|
 The study of ancient Macedonia is bedeviled
by the Macedonian question. Scholars from modern Greece and the
former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia have made bold statements
on the nature of ancient Macedonia, which in their more extreme
variants can be summarized as "the ancient Macedonians spoke a
Slavic language" and "Macedonia has been Greek for at least
3,000 years". Unfortunately, politicians in both nations argue
(with a textbook example of a non sequitur) that the borders of
the past should also be those of the present.
Of course, modern politics can not be based on ancient history.
Scholars who allow themselves to be used for political purposes,
overestimate the importance of their field of study. They also
force others to digress longer and more often than they like on
the relation between ancient Macedonia, the Slavs, and Greece,
which must therefore be the leitmotiv of this article too. Those
interested in the origin of the debate, can read the appendix.
Country
Macedonia as a whole consists of two parts:
The fertile alluvial plain, watered by the rivers Haliacmon and
the Axius, simply called Macedonia (or Lower Macedonia, to
prevent confusion). It is situated immediately north of the holy
mountain Olympus. In Antiquity, the plain produced sufficient
cereals to permit export, but it was also rich in cattle, sheep,
and remarkably strong horses. The coast is flat and there are
only a few natural harbors, which helps to explain why the
Macedonians never became a sea-faring nation.
The mountains, usually called Upper Macedonia. There were arable
tracts but the country was predominantly pastoral. Its forests
produced pitch and especially timber, there was some iron and
gold mining, and hunters made sure that Macedonia could also
export furs.
Today, Lower Macedonia is completely within the borders of
modern Greece; the northern part of Upper Macedonia constitutes
the former Yugoslav republic of Macedonia.
Although the two landscapes are different, they share a
continental climate with cold winters. This climate makes the
Macedonian vegetation different from the rest of the Aegean
region.
Language
At first sight, it appears that the inhabitants of the
Macedonian alluvial plain spoke Greek. A fourth-century curse
tablet from Pella, published in 1994, is written in Northwest
Greek, and later inscriptions are in Attic Greek. Many personal
names (like Philippos and Alexandros, Zeus and Herakles) are
Greek as well. That the Macedonians spoke Greek, looks like an
inevitable conclusion.
However, there is some room for doubt. To start with, there are
also Macedonian names that have no Greek parallel (Arridaeus or
Sabattaras). In the second place, in many semi-literate
societies, there is a difference between the spoken and the
written language. It would not be without parallel if a
Macedonian, when he wanted to make an official statement,
preferred decent Greek instead of his native tongue. (Cf. the
altars of the goddess Nehalennia, which were all written in
Latin, a language that was almost certainly not spoken by the
people who erected them.)
Thirdly, many historical sources are written in Greek, and it
was a common practice among Greek historians to hellenize
foreign names. For example, the name of the powerful first king
of the Persian empire, Kuruš, ought to be transcribed as Kourous
or Kouroux in Greek, but became Kyros, because this looks like a
Greek word ("Mr. Almighty"). The name that is rendered as
Alexandros, which has a perfect Greek etymology, may in fact
represent something like Alaxandus, which is not Greek. A
related argument that forces us to hesitate is that the Greeks
nearly always converted the names of foreign deities. Supreme
gods like Jupiter and Marduk are called "Zeus". So, the fact
that Greek authors use Greek names for Macedonian people and
deities does not prove very much about the Macedonian language.
None of this forces us to say that the Macedonians did not speak
Greek, but it leaves the possibility that things were not what
they seem. There is room for skepticism.
This is why linguists take several remarks by the authors of
ancient dictionaries, which otherwise might have been
interpreted as indications for a mere difference in dialect,
very seriously. For example, there is evidence that Greeks were
unable to understand people who were makedonizein, "speaking
Macedonian". The Macedonian king Alexander the Great was not
understood by the Greeks when he shouted an order in his native
tongue and the Greek commander Eumenes needed a translator to
address the soldiers of the Macedonian phalanx. The Greek
orators Thrasymachus of Chalcedon and Demosthenes of Athens
called Macedonian kings like Archelaus and Philip II barbarians,
which prima facie means that they did not speak Greek. Now this
happens in polemical contexts and is certainly exaggerated, but
the statements need to refer to some kind of linguistic reality.
We know frustratingly little about the Macedonian
language/dialect. For instance, we don't know anything about its
grammar or syntaxis. We do not even know whether the Macedonians
spoke one language at all; many societies, now and then, have
more than one language. All we have is a set of about 150 words
that were recognized as Macedonian in Antiquity, many of which
are derived from a Macedonian-to-Greek dictionary by a man named
Amerias. These 150 words can be divided into two groups:
Words that have a counterpart in Greek. For example, the
Macedonian title Nikatôr ("victor") is obviously the equivalent
of Greek Nikêtêr. Usually, the Macedonian words are voiced and
lack aspiration whereas Greek words are voiceless and aspirated:
for example, Greek aithêr is the equivalent of Macedonian adê
("sky").
Words that do not resemble a Greek word: sarissa ("lance"),
abagna ("rose"), peliganes ("senate"). It is certain that these
words are Indo-European.
Linguists have attempted to establish connections between the
non-Greek words with other Indo-European languages, but this is
difficult. For example, abroutes, ("eyebrows") looks like the
Avestan word bruuat.biiam, which suggests an eastern origin of
the Macedonian language; but if the /T/ in abroutes is a writing
error and should be read as a /F/ (digamma; pronounced as /w/),
there is nothing special about it, because *abrouwes corresponds
to the Greek ophrues. It is not easy to find parallels for a
vocabulary if even a simple writing error can have grave
consequences. Things are even more complicated because the
languages of the neighboring Thracians and Illyrians, where we
would seek for parallels first, are equally poorly understood.
Much is still uncertain, but two conclusions appear to be
irrefutable:
The Macedonians did not speak a Slavic language, which belongs
to an altogether different branch of Indo-European, called
Balto-Slavo-Germanic;
Macedonian and Greek were related but different, but it is not
certain whether they were different languages (which means that
they have a different grammar and syntaxis) or dialects.
It is also certain that the Macedonian language became
increasingly hellenized. Evidence for the pronunciation of
Macedonian in the second half of the fourth century can be found
in the cuneiform texts from Babylon. If Macedonian was still
unaspirated and voiced when Alexander the Great conquered the
Persian Empire, the Babylonian scribes would have spelled the
name of the king's brother, called Philippos in Greek sources,
something like Bi-líp+ending. However, the first syllable is
always Pi, which also represents a sound like /vi/. This
suggests that the Macedonians had began to aspire their
consonants and were losing voice. The name Berenike (the
Macedonian equivalent of Greek Pherenike) may also have been
pronounced according to the Greek fashion, because it is
rendered in Latin as Veronica.
Finally, it must be stressed that, despite what modern
politicians and some modern scholars argue, language says not
much about ethnicity. (People can speak Frisian and have a Dutch
passport, whereas people speaking Dutch can live in Belgium and
Surinam and feel offended when they are called Dutch.) The
identification of "one language, one nation, one state", is
nineteenth-century and says nothing about Antiquity. Still,
language is one of the factors that is used to classify people,
just like religion and a shared past, so it is not altogether
irrelevant either.
|
