Pella

""En Filipo II y el Arte de la Guerra tendremos la oportunidad de conocer en profundidad a uno de los más grandes reyes de la antigua Macedonia. Gracias a su habilidad como estratega, diplomático, político y soldado, heredó un reino pobre, débil y acosado por innumerables enemigos y lo transformó en el más poderoso de toda Grecia.

A lo largo de sus páginas podremos conocer la historia del reino Macedonio, desde sus orígenes míticos hasta la formación de un imperio, de la mano del que, a la postre, se convertiría en el padre del mítico Alejandro Magno y en el forjador de un nuevo ejército que cambiaria el devenir de la guerra en la Antigüedad. Filipo II fue el creador de la falange macedonia, formación que se demostraría como inigualable en el campo de batalla y que reportaría incontables victorias sobre poderosos enemigos, como los ilirios, los tesalios, los tracios, los beocios o los atenienses. Pero no sólo eso, logró integrar en el campo de batalla a la infantería y a la caballería para emplearlos en nuevas formaciones tácticas: armó a sus soldados con las míticas sarissas y apreció como pocos las posibilidades militares que la maquinaria de guerra podía proporcionarle, siendo el mecenas de numerosos avances en este campo. Soñó con conquistar el Imperio persa, cuando ya había logrado lo que nadie antes fue capaz: el control de Grecia.

Sólo la muerte le arrebató esa hazaña, pero sentó las bases de lo que más tarde conseguiría su propio hijo. Su figura levantó tanto odios como pasiones; se le conocía como mujeriego y bebedor, pero también por su habilidad para la oratoria, por sus astucia, determinación y valor. Siempre luchó en primera línea junto a sus soldados y nunca permitió que éstos le llamaran rey, sino solo "General".

Rev. H.P. Scholte, being persecuted for his faith in the Netherlands, emigrated to the U.S.A. in 1847 where he expected to find a “place of refuge.” Upon arrival, he established a settlement he called Pella. This is an exception to the rule that immigrant settlements were named after cities or villages in their home countries. By choosing this particular name, Scholte referred to a tradition of the Early Church: the so-called flight to Pella. Why was he doing so?

The article proposes a new translation of lines 8-14 of Amarna letter no. 255. The letter is a diplomatic protest by Mut-Baḫlu, the local ruler of Pella, against the pharaoh’s command that he relinquish his control over the local traffic of caravans. Mut-Baḫlu argues that to control the caravans is his hereditary right. Such an argument is well attested in the Amarna correspondence between the great powers. Its use in a vassal’s letter is a crafty attempt to exploit the diplomatic conventions of the Late Bronze Age.

Macedonians have emerged from the substratum of prehistoric tribes belonging to the huge family of Pelasgians, Aeols/Boreans  and Hyperboreans (Anti, Brygii, Danuni, Kiti, Hittiti, Lapiti, Macedoni, Minyi, Misiani, Mosiniki, Pelasgi, Pelagoni, Paioni, Tiroi, Tyrseni, etc.) that lived and contributed the creation of archetypical cultures of the second millennium BCE in the central regions of Macedonian Peninsula and Asia Minor.  During their migrations these ancestral Aryan-Macedonic tribes brought with them their culture and contributed to the creation of the civilization centers in antiquity,  especially in the region of lower Danube and further toward Ukraine/Russia (as 'Aryans') and in Central Europe (as 'Veneti' and/or 'Gaul'). 
As a result of the progressive expansion of the early Macedonians during the archaic period all the other regional tribes fused together into a larger union of Macedonians. At the beginning the Orestians (modern Mkd. Gorani; Eng. 'highlanders', mountainers)  from Argo (today Kostur region, Aegean Macedonia) in western Lower Macedonia, together with other neighboring Macedonic tribes living in Eordaia, Elimeia (Kožani and Grevena), northern Timfaia (Hasia), Lynkestia, Desaretia (Lerin-Prespa-Ohrid region), Elimiotia, Pelagonia and Paionia (in Upper Macedonia) began to form the Macedonian state, the first entity of that kind and extent on the European soil.

Several attempts have been made to connect the nativity of Jesus, and more recently, the so-called “Rapture of the Church” to specific datable events in the heavens. In recent decades, several of these efforts have been centered on the constellation Virgo, the vision of the woman “clothed with the sun” in Revelation 12:1-6, and possible Jewish dates for the conception or birth of Jesus. Some attempts at aligning Revelation 12 with the actual heavens are connected to theories about the Star of Bethlehem. This article presents a partial exegesis of Revelation 12:1-17, as well as Babylonian astronomical concepts, which could call into question some popular conceptions concerning dating the birth of the Messiah.  (Updated May 2021)

The subject of this paper is the presentation of a previously unknown local red-figure pottery workshop from central Macedonia, probably in Pella, capital of the Macedonian kingdom. It is dated to the second half of the fourth century and is associated with, and greatly influenced by, the late period of red-figure production in Attica. In this study I present the particular characteristics of the workshop, the vase shapes, the imagery, the chronology, the vase-painters, the sites both in Pella and elsewhere at which this red-figure pottery was found, and some general conclusions.

The current paper examines five bronze, relief weights, produced in a mold. They have all been discovered in the Agora of Pella and its surrounds. They are all square; on their upper surface they bear either a denotation of their weight (nos 1-3) or a symbol (no 4) or a monogram (no. 5), which possibly indicates the name of an official of the city.
The majority of the weights adopts the Attic weight standard. The only exception is no. 1, which follows the “allied standard”. By their weight, three standards can be recognized. Weight no. 3 fits with Attic mna of 105 drachmas; weights nos. 2 and 4 follow a mna of 112 drachmas, while weights nos. 1 and 5 relate to a mna of 138 drachmas. The last two examples derive from the destruction layer of the city or immediately below it. This leads us to the conclusion that they were possibly in use at the time of the destruction of the city in the early 1st century B.C. The market control, evident on weight no. 5, which was stamped with an official seal in order to be reused, comprises an additional indication that the weight standard of the early 1st century B.C. was the one of the mna of 138 drachmas. Therefore, we can distinguish at least two changes in the weight standard, with the very last being in use in the final days of Pella.
The caduceus and the monogram on the weights nos. 4 and 5, strengthened by the market control evidence, verifying the existence of archons in Pella. They had the responsibility to produce the prototypes and to control the weight standards, either during the reign or after the Roman conquest.
Lastly, the developed commerce existing in the capital of the Macedonian kingdom may explain the discovery of weight no. 1 in an area close to the central south entrance of the Agora. It would have been required in such a milieu for regulating purchases and in the possible exchange of coins to silver according to the familiar weight standard.

In this paper, the presence and usage of coins of Macedon within Samuel’s Fortress is discussed, based on 218 specimens; that is, 135 being issues of the kings of Macedon and 83 being issues of the ‘Macedonians’ and of the cities of Macedon, respectively. These coins represent ~42% of the total number of 524 single coin finds belonging to the Classical and Hellenistic periods, discovered during the systematic archaeological excavations from 2001 to 2013 at Samuel’s Fortress in Ohrid.

Key words: Samuel’s Fortress, coins, Macedon, kings, ‘Macedonians’, cities

Christopher Buck, “Illuminator vs. Redeemer: A ’Trajectory’ of Ebionite Christology from Prophet Messianism to Baha’i Theophanology.” Abstracts: American Academy of Religion/Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting 1983 (Dallas). Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1983, p. 86.  

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• CITED BY HANS KUNG:

“Present-day scholars like Christopher Buck also have come to the same conclusion: ‘In the course of time the Ebionites together with the Sabaean Baptists seem to have become established in Arabia. This fertilization invites the hypothesis that the Qur’an reflects Ebionite prophetology’.” –  Hans Küng, Christianity: Essence, History, and Future (New York : Continuum, 1995), p. 106 and 819, n. 177:

“Present-day scholars too have concluded: ‘In the course of time the Ebionites together with the Sabaean Baptists seem to have become established in Arabia. This fertilization invites the hypothesis that the Qur’an reflects Ebionite prophetology’.” – Hans Küng, Islam: Past, Present, and Future. Translated by John Bowden (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), p. 42 and p. 672, n. 58: “C. Buck, report to American Academy of Religion, Abstracts AAR/SBL 1983.”

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ABSTRACT (published in 1983)

The rediscovery of Ebionite Christianity is one of the achievements of recent scholarship. Since World War II, specialists in Christian origins have sought to recover what might be thought of as “lost” forms of Christianity. Of all forms of Jewish Christianity, Ebionism is the most distinct and well known. The researches of Bavarian scholar Schoeps drew the notice of fellow scholars to verifiably Ebionite elements preserved in the Pseudo–Clementine Homilies (“H”) and Recognitions (“R”), until then deemed romances devoid of much historical worth. The late Cardinal Danielou treated Jewish Christianity phenomenologically, defining its various forms collectively as a culture (“a culture of apocalypses”). Made possible by the convergence of manuscript discoveries, Danielou succeeded in presenting Jewish Christianity as the predominant though not exclusive influence in the early Church for a full century after Christ. Jewish Christians were primarily living in Palestine, Transjordan, and Syria, but were doubtless in Rome, Asia Minor, and northern Africa as well. Jewish Christianity, like a lost civilization, appears once to have had a formative (though later ostracized) presence in the early Christian world.

The two Jewish revolts reversed the situation, such that the ethno- (“pagan”) Christians emerged as the prevailing “orthodoxy.” Judged in relation to “triumphant Pauline Christianity,” the early major forms of Jewish Christianity were “completely misunderstood by Western heresiologues” which condemned Millenarism, Encratism, and Ebionism as impoverished doctrine. All of this surprising data so revolutionized concepts of Christian origins that Quispel of Utrecht was led to declare that “the Jewish Christians or Ebionites were the legitimate heirs of primitive Christianity, whereas the New Testament to a large extent reflects the views of Gentile Christianity as defended by St. Paul and his fellows. This is the present state of scholarship.”

What, then, can be said about “the present state of scholarship” which Quispel asserted favoring the primacy of the Ebionites as preservers of the “original” traditions? We can safely say that there was more to Christianity than met the orthodox or heterodox eye. Post-World War II research has, indeed, revolutionized our views of Christian origins. Several important forms of Christianity took root and effloresced in a variety of cultural soils. That history favored one form over the other is not a proof of primacy. Perhaps we can think of a plurality of “apostolic successions” rather than in terms of one only. The fullest picture of early Christianity is perhaps the most impressive: a mosaic, not a monochrome. Historical enquiry can remove the whitewash of orthodoxy, such that orthodoxy itself becomes more human, more alive as the drama with all its actors is replayed before our historical eyes. Perhaps the appreciation and not the suppression of diversity within Christianity will evoke the richest sense of heritage, the broadest sense of commonality, and the greatest impulse against judgementalism ⎯ the fomenter of religious prejudice. The recovery of Ebionite Christianity is part of a long and painstaking process: the total restoration of our Christian past ⎯ a process which might be thought of as the “salvation” of salvation-history.

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NOTES

This is the author's research paper for his first graduate course, "Problems in Ebionism," a directed study at Western Washington State College (now Western Washington University), under William K.B. Stoever (now Professor Emeritus), chair of Liberal Studies. The paper was awarded an A on its completion in June 1982. Dr. Stoever is named on the last page of the paper. The paper itself was word-processed by Carol Lenhard.

The “Abstract” (supra) was published in 1983. Although the paper itself is unpublished, it may be considered to be the equivalent of a peer-reviewed paper insofar as the paper was critically reviewed by Dr. Stoever. Of interest is the striking phenomenological resonance between the Ebionite Christian doctrine of the "True Prophet" with the Bahá’í doctrine of the “Manifestation of God.”

Excerpt from an early Jewish-Christian work, The Homilies of Clement:

Salvation of Jews and Christians
"For on this account Jesus is concealed from the Jews, who have taken Moses as their teacher, and Moses is hidden from those who have believed in Jesus. For, there being one teaching by both, God accepts him who has believed either of these" (H 8:6). "For even the Hebrews who believe Moses, and do not observe the things spoken by him, are not saved, unless they observe the things that are spoken to them... Neither is there salvation in believing in teachers and calling them lords" (H 8:5).

"Neither, therefore, are the Hebrews condemned by account of their ignorance of Jesus, by reason of Him who has concealed Him, if, doing the things commanded by Moses they do not hate Him (Jesus) whom they do know. Neither are those from among the Gentiles condemned, who do not know Moses, provided that these also, doing the things spoken by Jesus, do not hate Him (Moses) whom they do not know" (H 8: 7) .

"And some will not be profited by calling the teachers lords, but not doing the works of servants... Moreover, if anyone has been thought worthy to recognize both as preaching one doctrine, that man has been counted rich in God, understanding the old things as new in time, and the new things as old" (H 8:7).

Research on Hellenistic pottery has already argued that pottery production in the early Hellenistic period (late 4th c. B.C.-early 3rd c. B.C.) was inextricably connected with Athenian pottery. Pergamon and other cities that later developed into important pottery centers based their early pottery needs to some extent on Athenian imports and only
through an intermediary phase of imitation of Athenian vases was each pottery center able to start producing its own distinct pottery. The above development has been observed, in particular, for Macedonia, an area of special importance as the center of the Macedonian kingdom, and in this paper I will argue that Athenian ceramic influence was equally strong in its capital, Pella, in the late 4th and early 3rd c. B.C.
The paper aspires to illuminate the conditions prevalent in Pella during the last quarter of the 4th c. B.C. through the presentation of pottery discovered in a road immediately east of the Agora. Even though this is not the first assemblage uncovered in the city that dates to this period, it is nevertheless the first that shows such a clear Athenian influence. This influence is traced in the shapes, their production details, the glaze and the types of decoration. Hence, the relatively high occurrence in this deposit of true Attic or Atticizing vases reveals that the kerameikos of Pella, which developed from the 3rd c. B.C. onwards to an especially robust and influential pottery center, initially followed the model recognizable at Pergamon and elsewhere. The examination of this
material contributes to our knowledge of the local economy of Pella, while the conscious selection or avoidance of specific Athenian vases as imports may reflect aspects of the social life of the people of that city in the transition from the 4th to the 3rd c. B.C.

Says who has the worldview, etc. and supplements chapters dealing with royal rule and Aristotle's political ideology. This was originally appendix 4, but I have removed the original Appendix 3, which was on political science before Aristotle. That's been absorbed into and expanded in the long essay "Plato's Politikē (political science) and Aristotle's Development of it." Contrary to what is surprisingly sometimes written, 2 Aristotle was not born in Macedon, or even a region that was then considered Macedonian. It would not be until 349 1 All references in this book are to Aristotle's Politics, unless otherwise specified. The chapter number is the most common, not those of the Loeb and Apostle editions. 2 Terence Irwin, "Introduction," pp. xiii-xxiv in Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), p. xiv; this error has continued through the 3 rd edition of 2019; Everson, "Introduction," pp. ix-xxvii in Aristotle, The Politics, ed. Stephen Everson, [trans. Benjamin Jowett, rev. Jonathan Barnes] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. x; see also the chart of "Principal Events" on p. xxiv. This was not corrected for the revised edition (1997).

The purpose of this article is to present the revolt that took place in Canaan under the leadership of Lab'ayu, ruler of Shechem, shortly before the emergence of Israel, which had the adhesion of several city-states of that region. The study will be done by analyzing the letters found at Tell el-Amarna and sent to Pharaoh by Lab'ayu (EA 252-254) by Tagi, ruler of Ginti-Kirmil (EA 264-266), and by Mut-Ba'lu, ruler of Pella (EA 255-256). It is noted in these letters that the territory conquered by the Lab'ayu revolt is similar to what King Saul, the first monarch of Israel, occupied a few centuries later.

The legendary Archippos is considered to be the founder of Pella-on-the-Orontes, the city whose name was borrowed from the Macedonian city where Philip II of Macedon and Alexander the Great were born. The Macedonian colony, and at the same time a military camp and particularly an equestrian camp, is built by soldiers no doubt belonging to the cavalry of the army of Alexander the Great. According to the legend quoted in the Cynegetica (Κυνηγετικά) of the Pseudo-Oppian of the beginning of the third century AD, Archippos is a friend of Heracles to whom the hero offered the bull of Geryon which was originally a breed of oxens become the pride of the region; a species highly appreciated throughout Antiquity. Archippos is a legendary founder attested by the ancient sources. It seems to me just the proposal of the historians that the military colony was established after the Battle of Issos in 333 BC, not far of the itinerary of the victorious Macedonian army. About 300 BC, Seleucus I Nicator re-established the Macedonian colony in the city, naming Apamea in honor of his wife Apama (Ἀπάμα). The city forming part of the tetrapole with Antioch, Laodicea and Seleucia-on-the-Sea, was founded by Seleucus in about 300 BC.
An unknown mosaic was discovered during clandestine excavations at Apamea in 2011. It, like many others, was disunited from the soil and then sold to antique collectors by international traffickers. Today, it is sought after by the Interpol. The mosaic illustrates unique scenes identified as the foundation of Pella and its (re)foundation as Apamea. This new source of late Antiquity has a quite exceptional and unique character for the history of the creation of the new polis. It is inspired by a literary source whose author could be Euphorion of Chalcis of the third century BC or hellenistic paintings completely unknown. The iconographic, semantic and pluridisciplinary analysis of this work of art will be proposed to the participants of the symposium on Founding Heroes and Community Identities in Antiquity, between Myth, Rite and Politics. See also an Abstract in French.

Dans la "section VI : La production artistique en Grèce du Nord" du catalogue d'exposition Au royaume d'Alexandre le Grand (2011), cette brève synthèse dresse un état des lieux sur les ateliers artisanaux. Elle met en évidence le changement provoqué par la montée en puissance du royaume de Macédoine et le cas très particulier que constitue l'agora de Pella.

Pella, a major urban site in the eastern foothills of the north Jordan Valley, has been extensively exca-vated over the past 17 years (Fig. 1). Work began as a joint University of Sydney-Wooster College Ohio Expedition, and has continued since the mid-1980s through the University ...