Ancient Macedonian History

""En Filipo II y el Arte de la Guerra tendremos la oportunidad de conocer en profundidad a uno de los más grandes reyes de la antigua Macedonia. Gracias a su habilidad como estratega, diplomático, político y soldado, heredó un reino pobre, débil y acosado por innumerables enemigos y lo transformó en el más poderoso de toda Grecia.

A lo largo de sus páginas podremos conocer la historia del reino Macedonio, desde sus orígenes míticos hasta la formación de un imperio, de la mano del que, a la postre, se convertiría en el padre del mítico Alejandro Magno y en el forjador de un nuevo ejército que cambiaria el devenir de la guerra en la Antigüedad. Filipo II fue el creador de la falange macedonia, formación que se demostraría como inigualable en el campo de batalla y que reportaría incontables victorias sobre poderosos enemigos, como los ilirios, los tesalios, los tracios, los beocios o los atenienses. Pero no sólo eso, logró integrar en el campo de batalla a la infantería y a la caballería para emplearlos en nuevas formaciones tácticas: armó a sus soldados con las míticas sarissas y apreció como pocos las posibilidades militares que la maquinaria de guerra podía proporcionarle, siendo el mecenas de numerosos avances en este campo. Soñó con conquistar el Imperio persa, cuando ya había logrado lo que nadie antes fue capaz: el control de Grecia.

Sólo la muerte le arrebató esa hazaña, pero sentó las bases de lo que más tarde conseguiría su propio hijo. Su figura levantó tanto odios como pasiones; se le conocía como mujeriego y bebedor, pero también por su habilidad para la oratoria, por sus astucia, determinación y valor. Siempre luchó en primera línea junto a sus soldados y nunca permitió que éstos le llamaran rey, sino solo "General".

In this short chapter I look at the issue of just where the Battle of Issus was fought. In so doing I seek to lay to rest the vexed question of just which river the battle was fought across. There has been much debate about this in the past, with two conflicting views dominating. Settling this issue should help to make both the issues of troop deployments and the course of the battle clearer.

Трудот е преглед на пишувањата и тврдењата на македонистите од 19 век за постоење на жива врска меѓу античките Македонци и денешните (односно тогашните, од 19 век) Македонци. Ваквата теза се појавува поради голем број фактори што се елаборирани во текстот, но таа и денес е актуелна во македонската културна сфера и доаѓа од голем број познати и признати историчари. Главната причина, но и цел на застапувањето на ваквата идеја кај македонистите од 19 век се согледува во неопходноста од враќањето кон славното минато за да се поттикне борбениот дух на Македонците во 19 век во напорите за создавање на своја самостојна држава. Покрај тоа, во овој труд се коригира некоректниот и омаловажувачки однос на некои наши (книжевни) историчари кон големото и значајно дело на македонистите од 19 век.

Основната цел на овој труд е да се афирмираат и да се актуелизираат неколку суштински, но истовремено и нејасни и дискутабилни проблемски прашања од македонската фолклористика поврзани со местото и улогата на античко-македонскиот крал Александар III Македонски во македонското народно творештво. Станува збор, имено, за дилемите во врска со прашањето дали постојат песни за Александар Македонски во проектот „Веда Словена“ од Стефан Верковиќ и Јован Гологанов од македонскиот културен 19 век. Овде се потенцира фактот дека во двете објавени книги од Стефан Верковиќ со наслов „Веда Словена“ (првата во Белград во 1874 и втората во Санкт-Петербург во 1881 година) не постојат песни за Александар Македонски. Бројни македонски фолклористи ги презентираат информациите за постоење на песни за Александар Македонски што Јован Гологанов му ги предал на Стефан Верковиќ, но ниту еден од нив не ги отвора суштинските прашања за тоа колку песни Гологанов му дал на Верковиќ, кои се тие песни и дали тие се сочувани или, пак, некаде објавени. Ваквото афирмирање и актуелизирање на овие прашања ќе поттикне натамошни дискусии и проучувања коишто ќе водат кон разјаснување на постоечките дилеми и нејаснотии за македонските песни за Александар III Македонски во проектот „Веда Словена“ на Верковиќ и Гологанов.

Philip II, his 7th and final wife Kleopatra and her guardian Attalos were all murdered. Each of these murders, which happened at different times, in different contexts, attracted a great deal of attention from Greek and Roman historians, both ancient and modern. Most often, at least among scholars, the ancient evidence is taken out of context and organised as elements of elaborately choreographed murder mysteries.  Here, we propose an alternative approach. By examining the evidence in its literary context, and thus sifting through elements of cultural misunderstanding, traditional literary topoi, later interpolation and circular arguments, we attempt to make contextual sense of Philip, Kleopatra and Attalos’ murders in terms of Macedonian cultural structures, courtly factions, and Argead traditions.

Macedonians have emerged from the substratum of prehistoric tribes belonging to the huge family of Pelasgians, Aeols/Boreans  and Hyperboreans (Anti, Brygii, Danuni, Kiti, Hittiti, Lapiti, Macedoni, Minyi, Misiani, Mosiniki, Pelasgi, Pelagoni, Paioni, Tiroi, Tyrseni, etc.) that lived and contributed the creation of archetypical cultures of the second millennium BCE in the central regions of Macedonian Peninsula and Asia Minor.  During their migrations these ancestral Aryan-Macedonic tribes brought with them their culture and contributed to the creation of the civilization centers in antiquity,  especially in the region of lower Danube and further toward Ukraine/Russia (as 'Aryans') and in Central Europe (as 'Veneti' and/or 'Gaul'). 
As a result of the progressive expansion of the early Macedonians during the archaic period all the other regional tribes fused together into a larger union of Macedonians. At the beginning the Orestians (modern Mkd. Gorani; Eng. 'highlanders', mountainers)  from Argo (today Kostur region, Aegean Macedonia) in western Lower Macedonia, together with other neighboring Macedonic tribes living in Eordaia, Elimeia (Kožani and Grevena), northern Timfaia (Hasia), Lynkestia, Desaretia (Lerin-Prespa-Ohrid region), Elimiotia, Pelagonia and Paionia (in Upper Macedonia) began to form the Macedonian state, the first entity of that kind and extent on the European soil.

"The problem of the linguistic position of Macedonian is usually posed in the form of ‘whether or not it belongs to the "Greek" linguistic unit’.* There are elements for and against, and each remains with his opinion. ... (For example) it is possible to argue endlessly whether a border dialect is French or not, in the absence of purely linguistic criteria. But even given the existence of the two types, the certain assignment of a dialect to one of them is not always possible. Between French and German, or between German and Polish, for example, the decision is clear because the two types are so divergent from each other that there can be no doubt or uncertainty; but the thing changes when we are faced with two closely related languages such as Italian and French. Do the so-called Gallo-Italian dialects go with the Gallo-Romance of France or with Italian? Such a question is usually answered by tracing the older patterns embracing the common characteristics, as a whole, to all the dialects that consider themselves Italian, and to all those that consider themselves Provencal or French, but it is clear that these schemes are based on the attribution, made before establishing them, of certain dialects to one group rather than another. And this attribution in turn rests not on purely glottological reasons, but on geographical-political and also cultural reasons: the latter includes the fact that the speakers of those dialects have adopted Italian as their national and literary language instead of French or the other way around. Indeed, Grober (in the systematic introduction to his Grundriss) had already observed that a strictly scientific grouping of the very varied range of novel dialects spoken in Iberia, Gaul and Italy is impossible, and ends up basing his distinction practice on the literary language used by relatives the various dialects. And anyone can see that, even if only one literary and national language continue to be used in Romania, the dialectal subdivisions of this (Romance) language would end up being as many as there are scholars who deal with the problem, due to continuous discussions between them. The importance of the national language, to which the speakers are recognized, for the distribution of dialects cannot be better shown than with the case of Dutch - this Low German dialect has risen to the dignity of language of a state that has had and still has great importance in world political and economic life, and all the dialects spoken by the subjects of that state, subjects who use Dutch outside the restricted circle of domestic and peasant interests, are therefore considered Dutch dialects; whereas the Low German dialects in the Germanic Empire are attributed to the German group, albeit more closely to Dutch than to literary German, for the simple reason that literary German is the language used in higher literature and in political relations, economic and cultural activities by the inhabitants of Lower Germany.   
      We want to conclude from this, if the Macedonians used the "Greek" as a literary language, their regional language is to be considered "Greek"? Not even in a dream. The conclusion and vice versa that the problem about the pertinence or not of Macedonian to "Greek" is, from a purely glottological point of view, false and useless.

      Thus, discarded the prejudice of the relevance or not to the whole of the "Greek dialects", we want to ask ourselves the question to which Indo-European languages the Macedonian have common isoglosses, and whether these isoglosses can illuminate us on the prehistory of the (Macedonian) language.

      The most well-known mark of Macedonian, the one on which the ancient grammarians had already fixed their attention, is the substitution of Middle Aspirated Indo-European..."

* - Why quotation marks? Because of the fabricated ethnogenesis of the so-called “ancient Greex” exonym, misleadingly based on the composition of the participants in the Trojan War (ca. 1180 BCE), such as the Dannans, Achaeans, Argaeads, etc., who were mentioned by Homer in his “Iliad”. The politically biased modern historiography misrepresents some of these peoples as “Greex” or “Hellenic”, but this is a blatant forgery – according to all the ancient sources “Hellenes” did not colonize the Peloponnesus until 80 years after the Trojan War.
    “The “Greex” were (and still are) ignorant of their origin. They neither knew whence their ancestors had come nor when they had established themselves in “Grease”, nor what they had done there. To preserve the exact memory of things as they occur, there is need of some means of fixing them; but the “Greex” did not know how to write; they did not employ writing until about the 8th century BCE. They had no way of calculating the number of years. Later they adopted the usage of counting the years according to the great feast which was celebrated every four years at Olympia; a period of four years was called an olympiad. But the 1st olympiad was placed in 776 BCE, and the chronology of the “Greex” does not rise beyond this date.” – ‘History of Ancient Civilization’ (1912) by Charles Seignobos, Doctor of Letters of the University of Paris, p.102.

The immemorial timeworn creation myths of the world, of the Supreme Creator-God from the sky, the Great Mother-Goddess of the Earth, the birth of the young Sun-God, myths of the Moon that gets to the earth and turns into a cow, conception of the months as divine creatures, etc., gave us the notion of the beginning of the time, the emergence of the order from the chaos, which have central role in each nation collective conscience. In that unknown epoch when the ancestors of the Macedonians were still united with the mythological Belasgians (lat. Pelasgians), they were worshipers of the primordial gods of nature, animals and woods, members of the ancient Aryan Pantheon. These primordial myths have deep roots that stretch back to the prehistoric times. They have survived numerous conquerors and influences of various religions, showing sturdy vitality, which is engraved deeply into the subconscious collective memory and traditions of the people.

In this chapter - originally Chapter 3 in my 1980 thesis, I examine Alexander's tactics in the second of his three major battles against the Persians.
In this expanded account I have been able to also look in much more detail at the topography of the battle site and the composition of the Persian army, including a Prosopographic analysis of its known commanders.  I have also included a number of diagrams to illustrate my key points.
Most of the major additions are in blue.

This is the continuation, in English, of the article on Taxila, already published here.  This concerns the Hellenistic Era.  Too few people know about Indo-Greek Kings, or about Greco-Bactrian Kings.  Yet, they existed in what is now Afghanistan and Pakistan.  May this paper help to enlarge our knowledge.  May academia.edu list the names of these kings as keywords.  Thank you for reading this article.

Introduction
1. Some Remarks on the Discovery and a Description of the Mosaic
2. Searching for the original Source of Inspiration
3. Where would the original Scene of the Foundation of Pella/Apameia have been kept?
4. How is the Mosaic Witness to the Culture and Ideology of the first Seleukids?
Conclusion
The author offers new reflections in the field of the origin of the historical mosaic of Apameia (foundation of Pella in 320 BCE and of Apameia in 300 BCE) dating from the 4th CAD, of history (for example concerning the identification of Archippos oikistes, legendary founder of Pella-on-the-Orontes,  as an important historical figure at Athens in 321-320 BCE); of the style history of the mosaic, of the origin of its inspiration, and of the archaeology concerning the Macedonian military settlement Pella.

A study of the rivalry and interaction between the Argead women, particularly Adea-Eurydike and Olympias, and their role, responsibility, and perception in the early Diadochoi Wars. Master's thesis from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU).

The monograph The ‘Autonomous’ Coins under the Late Antigonids is a systematic study of the silver and bronze issues of the Macedonians, the Botteatai and the Amphaxians, of people that resided in distinct areas of the Macedonian Kingdom, the so-called districts (merides). These are the only non-regal coins of the Macedonian state that were minted during the reigns of Philip V and Perseus, or even somewhat earlier. The present book discusses the relation of the ‘autonomous’ coins to the royal issues, studies their metrology, their presence in hoards and connects their iconography to its historical context. Finally, based on the re-examination of the material as well as on new evidence, the study revises earlier theories on the dating and interpretation of the ‘autonomous’ coins.

The mist, though clearing from the ridge tops, hugged the ground and rolled down the slopes into the Enipeus valley to the south. Though the screams and shouts of the combatants could be heard from down the slopes, little could be discerned. In his camp, the Macedonian king vacillated over whether to commit or to withdraw. The Illyrian and mercenary thureophoroi - all of Philip’s auxiliary troops aside from the Thracians – as well as more than half of his cavalry had been committed to the escalating ‘encounter’ skirmish which had become a battle for the heights of Cynoscephalae – the “Dogs’ Heads”, a ridge of rough and precipitous hills with parallel outliers jutting into the plain of Pharsalus. The ground was not at all favourable for his phalanx but the Romans, too, would have to contend with it. Now, as messengers from the engaged troops ran to Philip declaring: “the barbarians cannot stand before us; now is the day for you to strike; now is your opportunity”, the Macedonian king, disinclined to accept battle, nonetheless decided to stake all and ordered his forces out of camp (Plb. 18.22.1-10; Liv. 33.8.1-2). It was a fateful decision.

The Balkan peninsula has long been considered as Europe’s tinderbox; and with good reason! With so many languages, ethnic groups (or peoples), and religious systems, the Balkans lived their most peaceful period of their millennia long history during the Ottoman rule that lasted between 400 and 600 years (as per different regions). As natural continuation of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Sublime Gate ensured peace and tolerance to a great number of peoples at a time of merciless and inhuman wars in the multi-divided and constantly disputed territories of the defunct Western Empire.
The Ottoman Empire’s scholarly, scientific and artistic superiority over the various state forms of Western Europe was undisputed until the beginning of the 17th century. However, the rise to preponderance of a bogus-Islamic, theological – ideological sect, namely the Hanbalite followers of Ibn Taimiya and his obscurantist and barbaric system, led the Ottoman Empire to collapse and the Islamic Civilization to definite and irreversible extinction. From 1600 to 1800, the Ottoman Empire became the Sick Man of Europe, and a century later it died out. The parallel rise of the Western European nationalist and colonialist states exposed the Balkan peoples to hatred, discord, local conflicts and regional wars that have not ended so far.
First published in the American Chronicle, AfroArticles and Buzzle on 27th March 2007
Republished in numerous sites, blogs and fora - indicatively:
https://republic-of-macedonia.jimdo.com/the_macedonians_the_greeks_and_the_communists.php
https://makedonin.wordpress.com/2007/10/19/the-macedonians-the-greeks-and-the-communists/
http://forum.idividi.com.mk/forum_posts.asp?TID=9846
https://forum.kajgana.com/threads/Хеленизмот-Европска-измислица-од-18-век.11127/page-3
http://www.topix.com/forum/city/dora-al/TK41LPQOB5VFME9PN/p5

Alexander's conquest of the Persian Empire introduced the Macedonian King to a wide range of different cultures, with different ways of fighting war.  But in India, he faced a very different enemy.  Ancient India had been relatively isolated from the turmoils that had shaped the history of much of Asia and Europe.  And as a result warfare on the subcontinent continued to follow the 'heroic', and ritualised modes of combat of older times that had been long abandoned in the west.
This paper looks at how the army of King Porus was shaped by Indian history and culture, and the impact that had on how his forces responded to Alexander's invasion.

Hesychius' Macedonian words are those which he assigns to the Macedonians as a whole, as well as to individual Macedonians such as Amerias, Alexander, Marsyas, etc. These terms are analyzed through and Indo - European perspective to find corresponding words in other Indo - European languages that will be useful in putting the ancient Macedonian language in the proper perspective and attempt to solidify its grouping as a distinct centum Balkan language that developed out of the same proto - language as Phrygian, Armenian, Epirotian, and Greek.

The article is based upon the thesis of the existence of intense relations between the Northern Black Sea and Macedonia towards the end of the 2nd and the beginning of the 1st millennium BC, confirmed with various traditions related to rivers. Toponyms and ethnonyms containing the following roots sind-, sinth-, sith-, are given as a first indicator, confirmed in both regions through ancient sources, thus considering its Indo Aryan interpretation as a river. Such interpretation is considered in context of the theories of Indo-Aryans moving south of the Northern Black Sea at the second half of the 2nd millennium BC; the Balkans being one of their directions. This last trajectory is related to the presence of Cimmerians and Hyperboreans at this peninsula, also verified in ancient written sources. A special significance is given to the ancient reports of Aria as the oldest name for Thrace. Numerous archaeological finds also refer to these motions, confirmed with a relevant literature. Moreover, different traditions witnessed in ancient sources are noted regarding the role of rivers in the spiritual culture of populations of both regions, especially in genealogical myths. Bull as a zoomorphic epiphany of river gods is especially emphasized, manifested with similar traditions, among which the roots taur-, taor found in the toponymy, ethnonymy and the theonymy of both regions.

Key words: Indo-Aryans, Macedonia, river cults, Thraco-Cimmerians, Sindoi, Tauria

... son, not yet as husband. First Barsine, and later Roxane, were stop-gaps along the way. Finally, nine years [End Page 577] after he could have, in 324, Alexander married Darius' elder daughter. 54 He placed his wedding to ...

Gaugamela was the last major battle between the forces of Alexander the Great and the Persian Empire under Darius III. This chapter concludes my analysis of that battle, starting with the collapse of the Persian left flank. In this chapter particular attention I seek to reconcile the conflicting accounts in the sources as far as possible, to determine the most likely course of events. At the end of the chapter is a appendix that summarises the course of the battle by rough stages.

Alexander spent almost two years securing control of Bactria and Sogdiana.  No major battles were fought.  Many of the events that happened during that period go well beyond the scope of this project, and shall not be addressed here.  Instead, specific incidents, actions and policies will be reviewed for evidence of how Alexander was adapting to changing tactical threats, along with evidence that at this time Alexander was already making plans and preparations for his Indian campaign.

This article is about the study of a hoard of seventeen bronze coins found near the new entrance of the archaeological site of Pella.This hoard constitutes one of the few known cases of numismatic concealment during the lifetime of Philip II. It numbers 17 bronze coins:  1 of Amyntas III, 4 of Perdiccas III,  11 of Philip II and1 of Cetriporis, ruler of the Odrysians. It is interesting to note that the majority of Philip’s  coins lack symbols, monograms and letters, which frequently appear in posthumous issues of this king. Only two coins of Philip II from the Pella hoard  bear the thunderbolt symbol.  The existence of coins attributed to Philip’s predecessors,  the appearance of Philip’s early type Heracles/horseman holding whip,  the lack of symbols apart from the thunderbolt, the coin of Cetriporis (357-352 BC) and  the shape of the skyphos allow us to date the coins’ concealment around the middle of the 4th century BC.