This collection of four essays seeks to contribute to the ongoing debate surrounding the language of ancient Macedonia. At the heart of this controversy is a fundamental question of identification: was Macedonian a dialect of Greek or was it, instead, a dialect belonging to another Indo-European language, perhaps Phrygian, Thracian or Illyrian? Published by the Centre for the Greek Language in Thessaloniki, this volume stakes a claim for the former hypothesis, situating Macedonian ‘within the dialect geography of ancient Greece’ (p. 79). All four essays are reproduced in Greek, English, French and German, which will make the volume widely accessible. The occasional awkward phrasings that seem to stem from the process of translation, at least in the English version, rarely detract from the content.
The essays are preceded by G.'s short introduction, which briefly alludes to the modern political implications of this debate before summarising each essay in some detail. G. presents the volume's main conclusion, that ancient Macedonian is a north-western dialect of Greek with ties to Doric, but stops short of offering a synthesis of the evidence or a theoretical foundation that might articulate how and why the various disciplinary approaches represented in the essays should be brought to bear on one another and on the central argument. Since the volume is without a concluding chapter, the absence of such a framework here is acutely felt.
In the first essay, ‘The History of Macedonia in the pre-Hellenistic Period’, M. Zahrnt presents an overview of Macedonian history, beginning with Herodotus' legend of the kingdom's foundation. Zahrnt effectively summarises major events and figures in the kingdom from the late sixth century b.c. to the reign of Philip II, to whom he devotes the latter half of the essay. Zahrnt is particularly interested in Philip's political relationship with the Greeks, and the shaping of his policies towards the Greek states around his intent to invade Persia.
The second essay, ‘The Other Greece: the Archaeology of Macedonia’, by A. Muller, offers a broad review of Macedonian material culture under the categories of city planning, domestic space and decoration, production, and tombs and funerary goods. Muller claims that Macedonian material culture is at once familiar (it is Greek), different (the royal context of Macedonia required changes to the Greek form) and original (its difference fundamentally contributed to the development of Greek art and architecture). While an efficient summary of the major extant material, the essay could have been substantially strengthened through the inclusion of illustrations and footnotes. In the case of the latter, even very specific proposals – for instance, that the landscape of the painting on the facade of Vergina's Tomb II represents a Thracian solar observatory at Buzovgrad (a theory advanced by D. Ignatiadou and I.-C. Seiradakis, ‘Ηλιακό παρατηρητήριο στην τοιχογραϕία του κυνηγιού στη Βεργίνα’, in P. Adam-Veleni and K. Tzanavari [edd.], 20 χρόνια. Το Αρχαιολογικό Έργο στη Μακεδονία και στη Θράκη. Επετειακός τόμος [2009], pp. 95–104) – are unattributed. This practice facilitates the glossing over of substantial debates that have played out in modern scholarship, for instance the dating and interpretation of the kingdom's palaces and tombs.
The latter two essays shift attention to the Macedonian language, which they approach from a philological and linguistic perspective. Both acknowledge that the dearth of sources imposes serious limits, and both depend heavily on a fourth-century b.c. curse tablet from Pella, a line drawing and transliteration of which are helpfully included in a brief appendix (p. 287).
‘Languages and Dialects in Ancient Macedon’ considers the available written evidence of the Classical period, focusing on the Pella curse tablet and inscriptions. E. Crespo argues that a variety of Greek dialects were spoken in the Macedonian region, alongside which at least one non-Greek language, probably Phrygian, was also spoken in the early Classical period. Crespo identifies the Greek dialect recorded in the Pella curse tablet as Macedonian, and concludes that it was a dialect of north-west Doric. Crespo goes on to argue that one of the curious features of this dialect, the voicing of normally aspirated sounds (Β, Δ, Γ for Φ, Θ, Χ), may be due to the phonetic influence of the non-Greek language spoken in the region, a habit that might also account for the difficulty that other Greeks reportedly had in understanding spoken Macedonian.
In ‘Ancient Macedonian as a Greek Dialect: a Critical Survey on Recent Work’, J. Méndez Dosuna presents a survey and analysis of the current scholarship surrounding the identity of ancient Macedonian, as well as a detailed examination of its features. Working from previous studies, including his own extensive work on Greek dialects, Dosuna argues that the features reflected in the Pella tablet are known in Doric and have particular affiliation with the north-west Greek dialects. The two exceptions to these Doric features, namely the voicing of the plosive and continuant consonants, are unparalleled elsewhere among the Greek dialects, but are not, on G.'s comparative evidence, impossible. In addition to this analysis, which depends in large part on the Pella tablet, Dosuna also looks carefully at a vexing fourth-century oracular tablet from Dodona, which may also reflect the Macedonian dialect; it, too, has affinities with north-west Doric dialects, but presents additional problematic dialectical features.
Crespo and Dosuna's essays are useful contributions in favour of the Greek hypothesis, and Dosuna's in particular provides entry into a deep body of scholarship. Even so, there is no reason to expect that this volume will put the controversy over ancient Macedonian to rest, since the analyses depend so thoroughly, if necessarily, on the Pella tablet. It is the expansion of our body of evidence through archaeological excavations that promises to enhance further our understanding of this issue.
While the essays have much to recommend them individually, the volume is somewhat inconsistent as a whole. The intended audience, for instance, is unclear: the overviews of Macedonian history and archaeology are so broad as to suggest a popular audience, while the essays on the language are highly technical, assuming an advanced background in Greek philology or linguistics. Further, the promise laid out in the introduction, that the four essays provide complementary perspectives that bring together historical, archaeological, philological and linguistic evidence to present a more complete picture of the identity of the language spoken in the ancient Macedonian kingdom, is misleading. The framing of the entire project in terms of the Greek identity of the Macedonian language circumvents larger – and thorny – questions about ethnicity, but it also leaves the reader without an effective framework to bring together the variety of evidence and disciplinary approaches presented. This is a particular problem since Zahrnt and Muller's essays seem to rest on an implicit and uncritical understanding of the Macedonians as ethnically (in whatever way that might be understood) Greek. That said, there is no doubt that those interested in Greek dialects or the ongoing debate about the Macedonian language will find this volume, and particularly its latter half, of value.
