting Hellenism from the waves of the barbarians throughout the centuries. The Slavonic element in Greece is either denied or minimized and it is well known that the Byzantine historian Constantine Porphyrogenitus openly says that the whole of Hellas had been Slavicized - It is likewise a known fact that the Slavonic tribes of the Ezerites and the Milingi were independent in the Peloponnese in the 7th and 8th centuries and did not pay tribute to Byzantium. If such facts are borne in mind, it is not difficult to understand whether Macedonia at that period was really a "bastion of Hellenism".
There have been protests in Greece that we have not used toponyms from the Aegean part of Macedonia in the forms which were given to them by decree after 1913 and more especially in 1926 because this has called Greek sovereignty into question. Demelios Georgakas" notes that even today in the Peloponnese no matter in which direction one moves one cannot go three miles without encountering a Slavonic place-name. Similar statements have been made by Ph. Malingudis. If there are so many Slavonic place-names in the Peloponnese, how many more are there in the Aegean part of Macedonia where the Slavonic tribes dwelt? And today Slavs have been living there for a period of 1,400 years. What is more natural than that the Balkanized Slavs who have lived so long and continuously in Macedonia should be called Macedonians and their language Macedonian. During the period of Thucydides (11, 99) the population of Northern (Upper) Macedonia was distinguished from the Macedonian conquerors; but even those from Upper Macedonia were likewise called Macedonians. It is very unscholarly to speak of a homogenization of just one nation in these regions of the Balkans.
References