Macedon

The Greek name of the people, Makedṓn (plural Makedónes), the highlanders of the north from whom the kingdom and the land took their name. The word is the endonym: the Macedonians called themselves Makedónes, “the tall ones” or “highlanders” by one common etymology, and from it the country Makedonía was formed as “the land of the Macedonians.” Herodotus and Thucydides already use the ethnonym freely, even as they debate whether these northerners were truly Greek.

Makedṓn is the root of the whole family of names, and the page that follows it is in a sense the story of one ethnonym’s travels. From the Greek people-name come the Latin Macedō, the land-name Makedonía and all its descendants, and, by the eastern road through Aramaic, the q-forms by which the Near East knew Macedon. That the entity is anchored in a people rather than a place is fitting for a kingdom whose identity was carried, in the end, on the backs of its soldiers from the Danube to the Indus.

The Latin name of the people, Macedō (plural Macedones), taken straight from the Greek ethnonym, the word by which Rome named the enemy it fought in the four Macedonian Wars and finally crushed at Pydna in 168 BCE. From it Rome formed the adjective Macedonicus, the honorific of the general who conquered the kingdom and the title of the bellum Macedonicum.

Macedō is the Greek people-name in Roman dress, and it shows the western road the name took: directly from Greek, with the k kept as a hard c, into the Latin from which the modern European forms descend. It is the mirror image of the eastern transmission on this page, where the same name reached Arabic and Aramaic with a q instead. Rome met Macedon as a rival to be beaten; the Aramaic East met it as the homeland of Alexander; the two halves of the name’s history part along that difference.

The Babylonian Aramaic name of Macedon, Mūqdōn, which lives in the Talmud almost entirely in one phrase: Aleksander Mūqdōn, “Alexander of Macedon,” the hero of the cycle of legends in tractate Tamid in which the sages of the south answer his riddles and he journeys to the gate of paradise. The Bavli knows Macedon, like the Arabic and Syriac worlds, as the place Alexander came from.

Mūqdōn carries the same eastern q as the Arabic al-Maqdūnī and the Syriac form, the mark of the name’s passage through Aramaic rather than from Greek directly. In the rabbinic imagination Macedon is not a country to be located but a patronymic attached to a legend; the kingdom that ended the Persian empire survives in the Talmud of Persian Babylonia as the second word of a conqueror’s name, the place that produced the king who keeps turning up at the edge of the world.

The Arabic name for a Macedonian, al-Maqdūnī, “the Macedonian,” known above all as the standing epithet of Alexander, al-Iskandar al-Maqdūnī, the form in which the Arabic historians and the vast Arabic Alexander tradition refer to him. As a free-standing country-name the Arabs used Maqadūniya, but it is the epithet, fused to Alexander’s name, that carried Macedon most widely through the Arabic world.

The telling feature of al-Maqdūnī is its q. Greek Makedṓn has a plain k, and had Arabic taken the name straight from Greek it would have written a kāf; the qāf instead betrays the road it travelled, eastward through Syriac and Aramaic, where Greek k before a back vowel was regularly rendered with qōp̄. The same q stands in the Syriac Maqedōnāyā and the Babylonian Aramaic Mūqdōn, so that the single consonant marks the whole eastern, Aramaic-mediated family of the name apart from the western one that kept the k.