Talk:Macedonia (ancient kingdom)

Periphery of Classical Greece

The opening seems to have aged badly and I understand it is contentious. However, Macedon, as a Greek speaking state, more specifically, a Greek religious and Greek cultural state in classical Greece throughout the classical period - whose rulers attended the Olympics throughout the entirity of the classical period - is 'periphery' really the correct word? Surely Thrace was on the periphery of Classical Greece, not Macedon? Surely on the periphery of the archaic Greece can be argued however not during the classical period (500-336 BC). Reaper7 (talk) 11:01, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

Some ancient Greek authors considered Macedonians to be barbarians. The story related to the Olympics is significant: the Macedonian kings were only allowed to compete after a debate took place on whether they were Greeks, which shows it was really not that obvious; Alexander I developed on his Heraclid ancestry and was therefore allowed to participate, but it also means that common Macedonians could not compete in the 5th century. See here.

The full quote in the lede is also "periphery of Archaic and Classical Greece", which is true as it only started to influence Greek affairs from the 350s BC. T8612 (talk) 11:37, 5 September 2022 (UTC)

About the foundation date

Hello. I'm almost certain that the foundation date of 808 BC provided in the infobox is incorrect. Firstly, as far as I can tell, it is not cited in any of the four places where it appears. There are two citations for Aigai in the Capitals section, but the Roisman reference does not provide any date. I don't have full access to other reference from Hatzopoulos, but a quick search inside on Google Books gives me nothing for '808', 'ninth century', or 'eighth century'. Moreover, none of the potentially relevant references in the 'Early history and legend' section on this page appear to have this date either and, in fact, disagree with it.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, no modern scholarly source that I've seen uses 808 BC as the date of Macedonia's foundation. Instead, they employ a few different dating schemes that I've compiled into a table below.

Date for Foundation of Macedonia

Book title	Year	Author	808 BC?	What date do they use?
A Companion to Ancient Macedonia	2010	Sławomir Sprawski (chapter)	X	''middle of the seventh century'' (pg. 130)
A History of Macedonia	1990	Malcolm Errington	X	''middle of the seventh century'' (pg. 2)
Brill's Companion to Ancient Macedon: Studies in the Archaeology and History of Macedon, 650 BC – 300 AD.	2011	Saatsoglou-Paliadeli (chapter)	X	''650–148 BC'' (pg. 295)
In the Shadow of Olympus: The Emergence of Macedon	1990	Eugene Borza	X	''early seventh century'' (pg. 98)
Ancient Macedonia	2017	Carol J. King	X	''c. 700'' (pg. xvi)
Lexicon of Argead Makedonia	2020	Waldemar Heckel	X	''second half of the 6th century'' (pg. 25)
A History of Macedonia Volume II: 550-336 B.C.	1979	N.G.L. Hammond	X	''about 650 B.C.'' (pg. 4)
Ancient Macedonia	2020	Miltiades Hatzopoulos	X	''the seventies of the seventh century or in the middle of that century'' (pg.12)
Chronologies of the Ancient World	2006	Walter Eder	X	''ca. 650'' (pg. 188)
Dynasties of the World	1989	John Morby	X	''c.650'' (pg. 29)
Women and Monarchy in Macedonia	2000	Elizabeth Carney	X	''sometime in the seventh century B.C.'' (pg. 4)
Encyclopædia Britannica	-	-	X	''700 BCE''

As you can see, none of these sources provide a date close to 808 BC. I also suspected that this issue began long before the page became a featured article. On 30 September 2007, @Dbachmann gave Caranus an uncited reign date of 808 - 778 BC. Then, on 28 November 2013, @TRAJAN 117 added 808 BC to the other parts of the infobox without any citations. I really have no idea where this apparently entirely made-up date even came from in the first place.

I would normally fix this kind of issue myself, but as this is a featured article, I thought it would be better to post my idea on the talk page first. I personally find ''c. 650-168 BC'' to be the most appealing for an infobox. However, ''seventh century-168 BC'' or ''7th century-168 BC'' might also be appropriate. I would also suggest removing the suspiciously exact reign date for Caranus entirely as he is considered legendary (i.e. made-up) by all modern scholars. BusterTheMighty (talk) 06:51, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for flagging this. This is indeed embarrassing, especially since the unsourced date of 808 BC has been sitting around for so long. At the time Dbachmann inserted it, it was contained – though ostensibly as a date of birth, not a date of accession – in the article about that king, so Dbachmann apparently just took it uncritically from there. It had been inserted there by an anon editor earlier that year, in one of that article's first edits [1]. Later additions to that article provided a citation to a primary source, the Chronicon of Eusebius, that placed Caranus' reign "before the First Olympiad", which would indeed be consistent with a birth sometime in the late 800s, so maybe there's some background to such a (legendary) dating there. The date was removed from the Caranus article in 2016 [2]. The main problem, apart from the unsourced nature of the alleged exact year, is of course that we're presenting the mythical figure of Caranus as if he was an actual historical king; we should clearly distinguish those. Fut.Perf. ☼ 08:34, 6 July 2023 (UTC)

Ah, I didn't think to check the Caranus article. It seems that a lot of the strangest edits to history articles on Wikipedia tend to come from someone (mis)reading an ancient or medieval author. Thanks for fixing the page! BusterTheMighty (talk) 00:07, 7 July 2023 (UTC)

Common languages listed in the infobox

Recently there has been an edit war in this article over the issue of common languages listed in the info box, namely the inclusion of the Ancient Macedonian language. Above all else, the lead section and the infobox must reflect information found in the prose body of the article per Wikipedia:Summary style, without supplanting information or omitting vital facts. As it currently stands, the article is quite clear on the issue, that the majority of surviving written inscriptions are indeed written in ancient Attic Greek and Koine Greek, with a small minority in what appears to be a Macedonian Greek dialect (albeit still unclassified, most likely a variant of Northwest Dorian with non-Greek influences like Thracian/Phrygian), but that primary sources indicate the Macedonian language was nevertheless widely used, especially in the military. An example of this is even provided with Alexander the Great issuing emergency military orders to his officers in their native Macedonian tongue rather than in Koine Greek. If it was common enough for its use by soldiers and officers in Macedon's armies (even when communicating with their king), then its inclusion in the infobox is entirely warranted. The existence of a lingua franca like Koine Greek does not preclude the fact that other common languages existed for people of the kingdom of Macedon and colonial Macedonians living elsewhere like in the Seleucid and Ptolemaic Empires. The article explicitly states that the Macedonian language did not go extinct until some time in the late Hellenistic period during the rise of Rome. Pericles of Athens^Talk 14:24, 14 October 2023 (UTC)