Cleopatra and the Macedonians of Egypt

[osiris]

good post i feel insulted every time i see or hear some one refer to alexanders generals kingdoms as hellenistic. it is a historians term invented a few hundred years ago, it was not a term in use by the people of that time. yet again another example of others defining our identity not just in the present but over 2 thousaand years ago. it is patently wrong to call those kingdoms hellenic and to deny us modern macedonians any link with them, instead allowing our greedy southern neighbours the arvanovlachs to revel in the ancient macedonians glory and contribution to world civilization.

[indigen]

good post i feel insulted every time i see or hear some one refer to alexanders generals kingdoms as hellenistic. it is a historians term invented a few hundred years ago, it was not a term in use by the people of that time. yet again another example of others defining our identity not just in the present but over 2 thousaand years ago. it is patently wrong to call those kingdoms hellenic and to deny us modern macedonians any link with them, instead allowing our greedy southern neighbours the arvanovlachs to revel in the ancient macedonians glory and contribution to world civilization.

If to add INSULT to INJURY, such designations are much more PAINFUL (and TREASONOUS) when coming from official "Macedonian" representatives and INSTITUTIONS! I exposed Pasko Kuzman for such dirty deeds nearly two years ago and there were many here who jumped to his defence. IMO, it may be worth revisiting that topic to see who said what and for what reasons and perhaps learning some lessons in analysis of what are essential Macedonian national interests that no individual, regardless of who and how he/she is perceived, can or should ever be allowed to compromise or undermine.

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Pasko Kuzman promoting "Macedonian-Hellenistic period" - anti ...
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Pasko Kuzman: "in the Macedonian - Hellenic period, namely from the middle of the 4th century to the middle of the 2nd century BC." ...
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2.
Macedonian Archaeological News > Number 3, Volume I, October 2009 ...
1 Aug 2009 ... Macedonian Type of Tomb in Varos – Ohrid. Pasko Kuzman ... Macedonian tombs from the Early Antiquity and the Macedonian - Hellenic period. ...
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3.
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Graves from the Macedonian-Hellenic necropolis have been discovered with the .... The explorations were conducted by: Pasko Kuzman, Dragica Simovska and ...
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[George S.]

INdigen you should be congratulated it's rather insulting.You know why because they did the deciding for us & we shouldn't let them.You know another insult is to say cleopatra was greek she was macedonian & could speak macedonian.What hellenistic period it was a macedonianistic period.If you tell a lie often enough it becomes for realeventually..

[George S.]

Indigen this pasko kuzman on you tube reckons that he knows where alexander is buried in macedonia??what do you reckon.

[The LION will ROAR]

Indigen this pasko kuzman on you tube reckons that he knows where alexander is buried in macedonia??what do you reckon.

George, not just Kuzman but other creditable Historians in Macedonia have said the same thing....They must know something that the world doesn't...?

[George S.]

lwr where is his grave??

[lavce pelagonski]

Banica mountain I think.

[George S.]

sTart digging lavce.Where's Banica Mountain??how do you know/?

[indigen]

Hellenistic Egypt: monarchy, society, economy, culture
By Jean Bingen, Roger S. Bagnall
2007


Under Ptolemy II, in certain official Ptolemaic texts, like the collection of regulations called P. Revenue Laws or a Prostagma like C. Ord. Ptol. 21, it is prescribed that identity, when a full name was required...that one has to add to the name of a person the name of his father and that of his homeland...remained throughout the Ptolemaic age; the death penalty would punish any ‘change of homeland and names’. In Egypt hundreds of regulated identities allow us to draw up an extraordinary picture of immigration: someone is a son of so-and-so, Cretan or Polyrrhenian from Crete or Achaean or Athenian, Thracian...and in the most prestigious case, Macedonian. On the strict plan of personal identity, one is as a rule neither Greek, nor Egyptian, because these two mark a very wide social status. One would perhaps acquire one of these broader statuses because he gives his full identity. The Macedonian contingent was particularly important...and access to this prestigious group was certainly jealously protected. The socially preeminent place of the Macedonian cavalry katoikoi in the chora explains why Makedon would, quite exceptionally, survive as an individual and private marker during the first half of the first century AD. It is the only identity mark with a patris connotation that did not disappear with the Ptolemaic dynasty.

Let us abandon, then, the idea that the homeland for which Cleopatra proclaims her love could be Alexandria. This would make no sense. Obviously Cleopatra gives prominence in her new titulature to her Macedonian ancestry and her links to the Macedonian aristocracy...The queen implicitly alludes to her ancestor, the Macedonian Ptolemy, who first reigned from Alexandria over a vast empire, in which Egypt was not a homeland, but a strategic base and a land to be exploited economically. She calls attention to the relationship of blood, specifically of Macedonian blood, that united Ptolemies and Seleucids. The word even echoed the prestige of the Macedonian hero par excellence, Alexander the Great, the conqueror who opened Egypt to the Macedonians and who was buried in Alexandria but was also the founder of a broader more ephemeral Macedonian Empire.

15 Bearzot (1992) does not help us here....I would not follow Bearzot when she considers that the Macedonians, because of their small number, merged with Greeks. As we have just said, in Egypt, Makedon, ethnic, and Hellen, social qualification, are semantically and juridically situated on two different levels.

In Hellenistic Egypt, the most prestigious patris is that of Makedon, which for a while survived the elimination of ethnic designations in the reorganisation by the Roman conquerors of the official mean of expressing identity.


The children of Antony...To the youngest child, Ptolemy Philadelphos...This new Seleucid destiny of the young boy is symbolised by the Macedonian insignia of his power, the chlamys of purple, the diadem and the Macedonian head-dress kausia. A limestone head of the prince wears the kausia decorated with a small uraeus, signs of his Alexandrian and Macedonian royal ancestry.

In fact, in the documents Hellenes are not apposed to Macedonians or Thracians (such a scheme would be anachronistic in Ptolemaic Egypt). When ethnic is needed, Greeks are designated by a Greek local origin at the same level as the Thracian or Macedonian generic ethnics. The notion of ‘Greek register’ which I use above is only a shortcut of the modern historian, and has no ethnological character, but reflects only socio-political allegiance to the basileus and membership in the immigrant structures - as opposed to the socio-religious Egyptian system and its own religious feelings about the nature and the role of the king as pharaoh.

This IS an excellent confirmation for the existence and continuity of the separate Macedonian national and ethnic identity (in ancient times) even in places such as Egypt, where they were a ruling minority amongst the indigenous local population and a mix of other (sometimes more numerous) immigrant/settler communities. Very valuable information!

NB:To George S. and others,
This is a very important and solid contribution by IoM that should not be further degraded by general chit chat (and mostly off topic) posts which, IMO, can (and should, if so desired) be discussed in the "General Discussion" MTO Forum.

So pochit,
I.

[George S.]

Indigen there is nothing to discuss it's pretty straight forward.I accept what you just said others may disagree if they want it's up to them.

[Agamoi Thytai]

This IS an excellent confirmation for the existence and continuity of the separate Macedonian national and ethnic identity (in ancient times) even in places such as Egypt, where they were a ruling minority amongst the indigenous local population and a mix of other (sometimes more numerous) immigrant/settler communities. Very valuable information!

Look what is written too in this very same book,on that specific subject,the Macedonian identity and how Macedonians in Egypt perceived themselves:
"Makedon was felt as a particular Greek ethnic....the word could have had some aristocratic flavour for the Makedones,who probably perceived themselves as an elite among the other Hellenes".

http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/5787/egypte.gif

[George S.]

Agamoi there is a distiction made when the macedonians were in egypt.Why would the egyptians make distiction if it was one people.They would have said that they were greek.
But they were two distinct people,so how can someone conquer themselves??Also for your information Agamoi there is a book from professor Philip Freeman published about alexander
where it is said the ordinary macedonian person in Macedonia NEVER spoke GREEK(there was no need) they spoke their own language called MACEDONIAN.THE only people to speak GREEK was the royal house who were MACEDONIAN & spoke Greek because of commerce & trade BUT they did speak their own mother tounge which was MACEDONIAN.

Agamoi i hope you got that it was very simple you only have a claim that if someone speaks greek then they are greek rubbish & pure bullshit.Agamoi wake up to your nonsensical arguments because you are wrong.

[makedonche]

Look what is written too in this very same book,on that specific subject,the Macedonian identity and how Macedonians in Egypt perceived themselves:
"Makedon was felt as a particular Greek ethnic....the word could have had some aristocratic flavour for the Makedones,who probably perceived themselves as an elite among the other Hellenes".
http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/5787/egypte.gif

Agamoi
There you go again quoting bullshit sources, or not even quoting the source, it's becoming annoying having to troll through the rubbish you post, when even you don't read and understand the entire book you quote!

[indigen]

Look what is written too in this very same book,on that specific subject,the Macedonian identity and how Macedonians in Egypt perceived themselves:
"Makedon was felt as a particular Greek ethnic....the word could have had some aristocratic flavour for the Makedones,who probably perceived themselves as an elite among the other Hellenes".
http://img651.imageshack.us/img651/5787/egypte.gif

Roughly, in this document, the Hellenes are everyone who is 'not autochtonous'.

So that is what constitutes a "Hellene", even if it was used rarely. As for the conjectures of a modern author in note 4, I am neither concerned nor does it detract from the evidence provided.

I suggest that it would be good if someone who owns a copy of the book to look through it and analyze the original dates the papers (the book is a compilation of papers presented over an extended period of time by the author) were written/presented to see if there is any pre and post 1990 papers and what bearing they may have on little details like note 4 below! Going on past evidence, people like NGL Hammond, even though he was generally pro-Greekanyway, were orchestrated by HellAss to shamefully sing to their political tune post 1990 and I suspect a Brussels-based French historian, as the author of the book is, may have had some requests made to him for some purposeful political shading of his work.


I shall retain here as a general frame for this chapter the immigrants that the administration
of the Ptolemies called more or less officially, but in fact very rarely, Hellenies, a term
which is much more complex than one could believe at first sight. In a papyrological dossier
from the third century BC in the Vienna collection,[3] the epthet Hellenes applies to a group
with a particular fiscal status, members of which have not only Macedonian or Greek names,[4]
but also Thracian and Jewish ones.They live in a village in the Fayyum and are in fact more or
less active elements of the Alexandrian royal system on the military, administrative or
econmomic level. Roughly, in this document, the Hellenes are everyone who is 'not autochtonous'.
This papyrus consolidates moreover the image of what the notion of Hellenes represents in the
Documentation of early Hellenistic Egypt.[5] page 94-95.


n4. Valid from the point of view od onomastics (the particularism of Macedonian traditional names
is well known), this distinction, trivial in our studies, is anachronistic and does not correspond
to the feeling that the Macedonians of Egypt had of their unquestionable Greek cultural identity.
In one rare example where the label Hellenes is used in the singular, it is claimed by a Ptolemaios
who declares elswhere he is Makedon (UPZ I 7 and 8)..... Page 94


Hellenistic Egypt: monarchy, society, economy, culture
Front Cover
Jean Bingen, Roger S. Bagnall
0 Reviews
University of California Press, 2007 - History - 305 pages
Hellenistic Egypt brings together for the first time the writings of the preeminent historian,
papyrologist, and epigraphist Jean Bingen. These essays, first published by Bingen from 1970
to 1999, make a distinctive contribution to the historiography of Hellenistic Egypt, a period
in ancient Egypt extending from its conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C. until its
annexation as a province of the Roman Empire by Octavian (later Augustus) in 30 B.C., after
his defeat of Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Ruled by Ptolemaic kings during this period,
Hellenistic Egypt was a sophisticated, rich, and fertile country. Its history is intimately
bound up with the history of the Mediterranean as a whole, yet parts of that history remain
relatively obscure and open to debate. New evidence, particularly from papyri, emerges frequently
and shifts our understanding and interpretation of this significant time. For the last six
decades Jean Bingen has been a leading editor and interpreter of such evidence. In particular
his work on the Ptolemaic monarchy and economy, which illustrates how the Greeks and Egyptians
interacted, has transformed the field and influenced all subsequent work. Historian and classicist
Roger Bagnall has selected and introduced Bingen's most important essays on this topic.
Copub: Edinburgh University Press
More »

http://books.google.com.au/books?id=pZbM_fpG_PQC

Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2007.10.01

http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2007/2007-10-01.html

Reviewed by Simone Bonim - June 18, 2007

http://www.historyinreview.org/ptm_egypt.html

amazon.com/Hellenistic-Egypt-Monarchy-Society-Economy/dp/product-description

From the Inside Flap
"The most comprehensive account of the economy, society, and culture of Hellenistic Egypt available in English."--J.G. Manning, author of Land and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt: The Structure of Land Tenure

About the Author

Jean Bingen is Emeritus Professor of Greek at the Free University of Brussels. As the most distinguished living historian of Hellenistic Egypt, he has published numerous articles and reviews over sixty years of research.

Roger Bagnall is Professor of Classics and History at Columbia University. His books include The Administration of the Ptolemaic Possessions outside Egypt, Egypt in Late Antiquity, and The Demography of Roman Egypt.

[indigen]

Hellenistic Egypt: monarchy, society, economy, culture
By Jean Bingen, Roger S. Bagnall
2007


Under Ptolemy II, in certain official Ptolemaic texts, like the collection of regulations called P. Revenue Laws or a Prostagma like C. Ord. Ptol. 21, it is prescribed that identity, when a full name was required...that one has to add to the name of a person the name of his father and that of his homeland...remained throughout the Ptolemaic age; the death penalty would punish any ‘change of homeland and names’. In Egypt hundreds of regulated identities allow us to draw up an extraordinary picture of immigration: someone is a son of so-and-so, Cretan or Polyrrhenian from Crete or Achaean or Athenian, Thracian...and in the most prestigious case, Macedonian. On the strict plan of personal identity, one is as a rule neither Greek, nor Egyptian, because these two mark a very wide social status. One would perhaps acquire one of these broader statuses because he gives his full identity. The Macedonian contingent was particularly important...and access to this prestigious group was certainly jealously protected. The socially preeminent place of the Macedonian cavalry katoikoi in the chora explains why Makedon would, quite exceptionally, survive as an individual and private marker during the first half of the first century AD. It is the only identity mark with a patris connotation that did not disappear with the Ptolemaic dynasty.

Let us abandon, then, the idea that the homeland for which Cleopatra proclaims her love could be Alexandria. This would make no sense. Obviously Cleopatra gives prominence in her new titulature to her Macedonian ancestry and her links to the Macedonian aristocracy...The queen implicitly alludes to her ancestor, the Macedonian Ptolemy, who first reigned from Alexandria over a vast empire, in which Egypt was not a homeland, but a strategic base and a land to be exploited economically. She calls attention to the relationship of blood, specifically of Macedonian blood, that united Ptolemies and Seleucids. The word even echoed the prestige of the Macedonian hero par excellence, Alexander the Great, the conqueror who opened Egypt to the Macedonians and who was buried in Alexandria but was also the founder of a broader more ephemeral Macedonian Empire.

15 Bearzot (1992) does not help us here....I would not follow Bearzot when she considers that the Macedonians, because of their small number, merged with Greeks. As we have just said, in Egypt, Makedon, ethnic, and Hellen, social qualification, are semantically and juridically situated on two different levels.

In Hellenistic Egypt, the most prestigious patris is that of Makedon, which for a while survived the elimination of ethnic designations in the reorganisation by the Roman conquerors of the official mean of expressing identity.


The children of Antony...To the youngest child, Ptolemy Philadelphos...This new Seleucid destiny of the young boy is symbolised by the Macedonian insignia of his power, the chlamys of purple, the diadem and the Macedonian head-dress kausia. A limestone head of the prince wears the kausia decorated with a small uraeus, signs of his Alexandrian and Macedonian royal ancestry.

In fact, in the documents Hellenes are not apposed to Macedonians or Thracians (such a scheme would be anachronistic in Ptolemaic Egypt). When ethnic is needed, Greeks are designated by a Greek local origin at the same level as the Thracian or Macedonian generic ethnics. The notion of ‘Greek register’ which I use above is only a shortcut of the modern historian, and has no ethnological character, but reflects only socio-political allegiance to the basileus and membership in the immigrant structures - as opposed to the socio-religious Egyptian system and its own religious feelings about the nature and the role of the king as pharaoh.

Hi IoM,
Can you provide the page number or chapter the info is sourced from?

So pochit,
I.