I present to you, Macedonia (ancient kingdom) on Wikipedia, my present project

[Roma_Victrix]

Macedonia (ancient kingdom)

For the past month now I've been editing, expanding, and rewriting the (English) Wikipedia page for "Macedonia (ancient kingdom)". It's looking pretty good but it could always use fine tuning and improvement. I've consulted an abundance of sources, but I've mostly used chapters by various authors in A Companion to Ancient Macedonia (Wiley Blackwell, 2010, edited by Roisman and Worthington) and Malcolm Errington's A History of Macedonia (1990) to construct the narrative, while the chapters by M.B. Hatzopoulos in Brill's Companion to Ancient Macedon (2011) and his book Macedonian Institutions Under the Kings (1996) served to shore up information on government, society, culture, and economics. When it came to the Macedonian Wars with Rome I relied heavily on Klaus Bringmann (2007), although I've heard in another forum that I should seriously consider providing Erich S. Gruen's input on the matter. I remember him well when I cited him in the past, since I used one of his tomes to help write the Wiki article on Augustus.

Bear with me, fellow Americans (especially Patriots or Falcons fans), I know that Super Bowl LI is upon us, but the day after that (and following the nursing of your hangover) I'd kindly request that you take a look at this article and give whatever feedback you can on how it could be improved.

Feedback and suggestions don't have to be limited to a discussion about which sources I have and have not used. Other feedback can include things related to style, format, organization, images, etc. I'd like to know what you think of the article thus far! Where it may be weak or where you think too much detail might be present. Keep in mind that it is a current "Good Article" nominee at Wiki, so suggestions given now would be immensely appreciated. I think it's a good idea to tap into the brainpower of TWC for this, since we do have a decent collection of cerebral historians lurking around in these forums, despite its seemingly juvenile gaming and modding facade.

[Copperknickers II]

Wow! That's an impressive piece of work. One wonders where you find the time to do all this stuff Roma, in between regularly posting threads on seemingly every section on TWC (and other forums I've seen you on, e.g. Reddit) plus learning various oriental languages and still having time for RL!

My only criticism is that that is a very, very long article. Macedonia was a small kingdom from 2000 years ago, whereas even some pretty major modern countries don't get an article that size. Granted, Alexander the Great is probably one of the top 5 most influential figures in history, but I think parts of the history section in particular could be spread out a bit more over different pages so it's a little more 'bitesize'. I used wikipedia a little bit for background reading during university when writing essays (I studied Classics), and it's always great for people at a more advanced level when a wiki article goes into a bit of detail and has decent sources. However in my experience most people above the level of undergraduate don't bother reading Wikipedia so above a certain level detail can become superfluous and walls of text can be a little intimidating - well, if that's not too strong a word. I suppose there are plenty of amateurs with an interest in these things who might not have access to JSTOR and other scholarly resources so it's useful for them to have more hardcore scholarly info on Wiki. Anyway, all this is not intended to belittle the impeccable referencing and thorough research in any way because it's scarily impressive.

Also I had a cursory scroll through the talk section, well done for keeping your cool dealing with the FYROM/Greek nationalists, ancient Macedon is one hell of a touchy subject for them. I think the article deals with the controversy fairly well.

[hellheaven1987]

I wonder were Macedonians the Hellenistic Thracians??

[Lord Oda Nobunaga]

I wrote most of the stuff on the Ten Great Campaigns and began to edit some of the articles on the battles of Sengoku Jidai. While some people added to it to make it better some other jackasses meddled with my work and starting editing . So now I decided screw free encyclopedias, if you want info you better pay for it.

Dayyum Roma, you been editing that article everyday for the past month, at the very least! Seems good to me but since Macedon isn't really my subject I don't know what to suggest.

[Copperknickers II]

I wrote most of the stuff on the Ten Great Campaigns and began to edit some of the articles on the battles of Sengoku Jidai. While some people added to it to make it better some other jackasses meddled with my work and starting editing . So now I decided screw free encyclopedias, if you want info you better pay for it.

Dayyum Roma, you been editing that article everyday for the past month, at the very least! Seems good to me but since Macedon isn't really my subject I don't know what to suggest.

I wrote some articles about my local area, corrected some articles about Roman mythology and Middle Eastern history, and added Donald Trump to the list of notable Scottish Americans. That's about the sum of my contributions to human knowledge!

[neoptolemos]

First of all congrats for the monumental work!
Secondly although it is very interesting and thorough, I tend to agree with Copperknickers that it is rather extensice article. It would be a bit confsuing for the non familiar reader.
Third. Some suggestions
1) The first description. Macedonia or Macedon was an ancient Greek kingdom more precise rather than an ancient kingdom in general. I thought it was present in the previous entry and it is also a widely accepted term/description.
2)Although you use a quite extensive and recent literature i suggest also to use NGL Hammond's tremendous works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._G._L._Hammond
Remember apart from scholar background he had a great first hand experience of the place itself. His suggestion that Vergina was Aigai was confirmed and his assertion that Macedonian dialect was closely related to Doric and Northwestern Greek was also supported by the discovery of Pella course tablet.

Keep up the good job

[+Marius+]

Impressive.

[Ἀπολλόδοτος Α΄ ὁ Σωτήρ]

Meh... I'm not impressed.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Just kidding! The structure of article looks great at first glance.

[Copperknickers II]

First of all congrats for the monumental work!
Secondly although it is very interesting and thorough, I tend to agree with Copperknickers that it is rather extensice article. It would be a bit confsuing for the non familiar reader.
Third. Some suggestions
1) The first description. Macedonia or Macedon was an ancient Greek kingdom more precise rather than an ancient kingdom in general. I thought it was present in the previous entry and it is also a widely accepted term/description.

There's significant debate as to whether Macedonia was actually Greek so I think it's best to keep it ambiguous. And besides you don't want to go calling Macedonia Greek on wikipedia if you don't want a lot of angry modern Macedonians vandalising the article. Besides did any of the other Greek cities actually have kings? I don't know, Greece isn't my specialty. But I'd say it's a good thing to distinguish Macedonia from the core of Greek city states such as Athens, Sparta, Corinth etc, even if the culture of all was ultimately 'Hellenic'.

[Ἀπολλόδοτος Α΄ ὁ Σωτήρ]

There's significant debate as to whether Macedonia was actually Greek so I think it's best to keep it ambiguous. And besides you don't want to go calling Macedonia Greek on wikipedia if you don't want a lot of angry modern Macedonians vandalising the article. Besides did any of the other Greek cities actually have kings? I don't know, Greece isn't my specialty. But I'd say it's a good thing to distinguish Macedonia from the core of Greek city states such as Athens, Sparta, Corinth etc, even if the culture of all was ultimately 'Hellenic'.

Macedonian demotic language was definitely a greek dialect with significant non-greek substrate. The relation to greek can be seen in names such as Bereníkē insted of Phereníkē.
We can assume that by the time of Philip II they were more Hellenic than anything else, even though their ancestry probably included a great number of hellenized Thracians, in addition to smaller numbers of Phrygians and Illyrians.

About greek kings - early city states had kings, until they were overthrown by aristocrats, demos or a tyrant.

Additionally, the modern Republic of Macedonia lies mostly on territory of ancient Paeonia, which happened to be annexed by Macedon and later administred by Rome as part of Macedonia Province, alongside Thessaly, yet modern Thessalians don't claim to be Macedonians.

[Ludicus]

Candidate to...Wikipedia:Good article nominations - Wikipedia

[Cyclops]

Nice work, a most reasonable outline of the main points (in a sometimes contentious area) and some nice pix too!

[Copperknickers II]

Additionally, the modern Republic of Macedonia lies mostly on territory of ancient Paeonia, which happened to be annexed by Macedon and later administred by Rome as part of Macedonia Province, alongside Thessaly, yet modern Thessalians don't claim to be Macedonians.

There are plenty of countries which use historical names which originated elsewhere. India is named after the river Indus, now in Pakistan, Benin is nowhere near the ancient kingdom of Benin, nor is Ghana near to its empire, nor is Eritrea situated on the Erythraean sea. Also the equator does not pass through Equitorial Guinea. And that's not including the various countries named after ethnic groups which they have only a tenuous relationship with: Romania, Mexico, Bulgaria, etc. And then various Latin American countries whose names were just made up on the spot and bear no relation to the actual location or traditional name of the area. So if FYROM want to call themselves Macedonians, who's to say they can't?

[neoptolemos]

There's significant debate as to whether Macedonia was actually Greek so I think it's best to keep it ambiguous. And besides you don't want to go calling Macedonia Greek on wikipedia if you don't want a lot of angry modern Macedonians vandalising the article.

Although I sympathize, I think it is more important to clearly state what the historiography and archaelogical evidence had showed than trying to be diplomatic. Ancient Macedon was ancient Greek in the sense of what was defined as "ancient Greek". And "Ancient Greek" is a term that encompass some very different people and eras from the Myceneans to even some Hellenized Easterners.
It is a simple fact that cannot change in order to serve modern nationalisms from both countries. We are talking about ancient people.

Besides did any of the other Greek cities actually have kings? I don't know, Greece isn't my specialty. But I'd say it's a good thing to distinguish Macedonia from the core of Greek city states such as Athens, Sparta, Corinth etc, even if the culture of all was ultimately 'Hellenic'.

A plenty. The problem most people have is that they have an idealized view of classical Greece with the prominent city-states while they tend to neglect the complexity of ancient Greek world and its variations. For example Macedonians, Thessalians and Epirots have more in common than with the rest of the classical Greece regarding political organization. Kingship is one of them. Also people neglect the Ancient Greek kingdoms of Cyprus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catego...alamis,_Cyprus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_of_Pherae
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagus_(title)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ings_of_Epirus

[Magister Militum Flavius Aetius]

Gotta say, that's better than my work on the pages about Aetius and the Battle of Chalons.

[Ἀπολλόδοτος Α΄ ὁ Σωτήρ]

There are plenty of countries which use historical names which originated elsewhere. India is named after the river Indus, now in Pakistan, Benin is nowhere near the ancient kingdom of Benin, nor is Ghana near to its empire, nor is Eritrea situated on the Erythraean sea. Also the equator does not pass through Equitorial Guinea. And that's not including the various countries named after ethnic groups which they have only a tenuous relationship with: Romania, Mexico, Bulgaria, etc. And then various Latin American countries whose names were just made up on the spot and bear no relation to the actual location or traditional name of the area.

Well, Romanians do speak a romance language and have many latin derived personal names, Mexico includes and is centered on Mēxihco - original nahua toponym. Bulgarians are descendants of mostly slavicized Thracians and actual Slavs, but they do also have actual bulgarian ancestry. India is an exonym for Bhārata, which doesn't refer to Indus.

So if FYROM want to call themselves Macedonians, who's to say they can't?

Not me! I don't care how they name themselves. They can refer to themselves as Aryans if they should so choose, just like the Germans, they would both be wrong because Aryan is an ancient endonym of Indo-Iranian peoples and their descendant groups. The modern Macedonians, outside northern Greece are Slavs of mixed slavic, hellenized/romanized and non-hellenized/romanized paeonian ancestry and other romance and paleo-balkan speaking peoples.

I don't mind them calling themselves the way they do, and wasting money on Alexander and Philip public statues and monuments. I do mind when historical articles must be written so as to not offend someone's ethnic delusions, the same goes for those Greeks who claim that alphabet is a greek invention and that Minoans were greek.

[Kyriakos]

Awesome work, Roma, +1 as well here

[Copperknickers II]

Well, Romanians do speak a romance language and have many latin derived personal names, Mexico includes and is centered on Mēxihco - original nahua toponym. Bulgarians are descendants of mostly slavicized Thracians and actual Slavs, but they do also have actual bulgarian ancestry. India is an exonym for Bhārata, which doesn't refer to Indus.

I don't speak Romanian but as far as I can gather, the Romanians make little differentiation between the adjectives 'Roman' and 'Romanian'. I believe the words for 'Romans' and 'Romanians' are respectively 'Romani' and 'Românii', which must barely be distinguishable in speech. They literally refer to themselves as 'Romans' despite the fact they are perhaps the least Roman of all the Romance speaking countries in terms of culture and genetics. Also a good portion of Romania was never even conquered by the Roman empire, and for a long time nearly all of it lay outside the empire with the Danube as the frontier. As far as I am concerned if they want to call themselves Romans they can, but I don't see that they are much more Roman than the FYROM Macedonians are Macedonian. India is not really a proper exonym considering it derives from the term Hindustan which is widely used today in Hindi and other Northern Indian languages. Also English is one of India's official languages, but Indians choose to use the word 'India' when they could easily have changed the name to 'Bharat' even in English.

Not me! I don't care how they name themselves. They can refer to themselves as Aryans if they should so choose, just like the Germans, they would both be wrong because Aryan is an ancient endonym of Indo-Iranian peoples and their descendant groups. The modern Macedonians, outside northern Greece are Slavs of mixed slavic, hellenized/romanized and non-hellenized/romanized paeonian ancestry and other romance and paleo-balkan speaking peoples.

What makes you think that Greek Macedonians are such pure Greeks? This map of Ottoman ethnicites shows northern areas of what is now Greek Macedonia (including Pella) largely populated by Bulgarians, Romanians and Turks:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[Roma_Victrix]

Eh hem. Excuse the drunk posting I made yesterday on Super Bowl Sunday (that's the National Football League's annual championship game for all you non-Muricans out there who are now on notice).

Wow! That's an impressive piece of work. One wonders where you find the time to do all this stuff Roma, in between regularly posting threads on seemingly every section on TWC (and other forums I've seen you on, e.g. Reddit) plus learning various oriental languages and still having time for RL!

Well, it's not incredibly time consuming to post on TWC or Reddit for that matter, but this Wiki project was really intensive. I had a bunch of downtime in January and decided to take full advantage of it. The great thing is I didn't have to visit a library or anything to write this article. I just used JSTOR, Archive.org, Google Books, and a few random PDFs of entire books that I was able to find online. I do own a physical copy of Bringmann's History of the Roman Republic, though.

And don't worry about me. I still found plenty of spare time to play pool and drink beer.

My only criticism is that that is a very, very long article. Macedonia was a small kingdom from 2000 years ago, whereas even some pretty major modern countries don't get an article that size. Granted, Alexander the Great is probably one of the top 5 most influential figures in history, but I think parts of the history section in particular could be spread out a bit more over different pages so it's a little more 'bitesize'. I used wikipedia a little bit for background reading during university when writing essays (I studied Classics), and it's always great for people at a more advanced level when a wiki article goes into a bit of detail and has decent sources. However in my experience most people above the level of undergraduate don't bother reading Wikipedia so above a certain level detail can become superfluous and walls of text can be a little intimidating - well, if that's not too strong a word. I suppose there are plenty of amateurs with an interest in these things who might not have access to JSTOR and other scholarly resources so it's useful for them to have more hardcore scholarly info on Wiki. Anyway, all this is not intended to belittle the impeccable referencing and thorough research in any way because it's scarily impressive. Also I had a cursory scroll through the talk section, well done for keeping your cool dealing with the FYROM/Greek nationalists, ancient Macedon is one hell of a touchy subject for them. I think the article deals with the controversy fairly well.

Thanks! And you're probably right about the size issue. I mentioned it as such on the talk page. I think a solution would be to create a "history of ancient Macedonia" article and move much of the content there, but that's a whole other project in and of itself. I had spare time this past month but now I do not! Unfortunately. I'll see what I can do after the Good Article nomination process or even during it. However, I don't think I'm going to shoot for a Featured Article candidacy. The article is simply not stable enough given all the edit warring by Republic of Macedonia and Greek nationalists. It only takes one turd to spoil the punch bowl.

I wonder were Macedonians the Hellenistic Thracians??

Their language contained elements (or at least some loanwords) of Thracian as well as Illyrian and Phrygian. However, archaeological finds such as the Pella Curse Tablet indicate that they spoke a dialect of Northwestern Greek similar to the Thessalians. In either case the aristocracy and army all spoke Attic (and then Koine) Greek in Alexander's day. By the time the Romans conquered Macedonia their native dialect had been completely replaced with Koine Greek.

I wrote most of the stuff on the Ten Great Campaigns and began to edit some of the articles on the battles of Sengoku Jidai. While some people added to it to make it better some other jackasses meddled with my work and starting editing . So now I decided screw free encyclopedias, if you want info you better pay for it.

Dayyum Roma, you been editing that article everyday for the past month, at the very least! Seems good to me but since Macedon isn't really my subject I don't know what to suggest.

Yeah, that's the price that's paid for editing Wikipedia. Fortunately, if your article is being watched by others editors they can help to retain your material, especially in a "Good" or "Featured" article. It takes a good amount of consensus on the talk pages to change such articles (usually most changes are reverted until an agreement is reached).

First of all congrats for the monumental work!
Secondly although it is very interesting and thorough, I tend to agree with Copperknickers that it is rather extensice article. It would be a bit confsuing for the non familiar reader.
Third. Some suggestions
1) The first description. Macedonia or Macedon was an ancient Greek kingdom more precise rather than an ancient kingdom in general. I thought it was present in the previous entry and it is also a widely accepted term/description.
2)Although you use a quite extensive and recent literature i suggest also to use NGL Hammond's tremendous works https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N._G._L._Hammond
Remember apart from scholar background he had a great first hand experience of the place itself. His suggestion that Vergina was Aigai was confirmed and his assertion that Macedonian dialect was closely related to Doric and Northwestern Greek was also supported by the discovery of Pella course tablet.

Keep up the good job

Awesome! I will definitely have to consult NGL Hammond as well, him and Erich Gruen. Thank you for the suggestion.

As for the "Greek" kingdom thing; that's actually a disputed point on the talk page and the cause of much edit warring in the article. The article does say "on the periphery" of Archaic and Ancient Greece, while being the dominant state in Hellenistic Greece. That's technically true, although it doesn't say much about the ancient Macedonians themselves from a cultural anthropological perspective. Regardless, that is covered extensively in the body of the article regardless of the wording in one sentence of the lead section.

Macedonian demotic language was definitely a greek dialect with significant non-greek substrate. The relation to greek can be seen in names such as Bereníkē insted of Phereníkē.
We can assume that by the time of Philip II they were more Hellenic than anything else, even though their ancestry probably included a great number of hellenized Thracians, in addition to smaller numbers of Phrygians and Illyrians.

About greek kings - early city states had kings, until they were overthrown by aristocrats, demos or a tyrant.

Additionally, the modern Republic of Macedonia lies mostly on territory of ancient Paeonia, which happened to be annexed by Macedon and later administred by Rome as part of Macedonia Province, alongside Thessaly, yet modern Thessalians don't claim to be Macedonians.

A plenty. The problem most people have is that they have an idealized view of classical Greece with the prominent city-states while they tend to neglect the complexity of ancient Greek world and its variations. For example Macedonians, Thessalians and Epirots have more in common than with the rest of the classical Greece regarding political organization. Kingship is one of them. Also people neglect the Ancient Greek kingdoms of Cyprus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catego...alamis,_Cyprus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_of_Pherae
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagus_(title)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ings_of_Epirus

You guys beat me to the punch. Monarchies existed throughout the Greek world even during the Hellenistic period, albeit alongside tyrannies, oligarchies, and democracies. For instance, the Kingdom of Syracuse (which became a republic at one point), the Kingdom of Epirus (which also became a republican league in a revolution), and the other examples you cited. It wasn't just Macedonia clinging on to the Homeric past. Even Sparta had dual kings, albeit with a constitutional framework and democratic people's assembly.

In either case, kingship was the norm for the Hellenistic east, given the Macedonian-founded Ptolemaic and Seleucid empires. Was Philetaerus, the founder of the Attalid dynasty of Pergamon, a Macedonian or other type of Greek?

Gotta say, that's better than my work on the pages about Aetius and the Battle of Chalons.

You contributed to those? Nicely done.

Nice work, a most reasonable outline of the main points (in a sometimes contentious area) and some nice pix too!

I made sure to include plenty of neglected and not very well known paintings, statues, and carved reliefs. My personal favorites are the photos of that temple-like facade of the Tomb of the Palmettes in Mieza, Macedonia, Greece. The paintings on it are very well preserved.

[Dracula]

Alexander the Great tryed and wanted to imprison Aristotle for democratic propaganda, and other philosophers, according to Diogenes Laertius. And his kingdom desintegrated with his death, his chldren had been killed by the greeks. That corresponds to the opposition his father Philip met at expanding Macedon and making actually whole of Greece independant kingdom.

It seems Macedon was formed on the borders of greek territory as a kingdom taught mostly by "barbaric" thought, and looking at the might of Persia, because it needed to be able to compete with it. And apparently it wasn't understood, nor supported enough. Then necessarily Greece lost to the Romans, and later, for being too lakardish /in greece should know what lakardia means/, the Byz Empire went in history too, loosing to the easterners.

It is the unsuccessfull project of democracy.