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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

According to a common reading of the passage, Herodotus considers the Macedonians a Hellenic tribe left behind during the 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 Dorian. (Histories, 1.53.1)

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Culture

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Language and writing

See main article: Ancient Macedonian language.

The language spoken by 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). This language 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).

An Austro-German school of scholars, which amongst others includes Ulrich Wilcken, Egon Friedell and Otto Abel, have conclude that the Macedonians were originally a Greek-speaking tribe that was until the 5th century BC relatively isolated from the bulk of Greek civilization. They had thus inevitably received Thraco-Illyrian influences and, as in the case of the Aetolians, were mostly regarded as foreigners by the southern Greeks. This was derived from studies on early Macedonian religious, political and cultural traditions which could be safely recognisable as Greek and be traced back to Homeric times.

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).

Hellenic controversy

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 subfamily of Indo-European, or Macedonian as an independent member of the Paleo-Balkan Sprachbund.

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.---

The late Nicholas G. L. Hammond, a classicist, also suggested 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."

As stated earlier Eugene Borza contradicts himself. In the book Makedonika 1995 Eugene Borza stated he accepted Hammonds general conclusion that the Macedonians had their origin among the Proto Hellenic peoples of the Pindus mountains.-First, the matter of the Hellenic origins of the Macedonians: Nicholas Hammond's general conclusion (though not the details of his arguments) that the origin of the Macedonians lies in the pool of proto-Greek speakers who migrated out of the Pindus mountains during the Iron Age, is acceptable.

He then states "We have suspected from literary sources for some time that the Macedonian court had become highly hellenized" If he accepts a general conclusion that the Macedonians were Proto Hellenes (Early Greeks from Pindus as Herodotus states) then it would be impossible for them to become Hellenized.The contadiction here is that the original people become more like the original people.

On the other hand, the historian Ernst Badian (Department of History at Harvard University) in his article about Greeks and Macedonians presents an interesting papirus fragment:

... When Eumenues saw the close-locked formation of the Macedonian phalanx ..., he sent Xennias once more, a man whose speech was Macedonian, biding him declare that he would not fight them frontally but would follow them with his cavalry and units of light troops and bar them from provisions”. …Now, Xennias' name at once shows him to be a Macedonian. Since he was in Ambiance' entourage, he was presumably a Macedonian of superior status, who spoke both standard Greek and his native language. He was the man who could be trusted to transmit Ambiance' message. This clearly shows that the phalanx had to be addressed in Macedonian, if one wanted to be sure (as Ambiance certainly did) that they would understand. And--almost equally interesting-- he did not address them himself, as he and other commanders normally addressed soldiers who understood them, nor did he send a Greek. The suggestion is surely that Macedonian was the language of the infantry and that Greek was a difficult, indeed a foreign, tongue to them. We may thus take it as certain that, when Alexander used Macedonian in addressing his guards, that too was because it was their normal language, and because (like Ambiance) he had to be sure he would be understood...

Regarding the above passage - quoted by Ernst Badian, does not necessarily imply that the 'native language' of which Xennias spoke was of non Hellenic origins. It is well documenated that ancient Greece had various Greek dialects that were not necessarily understood by other Greeks. They were referred to as "one's native tongue". Historian Richard Carrier notes, "Greeks of different dialects could speak to and understand each other, with varying degrees of difficulty. Two dialects that were widely distant from each other might be just barely intelligible to each other." . Therefor, it is highly likely that the standard Greek referred to in the above passage is the Koine Greek, that was largely based on Attic Greek, the only difference being that it had influences from other dialects. Koine Greek dialect, still fairly new during Alexander's time since it just started taking shape as the common Greek dialect within the armies of Alexander the Great, would not have been the dialect that most ancient Greeks would have been familiar with during its early stages in the 4th century BC. This dialect became the newly formed common dialect spoken within the Hellenic world.

The famous words that the Athenian orator Demosthenes, who advocated pro-Athenian issues over any other Greek states, used to describe the Macedonian King Philip II of Macedon were as follows:

"... not only no Greek, nor related to the Greeks, but not even a barbarian from any place that can be named with honors, but a pestilent knave from Macedonia, whence it was never yet possible to buy a decent slave"- Demosthenes, (Third Philippic, 31).

This speech of Demosthenes could be seen as more of politically motivated then any actual probability of King Philip's "Greekness" or lack off. King Philip used to found a pro-Macedonian lobby in the southern Greek cities in order to facilitate their absorption into the Macedonian kingdom, and Demosthenes, was in the essentially anti-Macedonian faction. One of King Philip's supporters was the well known Athenian orator Aeschines, which led to his accusation by Demosthenes and Timarchus on a charge of high treason. Aeschines was acquitted as the result of a powerful speech, in which he showed that his accuser Timarchus had, by prostituting himself to men in the port city of Piraeus, forfeited the right to speak before the people. This oration is often considered because of the bulk of Athenian laws it cites. Aeschines's speech On the Embassy (2.32) talks about the Macedonian king Amyntas taking part at the congress of the Lacedaemonian allies and the other Greeks:

"For at a congress of the Lacedaemonian allies and the other Greeks, in which Amyntas, the father of Philip, being entitled to a seat, was represented by a delegate whose vote was absolutely under his control, he joined the other Greeks in voting to help Athens to recover possession of Amphipolis. As proof of this I presented from the public records the resolution of the Greek congress and the names of those who voted".

The Persians, who ruled and had interaction with the ancient Macedonians for a brief period under the overlordship Darius Hystaspes, would refer to their neighbors in the West by the title Yauna, the Persian name of the Greeks, extended from the name Ionia (Greek: Ιωνία) of the Greek settlements in Asia Minor. To distinguishing between the inhabitants who lived in the southern and northern Hellenic regions, the Persians would call the southern Greeks Yaunâ Tyaiy Paradrayâ ("Greeks across the sea"), and the Macedonians as Yaunâ Takabarâ ("Greeks with sunhats"), a reference to the Macedonian headwear. An inscription on the tomb of Darius Hystaspes at Naqš-i Rustam proudly proclaims that he conquered the Yaunâ takabarâ.

Persian:"...\ Katpatuka \ Sparda \ Yauna \ Sakâ tyaiy pa radraya \ Skudra \ Yaunâ takabarâ \ Putây â \ Kûšiyâ \ Maciyâ \ Karkâ thâtiy \ D."; (English: "...\ Cappadocia, \ Lydia, \ the Greeks, \ the Scythians across the sea, \ Thrace, \ the sun hat-wearing Greeks, \ the Libyans, \ the Nubians, \ the men of Maka \ and the Carians.")

According to Herodotus Histories, the Persian king Mardonius had this says about the ancient Macedonians: (Histories Book 7, Paragraph 9.1-2).

"We know the manner of their battle- we know how weak their power is; already have we subdued their children who dwell in our country, the Ionians, Aeolians, and Dorians. I myself have had experience of these men when I marched against them by the orders of thy father; and though I went as far as Macedonia, and came but a little short of reaching Athens itself, yet not a soul ventured to come out against me to battle. Yet the Greeks are accustomed to wage wars, as I learn, and they do it most senselessly in their wrongheadedness and folly . Since they speak the same language, they should end their disputes by means of heralds or messengers, or by any way rather than fighting; if they must make war upon each other, they should each discover where they are in the strongest position and make the attempt there. The Greek custom, then, is not good; and when I marched as far as the land of Macedonia, it had not come into their minds to fight."

The English lexicographer Sir William Smith in his 1865 book called "The smaller history of Greece" is speaking about the Macedonians as seperate people:

"The internal dissensions of Greece produced their natural fruits and we shall have now to relate the downfall of her independence and her subjugation by a foreign power. This power was Macedonia, an obscure state to the north of Thessaly, hitherto overlooked and despised, and considered as altogether barbarous, and without the pale of Grecian civilization. But though the Macedonians were not Greeks, their sovereigns claimed to be descended from an Hellenic race, namely, that of Temenus of Argos; and it is said that Alexander I. proved his Argive descent previously to contending at the Olympic games",CHAPTER XIX, Phillip of Macedon.3

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. However it should be noted that only free Greeks could take part in the ancient Olympic Games. Alexander I did not gain Macedon's independence, which was under Persian rule, until after the end of the Persian Wars. The Macedonian aristocracy, however, clearly saw itself as Greek and Macedonian kings were permitted to participate on that basis. This was evidently somewhat controversial: when Alexander I attempted to compete at Olympia, Herodotus relates:

Now that the men of this family of Alexander I are Greeks, sprung from Perdiccas, as they themselves affirm, is a thing which I can declare of my own knowledge, and which I will hereafter make plainly evident. That they are so has been already adjudged by those who manage the Pan-Hellenic contest at Olympia. For when Alexander wished to contend in the games, and had come to Olympia with no other view, the Greeks who were about to run against him would have excluded him from the contest- saying that Greeks only were allowed to contend, and not barbarians. But Alexander proved himself to be an Argive, and was distinctly adjudged a Greek; after which he entered the lists for the foot-race, and was drawn to run in the first pair. Thus was this matter settled. (Histories, 5:22)

Regarding the participation of ancient Macedonians in the Ancient Olympics, there is a list of names, including Macedonians of non-royalty lines, who did participate in the games:

• King Alexander I: in the 80th Olympics, in 460 BC. He run the Stadion and was placed very close second.
• King Arhelaos Perdikas: competed in the 93rd Olympics, in 408 BC and won at Delphi the race of the four-horse chariot.
• King Philip II: was an Olympic champion three times. In the 106th Olympics, in 356 BC, he won the race, riding his horse. In the 107th Olympics, in 352 BC, he won the four-horse chariot race. In the 108th Olympics, in 348 BC, he was the winner of the two colt chariot.
• Cliton run the Stadion in the 113rd Olympics, in 328 BC.
• Damasias from Amphipolis: won in the Stadion in the 115th Olympics, in 320 BC.
• Lampos from Philippi: participated in the four-horse chariot race in the 119th Olympics, in 304 BC.
• Antigonos: won in the Stadion race, in the 122nd Olympics, in 292 BCE and in the 123rd Olympics in 288 BC.
• Seleucos: won in the field-sports competition in the 128th Olympics in 268 BC.
• Velestihi (Belistiche): of Thalassia (seashores) of Macedon, during the 128th Olympics, in 268 BC and in the 129th Olympics, in 264 BC. Pausanias mentions that: "…it is said that the race of the two-colt chariot was won by a woman, named Velestihi from the of Macedonia".

References

See also

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

• Ancient Macedonians
• Ancient Greeks