Macedonia

The Greek name of the region, Makedonía, “the land of the Macedonians,” formed on the ethnonym Makedṓn with the territorial suffix that builds country-names from people-names, exactly as Iōnía is built on Iōnes. It names the broad land of the southern Balkans north of Thessaly, the kingdom’s homeland, and the Greek geographers from Herodotus on use it for the whole country from the coast to the upland cantons.

Makedonía is the source of every later land-name on this page, the form from which Latin, Syriac, and Arabic all took their words for the region. It stands to the ethnonym Makedṓn as the country to its people, and the two together split the naming of Macedon between them: the kingdom and its soldiers carried the people-name across Asia, while the land-name stayed put and became, in Roman hands, the name of a province.

Skudra is the Old Persian name of the European satrapy the Achaemenids held after Darius crossed into Europe around 513 BCE, the district recorded in the royal lists of subject lands at Naqsh-e Rustam and Persepolis. It covered Thrace and the Macedonian coast together, and Macedon, when its king Amyntas gave earth and water to Persia, fell within or beside it. The form is included here as the nearest the Persian empire came to naming Macedonia, but its identification with the region is marked disputed for two reasons.

First, Skudra is not a Macedonian or even a Greek word: it appears to derive from the self-name of the Scythians (Skuδa), applied by the Persians to the whole northern frontier, so that it names Macedonia only by inclusion, not by intent. Second, its exact extent is uncertain, and whether the Macedonian heartland proper was ever administratively “Skudra” or merely a tributary beside it is debated. The Achaemenids, in short, had no name for Macedon as such: to Darius’s surveyors the future homeland of Alexander was an unnamed part of a frontier district called after someone else, the one great empire of the age that never learned to name the kingdom that would destroy it.

The Latin name of the region, Macedonia, taken from the Greek and made, in 146 BCE, the title of a Roman province, the first that Rome carved out of the Greek east. After the defeat of Perseus the old kingdom was first broken into four republics and then absorbed; as a province, Macedonia governed the southern Balkans and gave its name to the great road, the Via Egnatia, that crossed it from the Adriatic to the Aegean.

Macedonia is the form through which the region’s name reached the modern world, the Latin keeping the Greek shape almost unchanged. It is also the name in which Macedonia entered Christian scripture in the West: the Macedonia of Paul’s vision, “come over into Macedonia and help us,” is this Latin word, the province through which the new religion first crossed from Asia into Europe. The land that had been a kingdom became, to Rome, first a conquest and then a thoroughfare.

The Syriac name of the region, Maqedōniyā, taken from the Greek of the New Testament, where it appears in the Peshitta account of Paul’s vision at Troas: a man of Macedonia stands and begs him, “come over to Macedonia and help us,” and the apostle crosses into Europe. The form also carries the Syriac Alexander Legend, the Neṣḥānā d-Aleksandros, in which Maqedon is the conqueror’s homeland.

Maqedōniyā shows the eastern q that marks the whole Aramaic-mediated branch of the name. Where Latin kept the Greek k as a c, Syriac rendered it with qōp̄, and from Syriac the same q passed into the Arabic Maqadūniya; the Babylonian Aramaic Mūqdōn on the Macedon page shows it too. The single consonant divides the family cleanly in two: a western, Greco-Latin Macedonia with a k-sound, and an eastern, Aramaic Maqedonia with a q, the two halves of Christendom and Islam inheriting the name by different roads.

The Arabic name of the region, Maqadūniya, the land that the Arabic historians knew as the homeland of Alexander, the country from which al-Iskandar al-Maqdūnī set out to conquer the world. It is the country-name beside the personal epithet al-Maqdūnī, “the Macedonian,” that the Arabs attached to Alexander himself.

Maqadūniya carries the eastern q, the inheritance of the Syriac through which Arabic received so much of its knowledge of Greek antiquity. The Arabs took the name not from the Greek directly but from the Aramaic-speaking Christian scholars who had already rendered Greek k as qōp̄, and so Arabic Macedonia begins, like its Syriac parent, with a qāf. The geography of the name’s transmission is written in its first letter: a q for everything that came east through Aramaic, a c or k for everything that went west through Rome. Maqdūniyā remains the Arabic name of Macedonia, the qāf of the medieval form still marking the eastern route the name once took.

The Byzantine theme of Makedonía, created around the 790s, the same military-administrative reorganization that produced the Anatolikon and the theme of Hellas elsewhere in this atlas. The name is the ancient one unchanged; the place is not. The theme’s territory lay in western Thrace, with its capital at Adrianople, while the old Macedonian heartland around Thessalonike was administered under other themes entirely; for centuries of Byzantine administration, “Macedonia” officially meant a stretch of Thrace, and the dynasty called Macedonian, founded by Basil I, took its name from a founder born in the theme, near Adrianople rather than anywhere Alexander would have recognized.

The entry is the page’s demonstration that an administrative name can drift clean off its geography and carry its history with it. The Old Persian entry above shows the reverse case, Skudra covering Macedonia from outside under a Scythian label; here the label is native, ancient, and correct in every respect except location. The “Macedonian” emperors of Byzantium’s greatest age were Macedonian in exactly the sense the theme system allowed, which is to say Thracian; a name with a thousand years of geography behind it had become, in the empire’s own ledgers, a bureaucratic coordinate. This page keeps finding names that are not where their places are; here, for four centuries, the place was not even where its name was.