Macedonia: From bad to worse

Alun Politics, The Past , , , ,

Thessaloniki
The White Tower of Thes­saloniki, Mace­do­nia, Greece. Photo (cc) dun­godung.

I’ve been read­ing the let­ter to Pres­id­ent Obama signed by vari­ous clas­sical schol­ars regard­ing the claims over Mace­do­nia, It’s about 50% suc­cess­ful in my case. It’s got me tak­ing the Mace­do­nia prob­lem much more ser­i­ously, but I couldn’t sign the letter.

Cri­ti­cising prom­in­ent pro­fess­ors when you’re job-hunting is a very bad idea. Non­ethe­less as far as the archae­ology of eth­ni­city goes it’s poor. The simple equa­tion of lan­guage with eth­ni­city, which the let­ter fol­lows, has been given a thor­ough kick­ing in other areas of archae­ology. Worse, even if the archae­ology was right, it would still be a bad argu­ment to say Greece’s claim to Mace­do­nia rests on the ancient Mace­do­ni­ans being Greek. To show this I’ll con­duct a little thought experiment.

Let’s say for the sake of argu­ment that next year there’s a sur­pris­ing find in Thes­saloniki. A marble tab­let from a temple dat­ing to 350 BC is found. To everyone’s sur­prise the table is inscribed with Cyril­lic let­ters rather than Greek, and the lan­guage is a vari­ant of Bul­garian. Would that mean Greece would have to hand over Mace­do­nia to its north­ern neigh­bour?
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