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The Ancient Macedonians were the inhabitants of Macedon and adjacent regions in ancient times. Historians generally agree that the ancient Macedonians - whether they spoke a Greek dialect or a distinct language - were absorbed into the Koine Greek-speaking population in Hellenistic times. Whether the ancient Macedonians were an ethnically Greek people themselves continues to be debated by historians, linguists, and lay people. However, the Macedonian Royal family known as the Argead dynasty claimed Greek descent.

Origins

Among the scholars of antiquity, the only attested record on the origin of ancient Macedonians is found in the Histories of Herodotus. He writes in his first book that the Macedonians were a Greek tribe left behind during the great Dorian invasion:

...for during the reign of Deucalion, Phthiotis was the country in which the Hellenes dwelt, but under Dorus, the son of Hellen, they moved to the tract at the base of Ossa and Olympus, which is called Histiaeotis; forced to retire from that region by the Cadmeians, they settled, under the name of Macedonians, in the chain of Pindus. Hence they once more removed and came to Dryopis; and from Dryopia having entered the Peloponnese in this way, they became known as Dorians. (Histories, 1.53.1)

On the origins of the Macedonian Roalty, Herodotus holds a record (8.137) about the youngest of three brothers from Argos, 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.

The controversy surrounding whether ancient Macedonia should be considered a Hellenic 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 Achaean origin while Macedonian people were of Dorian stock. While, according to Strabo (Book VII. Chapter VII. 8. Getae, Macedonia, Black Sea) we are told the rulers of Lyncestis (a barony in the west of Macedonia) claimed that the Dorian tribe Bacchiads of Corinth 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 Paleo-Balkan Sprachbund.

It is generally accepted today that Macedonians were originally a proto-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 Aetolians, they were highly regarded by many southern 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 Persian characterisation "Yauna Takabara" (Greeks wearing hats). Even though some southern Greeks might have regarded them as "foreigners" this does not provide conclusive analysis on their origins one way or the other, as it was shown by Hungarian scholar Gyorgy Nemeth who compiled a list of a 8209 "foreigners" living in Athens during the 5th century BC based on their place of origins in which the great majority of these "foreigners" have been positively identified as other Greeks from all over the ancient Greek world.

Besides the theory which regards Macedonians as a Greek-speaking tribe (Masson, Hammond), the Macedonians were sometimes spoken of as a tribe of Thrace, the land north-east of Greece (Sir William M. Ramsay). Rather than a Greek origin, some argue that the ancient Macedonians had an Illyrian or Thracian origin. It is also possible that the ancient Macedonians were originally a distinct people, later absorbing Greek, Illyrian, and Thracian elements (cf. Borza, et al.).

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 Alexander the Great (see Hellenism). 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 Archelaus established the new capital at Pella, a festival in honor of Zeus at Dion (a city right next to Mt. Olympus), and welcomed Southern Greek intellectuals into the kingdom. Athenian playwriters such as Euripides and Agathon and the famous painter Zeuxis all were influencial in the early Kingdom. Euripides wrote his last two tragedies at Archelaus' court.

In book eight, Herodotus counts the allied Macedonians as part of the Greek fleet. Titus Livius (lived 59 BC-14 AD) in his Ab urbe condita (31.29) is quoting a Macedonian ambassador from the late 3rd century BC, implying that Macedonians had been a Greek-speaking tribe:

The Aetolians, the Acarnanians, 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

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Language and writing

See main article: Ancient Macedonian language.

The tongue of the area's inhabitants prior to the 5th century BC is attested in some hundred words from various glosses (mainly those of Hesychius of Alexandria, 5th century AD), as well as placenames (toponyms) and personal names (anthroponyms). 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.

Although the majority of the attested words can be confidently identified as Greek, there are 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 Berenikē vs. mainstream Greek Pherenikē. If these words are representative of the Macedonian language, than 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 Template:Polytonic kéblē or Template:Polytonic keblē for the standard Template:Polytonic kephalē, 'head'.)

There is some disagreement about the role of Doric Greek dialect in Macedonia. A number of Doric inscriptions from classical Macedon are known, such as the Pella katadesmos, 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 5th century BC Athenian comedy by the poet Strattis, "Macedonians", also contains a sentence of apparently dialectal Greek speech that may be meant to represent the speech of a Macedonian. 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). Beginning from the 5th century BC, Macedonia became more and more closely associated with southern Greek cultural and political development, resulting in the adoption of the Attic dialect (see Koine Greek).

The late Nicholas G. L. Hammond, a historian, also supports that Macedonian was a Greek dialect:

"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."

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 Olympic Games, entry to which apparently was confined to Greeks. In 480 BC, 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 (408 BC) and, another 50 years later, Philip II (356 BC, 352 BC and 348 BC). From the age of Alexander the Great onwards, Macedonian participation in the Olympic Games became common.

References

1. Nemeth, G. (2001) Metics in Athens, Acta Ant. Hung. 41, 2001, 331-348
2. The Foreign Residents of Athens: An Annex to the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names: Attica, by Michael J. Osborne and Sean G. Byrne (British Academy)

See also

• Macedon
• List of ancient Macedonians
• Lynkestis
• Molossians
• Chaonians
• Thesprotians
• Dorian
• Ancient Greece

• Ancient Macedonians
• Ancient Greeks