Phrygians (Bryges or Briges) and Macedonia

Thessaloniki, location of ancient Mygdonia, Macedonian home of the Bryges.

Phrygians are supposed to have migrated from the Balkans (Macedonia and Thrace) somewhere between 12th and the 8th centuries BC. This point is not clear, as many works are dealing on the object now, so we can expect new knowledge.The beginning of the Phrygian state is unknown. It appears for the first time as a well-organized kingdom, under Midas' authority, in the end of the 8th c. BC. We know nothing for sure before him, but there was probably a king Gordias. We have very little information about the rise of Phrygia" Prof. Garance Fielder, Aix-en-Provence Univercity, France.

Legends and history also record how the Phrygians had initially settled in area of Macedonia. Known in this area in classical times as the Bryges, we can theorize whether they prompted the Dorian, Thessalian and other movements south about this time, or if they were part of a general southward movement of peoples in the Balkans in this era. The Bryges were known to have lingered at various locations in the region of greater Macedonia for centuries after their brethren had debarked for Anatolia".

Establishing their capital at Edessa in their decades sojourning in Macedonia, the Bryges™ language and culture mixed with that of the local Thracians while they dominating an area equivalent to Philip’s Macedonia. After some time dominating northern Greece and the southern Balkans, the bulk of the Bryges moved on into Anatolia, picking up the mantle dropped by the Hittites and filling up the power vacuum there to become known as the Phrygians. The reason for this may have been connected with their knowledge of the legends of the former Hittite riches or that of the contemporary Near Eastern states. New pressures from the north by the Illyrians and others could also have prompted their new "Edessa, the most ancient city of first Macedonians, the legendary and historical capital of Argeades royal dynasty, known in the era of Macedonian kings as Aegae, was built by Bryges a prehistoric pepople existing in the middle of 3th millenium BC, long ago before Greek tribes emerged in Europe"Alice Stougianakis, Greek archaologist worked in 60's Edessa's excavations.

Abstract from her article in Edessan Chronicles Magazine, May 1972

According to the Telegony (Epic Cycle), Odysseus came upon the land of Thesprotia where he stayed for a number of years. He married Thesprotia's queen, Kallidike (Callidice, Kallidice) and had a son with her Polypoetes. Odysseus led the Thesprotians in the war against the Brygoi (Brygi), but lost the battle because Ares was on the Brygoi side. Athena went to support Odysseus, by engaging the war god in another confrontation until Apollo separated them. When Kallidike died, Odysseus returned home to Ithaca, leaving their son, Polypoetes, to rule Thesprotia.Ares Blessings - The BrygoiSome text mentioning the Mushki in Hittite area:This left the Hittite homelands vulnerable to attack from all directions, and Hattusa was burnt to the ground sometime around 1180 BC following a combined onslaught from Gasgas, Bryges and Luwians. The Hittite Empire thus vanished from the historical record.By 1160 BC, the political situation in Asia Minor looked vastly different from how it had only 25 years earlier. In that year, the Assyrians were dealing with the Mushku pressing into northernmost Mesopotamia from the Anatolian highlands, and the Gasga people, the Hittites' old enemies from the northern hill-country between Hatti and the Black Sea, seem to have joined them soon after. The Mushku or Mushki had apparently overrun Cappadocia from the West, with recently discovered epigraphic evidence confirming their origins as the Balkan "Bryges" tribe, forced out by the Macedonians.

The Makednoi from the mountains of Epirus moved out towards the south pushing the Bryghes out of the area.or perhaps by the Illyrians prior to 1500B.C..

Also there was a Brucidas capitol of the Bryghes found on the Via Egnatia road between Heracleia Lyncestis and Patrae/Claudanum .

A intresting opinion from Margalit Finkelberg as about the Phrygians and theirs relationship with the IE theory.

The Phrygians spoke an Indo-European language closely related to Greek, which allows us to suppose that their position as regards the Greeks could not have differed much from that of the Macedonians.Yet, no ancestor of the Phrygians is mentioned in Greek genealogies on a par with Makedon and Graikos. This ‘structural amnesia’ was obviously due to the fact that, as distinct from the Macedonians who remained in their original habitat in southeastern Europe, the Phrygians moved to Anatolia in the time of the great migrations at the end of the Bronze Age.

Of all the languages of the East Indo-European group only Greek, Macedonian and Phrygian are centum languages, that is, they did not develop the palatalisation of the velar consonants characteristic of the other East Indo-European languages (Armenian, Albanian, Indo-Iranian, the Slavic and Baltic languages). This common retention can only be accounted for if we assume that the Greeks, Macedonians and Phrygians jointly separated from the proto-Indo-European unity and left for the Balkans before satemisation of the rest of the East Indo-European languages had taken place. Had Greek and Phrygian separated before the arrival of the Greeks in the Balkans, Phrygian should have been related to Greek approximately as are Armenian or Iranian, which also belong to the Eastern group of Indo-European languages and are quite close to Greek.

sources:

1. http://phrygians.org/chrono.html
2. Margalit finkelberg, Greeks and pre-Greeks
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bryges

Greek dig unearths Neolithic household gear

ATHENS, Greece – A 6,000 year-old set of household gear, including crockery and two wood-fired ovens, has been found in the buried ruins of a prehistoric farmhouse in northern Greece, officials said Thursday.

A Culture Ministry statement said the discovery “provides invaluable, unique information” on late Neolithic domestic architecture and household organization.

“This is a very rare case where the remains have stayed undisturbed by farming or other external intervention for about 6,000 years,” the ministry statement said. “The household goods are in excellent condition.”

The rectangular building, which covers some 624 square feet, was discovered during work to lay water pipes earlier this year at the village of Sosandra near Aridaia, some 360 miles north of Athens.

Archaeologists who excavated the site between March and July found a large number of clay vessels for cooking and eating, stone tools, mills for grinding cereals and two ovens.

The house was separated into three rooms. It had walls made of branches and reeds covered with clay, supported by strong wooden posts. The building was destroyed by fire, which baked the clay, preserving impressions of the wooden building elements, as well as the post holes.

Archaeologists believe the inhabitants managed to escape the fire, taking with them their valued stone blades and axes.

“They left behind the large stone tools which would have been difficult to move away,” the ministry statement said.

By Nicholas Paphitis, Associated Press
livescience.com

THE LANGUAGE OF THE MACEDONIANS

The Pella curse tablet is a curse or magic spell (Greek: κατάδεσμος, katadesmos) inscribed on a lead scroll, dating to the 4th or 3rd century BC. It was found in Pella (at the time capital of Macedon) in 1986 and published in the Hellenic Dialectology Journal in 1993. It is possibly the only attested text in the ancient Macedonian language (O. Masson). This finding analyzed AFTER the article of the Professor N.G.L. Hammond.

by N.G.L. Hammond
The Macedonian State (Oxford: 1989), pp. 12–15.

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 me¯kos. The genealogy of eponymous ancestors which Hesiod recorded [. . .] has a bearing on the question of Greek speech. First, Hesiod made Macedon a brother of Magnes; as we know from inscriptions that the Magnetes spoke the Aeolic dialect of the Greek language, we have a predisposition to suppose that the Macedones spoke the Aeolic dialect. Secondly, Hesiod made Macedon and Magnes first cousins of Hellen’s three sons – Dorus, Xouthus, and Aeolus – who were the founders of three dialects of Greek speech, namely Doric, Ionic, and Aeolic. Hesiod would not have recorded this relationship, unless he had believed, probably in the seventh century. that the Macedones were a Greek-speaking people. The next evidence comes from Persia. At the turn of the sixth century the Persians described the tributepaying peoples of their province in Europe, and one of them was the ‘yauna takabara’, which meant ‘Greeks wearing the hat’. [1] 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. [2] 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.

That, however, is not the opinion of most scholars. They disregard or fail to assess the evidence which I have cited, [3] and they turn instead to ‘Macedonian’ words and names, or/and to literary references. Philologists have studied words which have been cited as ‘Macedonian’ in ancient lexica and glossaries, and they have come to no certain conclusion: for some of the words are clearly Greek, and some are clearly not Greek.

That is not surprising; for as the territory of the Macedonians expanded, they overlaid and lived with peoples who spoke Illyrian, Paeonian, Thracian, and Phrygian, and they certainly borrowed words from them which excited the authors of lexica and glossaries. The philological studies result in a verdict, in my opinion, of ‘non liquet’[.4]

The toponyms of the Macedonian homeland are the most significant. Nearly all of them are Greek: Pieria, Lebaea, Heracleum, Dium, Petra, Leibethra, Aegeae, Aegydium, Acesae, Acesamenae; the rivers Helicon, Aeson, Leucus, Baphyras, Sardon, Elpeüs, Mitys; lake Ascuris and the region Lapathus. The mountain names Olympus and Titarium may be pre-Greek; Edessa, the earlier name of the place where Aegeae was founded, and its river Ascordus were Phrygian. [5] The deities worshipped by the Macedones and the names which they gave to the months were predominantly Greek, and there is no doubt that these were not late borrowings.

To Greek literary writers before the Hellenistic period the Macedonians were ‘barbarians’. The term referred to their way of life and their institutions, which were those of the ethne¯ and not of the city-state, and it did not refer to their speech. We can see this in the case of Epirus. There Thucydides called the tribes ‘barbarians’. But inscriptions found in Epirus have shown conclusively that the Epirote tribes in Thucydides’ lifetime were speaking Greek and used names which were Greek. [6] ln the following century ‘barbarian’ was only one of the abusive terms applied by Demosthenes to Philip of Macedon and his people. [7]

In passages which refer to the Macedonian soldiers of Alexander the Great and the early successors there are mentions of a Macedonian dialect, such as was likely to have been spoken in the original Macedonian homeland. On one occasion Alexander ‘called out to his guardsmen in Macedonian (Makedonisti), as this [viz. the use of ‘Macedonian’] was a signal (symbolon) that there was a serious riot.’ Normally Alexander and his soldiers spoke the standard Greek, the koine¯, and that was what the Persians who were to fight alongside the Macedonians were taught. So the order ‘in Macedonian’ was unique, in that all other orders were in the koine¯. [8] It is satisfactorily explained as an order in broad dialect, just as in a Highland Regiment a special order for a particular purpose could be given in broad Scots by a Scottish officer who usually spoke the King’s English.

The use of this dialect among themselves was a characteristic of the Macedonian soldiers (rather than the officers) of the King’s Army. This point was made clear in the report – not in itself dependable – of the trial of a Macedonian officer before an Assembly of Macedonians, in which the officer (Philotas) was mocked for not speaking in dialect. [9] In 321 when a non-Macedonian general, Eumenes, wanted to make contact with a hostile group of Macedonian infantrymen, he sent a Macedonian to speak to them in the Macedonian dialect, in order to win their confidence. Subsequently, when they and other Macedonian soldiers were serving with Eumenes, they expressed their affection for him by hailing him in the Macedonian dialect (Makedonisti). [10] He was to be one of themselves. As Curtius observed, ‘not a man among the Macedonians could bear to part with a jot of his ancestral customs.’ The use of this dialect was one
way in which the Macedonians expressed their apartness from the world of Greek city states.

=================================================================
Notes

[1]- See J. M. Balcer in Historia 37 (1988) 7.
[2]- FGrH 4 F 74.
[3]- Most recently E. Badian in Barr-Sharrar 33–51 disregards the evidence as set out e.g. in
HM 2. 39–54, when it goes against his view that the Macedonians (whom he does not define)
spoke a language other than Greek.
[4]- The matter is discussed at some length in HM 2. 39–54 with reference especially to
O. Hoffmann, Die Makedonen, ihre Sprache und ihr Volkstum (Göttingen, 1906) and J. Kalléris,
Les Anciens Macédoniens I (Athens, 1954); see also Kalléris II and R. A. Crossland in the Cambridge
Ancient History 3. I. 843 ff.
[5]- For Edessa see HM 1. 165 and for the Phrygians in Macedonia 407–14. Olympus occurs as a
Phrygian personal name.
[6]- See Hammond, Ep 419 ff. and 525 ff.
[7]- As Badian, loc. cit. 42, rightly observes: ‘this, of course, is simple abuse.’
[8]- Plu. Alex. 51. 6.
[9]- Curtius 6. 9. 34–6.
[10]- PSI XII 2 (1951) no. 1284: Plu. Eum. 14.11. Badian, loc. cit. 41 and 50 n. 66, discusses the former and not the latter, which hardly bears out his theory that Eumenes ‘could not directly communicate with Macedonian soldiers’, and presumably they with him. Badian says in his note that he is not concerned with the argument as to whether Macedonian was a ‘dialect’ or ‘a language’. Such an argument seems to me to be at the heart of the matter. We have a similar problem in regard to Epirus, where some had thought the language of the people was Illyrian. In Plu. Pyrrh, 1. 3 reference was made to ‘the local phone¯ ’, which to me means ‘dialect’ of Greek: it is so in this instance because Plutarch is saying that Achilles was called ‘in the local phone¯ Aspetos’. The word ‘Aspetos’ elsewhere was peculiar to Greek epic, but it survived in Epirus in normal speech. It is of course a Greek and not an Illyrian word. See Hammond, Ep. 525 ff., for Greek being the language of central Epirus in the fifth century BC

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A Statue of Godess Nike Unearthed in FYROM

Another archaelogical artifact found in Upper Macedonia (South FYROM). Is a statue of the Greek Godess Nike.

As Vasko Gligorijević inform us the statue was unearthed by archaeologists working at the Styberra locality, near the remains of a gymnasium. In Greek mythology, Nike (Greek Νίκη pronounced , meaning Victory), was a goddess who personified triumph throughout the ages of the ancient Greek culture. From the data at our disposal at present, we know that the Macedonians worshipped the twelve Olympian gods, both collectively and individually, and also Pluto, Persephone, Dionysos, Pan, Hestia, Heracles, Asklepios, Okeanos, Amphitrite, the Nereids, Thetys, Orpheus, the Diocouroi, Amphilochos, the Nymphs, the Graces, the Fates, Hygieia, Lethe, Nemesis and Eros. They also gave them the familiar Greek epithets, such as Agoraios, Basileus, Olympios, Hypsistos of Zeus, Basileia of Hera, Soter of Apollo, Hagemona and Soteira of Artemis, Boulaia of Hestia, etc.

Alexandria event on Alexander the Great

Alexandria (ANA-MPA/N. Katsikas)

The life and times of Alexandrer the Great was presented on Thursday night at the Alexandria Library (Bibliotheca Alexandrina), during a lecture by writer/director Nikos Sofianos, who has devoted decades to a step-by-step cinematographical documentation of the great Macedon general's course throughout the entire geographical region, from Pella to the Indies, to Alexandria and the Orient.

The lecture, held at the Library's conference center in cooperation with the World Council of Hellenes Abroad (SAE), is part of an initiative by SAE president Stefanos Tamvakis to inform the world public on the life of Alexander the Great, not only the Greeks abroad, but more so the local societies and peoples in the far reaches of the Macedon leader's sojourn.

The Alexandria-descended Tamvakis, addressing the event, said that "for us Alexandrians, Alexander the Great is not just an important figure who changed the course of history, but something much deeper, which accompanies us from the day we are born, and gives us courage, strength and pride".

In today's world, where even that which is self-evident becomes the object of political and historical distortions, "our duty is, with level-headedness and patience, and systematically, to convey the knowledge about the Greek general from our Macedonia, who with his human-wide and multi-cultural pollicy, was the first to spread and convey Hellenis and its values to all corners of the world".

ANCIENT MACEDONIA from HISTORY CHANNEL

PART 1


PART 2


PART 3


PART 4


PART 5

Greek dig unearths Neolithic household gear

ATHENS, Greece – A 6,000 year-old set of household gear, including crockery and two wood-fired ovens, has been found in the buried ruins of a prehistoric farmhouse in northern Greece, officials said Thursday.

A Culture Ministry statement said the discovery “provides invaluable, unique information” on late Neolithic domestic architecture and household organization.

“This is a very rare case where the remains have stayed undisturbed by farming or other external intervention for about 6,000 years,” the ministry statement said. “The household goods are in excellent condition.”

The rectangular building, which covers some 624 square feet, was discovered during work to lay water pipes earlier this year at the village of Sosandra near Aridaia, some 360 miles north of Athens.

Archaeologists who excavated the site between March and July found a large number of clay vessels for cooking and eating, stone tools, mills for grinding cereals and two ovens.

The house was separated into three rooms. It had walls made of branches and reeds covered with clay, supported by strong wooden posts. The building was destroyed by fire, which baked the clay, preserving impressions of the wooden building elements, as well as the post holes.

Archaeologists believe the inhabitants managed to escape the fire, taking with them their valued stone blades and axes.

“They left behind the large stone tools which would have been difficult to move away,” the ministry statement said.

By Nicholas Paphitis, Associated Press
livescience.com