Macedonians were Greeks

Historical truth on the ancient Macedonians

"Albeit inspired by Grinevich' ideas, T.B. - A.T's [Boshevski and Tentov] work is with pretentious to being considered as a scholarly study. They have done great efforts to re-decipher the middle text of the Rosetta Stone, but their approach was wrong, and the results are of a quasi scientific value. Without taking into consideration the development of the languages and historical reality, ignoring centuries long studies of the ancient Macedonian, the authors try to identify it with south dialects of the contemporary Macedonian language"
Petar H. Ilievski
Skopjan academic denounces the Rosetta Stone hoax

What is the Rosetta Stone?

The Rosetta Stone is an ancient Egyptian monument,dated at 196 BC, at the time of the Hellenistic Period of Egyptian history, when a Macedonian dynasty, the Ptolemies were ruling over Egypt. It was discovered in Egypt in 1799 by Napoleon’s French army. Soon after its discovery it was surrendered to the British army and is now housed in the British Museum. The stone of Rosetta became the key to understanding Egyptian hieroglyphs. Both the Hieroglyphic and the Demotic Egyptian writing had died out around the fourth century AD, being replaced by the Coptic alphabet. Over time the knowledge of how to read Hieroglyphs and the Demotic script was lost, until the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and its subsequent deciphering. The Rosetta Stone is a stele of black granitic rock. It measures a little over a meter high, 72 cm wide and about 30 cm deep. It is missing the top left, the top right and the bottom right corners. The front of the slab is smooth and it is filled with linear text, inscribed in three separate bands, one on top of the other. Each band is written in a different script making up three very distinct levels of written stone surface. It is a bilingual (not trilingual) inscription, written in two forms of Egyptian (Hieroglyphic and Demotic) and one in Greek, as E.A. Wallis Budge emphatically informs us in his book “The Rosetta Stone”.

The inscriptions in the Rosetta Stone make a total of three essentially(but not completely) identical translations of the same decree. This decree was passed by a council of High Egyptian priests, at their meeting in Memphis, which confirmed the establishment of the Pharaonic cult of

the Pharaoh Ptolemaios V Epiphanes, on the first anniversary of his official royal coronation. The coronation ceremony was held on the ninth year of his reign as a Pharaoh of the Hellenistic kingdom of Egypt (he was a minor upon his father’s death).
 

What is the Slavic Macedonist generated propaganda?

There is a paper, allegedly scientific in nature, that has been making waves in the popular press of Skopje, and even more loud noises on web sites, blogs and Youtube videos.  Dr. Tome Boshevski of the “Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts” in Skopje, North Macedonia (former FYROM), and Dr. Aristotel Tentov, member of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies in Skopje, North Macedonia (former FYROM), are the authors of it. Their paper is named:
“TRACING THE SCRIPT  AND THE LANGUAGE OF THE ANCIENT MACEDONIANS”, and according to their own abstract it “presents the results of research realized within the project “Deciphering the Middle Text of the Rosetta Stone”, supported by Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 2003 – 2005.”
According to these engineering professors, things with The Rosetta Stone are not what they seem to be. Since no known scholarly or scientific magazine or publication has ever agreed to publish their work, and they have not been allowed to speak and present their case in any forum or congress of a related scholarly faculty (History, Egyptology, Linguistics, Hellenistic Studies, etc), we could have just as well dismissed their work as just another loony ancient Egypt related theory, by two media-seeking amateur Egyptologists. There are thousands of the kind, who try to explain various topics from how the Egyptian pyramids were built by extraterrestrials and ho Egyptians taught Pyramid building to the Mayans and the Aztecs to how the next world war and other eschatologic events have been foretold by prophesies written in Hieroglyphs and hidden with mummies in tombs.Unfortunately though, due to the unmistakably impressive sounding resumes and positions of the above mentioned Electrical Engineering professors (one of whom being a member of what should normally be considered a prestigious “Academy of Sciences and the Arts” of a country), their work needs to be brought out into the light, examined and exposed for what it is: pseudoscience. Despite the fact that the international scholarly community has ignored and essentially shunned the work of the two engineers, it has nevertheless acquired a sort of cult following among ultra-nationalists and other right wing and revisionist circles in their country.
 

Since Slavic Macedonist nationalists love to swallow anything which will allegedly promote their non-existing links with antiquity, let us remind them once more simple and logical facts which they conveniently prefer to ignore.

(a) The two UNQUALIFIED engineers Tentov and Boshevski have admitted themselves that they “are not specialists in the area of linguistics”.

(b) Even Tom Boshevski’s  colleagues, members of MASA think of “his discovery as “science fiction””.

(c) The two UNQUALIFIED to Linguistics, Engineers have sent their discoveries  to the Institute (Oriental Institute in Chicago, a research center part of the University of Chicago) but as they admitted themselves ” So far there have been no reactions, nor a reply”.  It looks the experts in Linguistics didn’t even bother with the irrational findings of Tentov and Boshevski.

(d) Since none from the academics coming from the US universities and from around the world who are experts in Linguistics, unlike the two Unqualified Engineers took them seriously, Tentov and Boshevski “bravely ignored the local and international intellectual community and have presented the language and script of the Ancient Macedonians”.

[e] A statement from one of the two Engineers in the press “I have not heard a negative response from official experts in this field, except ignorance and refusal to meet to discuss the topic“. Actually as you admitted yourselves none even replied.  That is why you have not heard a negative response. The reason is obvious. No expert even bothered to waste his/her time with “science fiction”.

[f] The fact that no serious Academic from the greatest Universities around the world bothered with  this “great discovery”, forced Tentov and Boshevski to make the following statements:

 “I am all for holding dialogue with all that can contribute, specifically with international historians who have taken the WRONG PATH in solving this problem. ”

“It would be difficult for them to deal with the news that they made a MISTAKE in translating the artifact, for which they have written and published many books and spent a lot of money”.

So according to Tentov and Boshevski “International Historians are in the “WRONG PATH” and Institutes have made a “MISTAKE” in translating the artifact! Everybody else, including the world Academia is wrong but the two Unqualified Engineers are not!

Even one of North Macedonia’s (FYROM) own prominent scholars in linguistics, Petar Ilievski, who dedicated more than sixty years to text analysis,  shows the absurdity of the theory that there is a connection between the middle text on the Rosetta-stone and the southern Macedonian dialects, in his work “Two Different Approaches towards Interpreting Ancient Texts and Some Greek-Slavonic Onomastic Parallels“, page 31, published in Prilozi, MANU 2007, extended in 2008 and published in English in Proceedings of the Macedonian-American Scholarly Conference.

To end with this pitiful demonstration of nonsense, it’s a fact that the usage of Demotic is attested in Egypt from the mid 6th century, in other words 250 years before the start of the Ptolemaic dynasty.

Demotic has been found on stelae from the temple of Serapis at Saqqara from around 600BC. It is attested in pre-Ptolemaic administrative, legal and commercial inscriptions as well as a few literary compositions and scientific and religious texts. Therefore given that Demotic pre-dates the Ptolemies by some 250 years, the hoax promoted by the two Unqualified Engineers is proved to be entirely nonsensical, unless they start claiming now for a greatest dose of amusement for any logical person that Egyptians spoke…Slavic!

Even a cursory review of the origins and history of Demotic shows it pre-dates the period on which Bosevski and Tentov refer to. Their analysis is simply nonsense and that is why it has been treated as such both among their colleagues and around the world.

Testimonies about the middle text of the Rosetta Stone

The bilingual (not trilingual) inscription on the Rosetta Stone IS WRITTEN FROM RIGHT TO LEFT IN THE TWO FORMS OF EGYPTIAN WRITING AND IN GREEK. It was the fashion at one time to compare the inscription on the Rosetta Stone with the great Inscription which Darius I had cut upon the rock at Bahistun in Persia, and to describe each of these documents as trilingual. But it must be remembered that the Decree on the Rosetta Stone is bilingual, though written in three kinds of writing, and that the Bahistun Inscription is trilingual, and written in three languages (Persian, Susian, and Babylonian) in three different kinds of cuneiform character. The Greek portion of the inscription on the Rosetta Stone is written in uncials ; it contains 54 lines of text, the last 26 of which are imperfect at the ends.

“The Rosetta Stone” By E A Wallis Budge, Page 40

The Rosetta stone which should really be called the Memphis Decree after the place where the document was probably first composed and “published”, is often described as a trilingual stela. THIS IS NOT QUITE ACCURATE. First of all, no version of the text could be properly described as an accurate translation of the others. Secondly, THE STELA PRESENTS ROUGHLY THE SAME TEXT WRITTEN IN THREE DIFFERENT SCRIPTS, BUT NOT IN THREE LANGUAGES. THERE ARE REALLY ONLY TWO UNRELATED TONGUES HERE, GREEK AND EGYPTIAN, BUT THE LATTER OCCURS IN TWO DIALECTS, EACH IN ITS OWN SCRIPT.

“Semitic Papyrology in Context” Kael Marinus Braun, Page 3

In its present state the Rosetta Stone is an irregularly shaped slab of compact black basalt which measures abot 3 ft. 9 in. by 2 ft. 4 1/2 in. by 11 in. and the top corners and the righthand bottom corner are wanting. IT IS INSCRIBED WITH 14 LINES OF HIEROGLYPHIC TEXT, 32 LINES OF DEMOTIC AND 54 LINES OF GREEK. THE INSCRIPTION ON THE STONE IS BILINGUAL AND IS WRITTEN IN EGYPTIAN AND IN GREEK. THE EGYPTIAN PORTION IS IN HIEROGLYPHS AND ALSO IN DEMOTIC CHARACTERS.

The Mummy: A Handbook of Egyptian Funerary Archaelogy By E A Wallis Budge, Page 124

Rosetta Stone. THE ROSETTA STONE, WRITTEN IN GREEK, DEMOTIC AND EGYPTIAN HIEROGLYPHICS, is a decree produced at a general council of priests..

“In Defense of Nature: The History Nobody Told You about” by Richard Michael Pasichnyk, P. 163

At the top of the Rosetta Stone are Egyptian hieroglyphics, IN THE MIDDLE IS EGYPTIAN DEMOTIC SCRIPT, and at the bottom is Greek.

“Academic American Encyclopedia”, Page 160

It is made of black granite, its top register written in hieroglyphic, THE MIDDLE DEMOTIC.

“Discoveries and Documents: An Introduction to the Archaeology of the Old Testament”, Page 7 by Edgar Jones, 1974

The Rosetta stone consists of fourteen lines of Egyptian hieroglyphics (shown above); THIRTY-TWO LINES OF EGYPTIAN DEMOTIC, and fifty-four lines of ancient Greek

Historical Deception: Untold story of Ancient Egypt”, By Moustafa Gadalla, page 23

Then in the summer of 1799, the Rosetta Stone was discovered. This slab of basalt was engraved with three versions of the same story, written in hieroglyphs on top, EGYPTIAN CURSIVE DEMOTIC SCRIPT IN THE MIDDLE and the more familiar greek in the bottom.

Knowledge Management Handbook By Jay Liebowitz

Copies of the decree in the EGYPTIAN (HIEROGLYPHIC AND DEMOTIC) and Greek languages were ordered to be cut on stele, which were to be set up in every temple of the first, second, and third class in Egypt.

Short History of the Egyptian People 1914 By E. A. Wallis Budge, page 155

He recognized the shorthand nature of the DEMOTIC WRITING ON THE ROSETTA STONE

“Encyclopedia of the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt”, Page 192 by Kathryn A. Bard, Steven Blake Shubert, 1999

[We added the capitalization and bold to emphasize the related text which counters the fantasies of the two Engineers from North Macedonia (FYROM)]