Macedonian Hellenes: From Darius to Polibius and the Graeco-Indian Kingdoms

Abstract

The borders of ancient Macedonia and the tribes and ethnicities that were conquered and culturally assimilated by the Ancient Macedonians remain the subject of scientific research and discussion. The Macedonians, however, were recorded in ancient sources from the time of Darius in Persia, and Aeschylus in Greece, through works of poetry, historiography, theater, geography, politics and religion as a Greek race, with Greek lalia, with Greek traditions and beliefs, with experiences that did not differ substantially from their compatriots in the rest of the Greek area of the south, nor from the East to Ionia and Cappadocia, nor from the West to Sicily and Italy in the South. They had their own regional peculiarities, their own political system, their own localism, but their names and customs were common, as was the huge pool of Greek cultural heritage from which they drew their daily lives. The Persian king Darius the Great called the Greeks Yaunâ, meaning "Ionians" and the Macedonians as Yaunâ takabarâ meaning "Ionians wearing sun hats". The kingdoms that appeared in 311 BC. in the depths of the East, the offspring of the Macedonian rivals of Alexander the Great, were recognized as "Greek-Indian kingdoms" by the local Indians, Persians, and even Chinese of the Far East and as such are testified in world history because of their Macedonian and Greek functioned as identical concepts, like Spartan and Athenian. The peoples of the East did not distinguish the Macedonians nationally from the rest of the Greeks. An ethnogenesis had to be provoked in a way of invention and construction in the Balkans in order to question the identity of Macedonian Hellenism by themselves, something that the Medes, Persians, Indians and Chinese recognized 2,500 years ago...