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Ancient Macedonian Words Found in the Modern Macedonian LanguageInterview with Professor Tome BoshevskiCourtesy, Liljana RistovaEditor, Canadian Macedonian News
(Translated from Macedonian to English and edited by Risto Stefov)
 Did the Slavs come to the Balkans from behind the Carpathians or did they cross theCarpathians fleeing north to avoid the Roman invasions? This is a problem that can be easilyand logically remedied. After five Macedonian-Roman wars fought in the second century BC with Philip V and his son Perseus, a large number of Macedonians including most of the elite and ruling class, fled Macedonia and headed north away from the conflict. Fearing a slaughter from the Romanarmies descending on Macedonia from the south, from Peloponnesus, they fled the Balkans and resettled north as far as Siberia. No people leave their homes voluntarily on masse unless theyare coerced. This massive evacuation was certainly coerced by the violent Roman invasionwhich accounted for about half of Macedonia's population leaving Macedonia. The other half  still remained and lived on Macedonian territory.We cannot accept the notion that the Macedonian-Roman wars "cleansed out" the entire Ancient Macedonian population as much as we cannot accept the notion that the Ancient Macedonianswho fled the conflict disappeared altogether. There are well documented historic facts that provethat Ancient Macedonians not only survived the Roman invasion but many who fled north in fact,over time, returned to their ancestral lands in the Balkans.
Professor Boshevski, you and your colleague Professor Aristotel Tentov, a while ago, madea sensational discovery of great importance to the Macedonian people and to world history.You were able to successfully decipher the center text on the Rosetta Stone, which for overtwo hundred years, no one was able to decipher. Even though you are not a linguist byprofession you are obviously very much interested in the subject. What compelled you totake on such a great task?Professor Boshevski:
With regards to the decipherment, we were not the first to attempt thecenter text translation. There were other translations made before us but we were not contentwith their results. I worked for forty years in the field of nuclear energy and I am no stranger tothe types of methods necessary to solve complex problems. I investigated other's attempts at thetranslation but their analysis fell short of meeting our expectations.The idea that drove us to the assumption that this indeed may be the writing of the AncientMacedonians is that we refused to believe the notion of mainstream science that the AncientMacedonians were illiterate and had no writing system or language of their own. To us it wasillogical to assume that two-thousand years ago a people capable of creating an empire with allthe elements of a complex civilization could not read and write in their own language! It would
 
 be impossible for such people to build grand libraries like never before and populate them withsuch great knowledge if they were not able to read and write.It is illogical to assume that if we have no knowledge of something that it doesn't exist! Manythings from that period for various reasons are still not known and have not been identified. Thecenter text on the Rosetta Stone is a good example where something discovered over twohundred years ago is still an enigma to this very day for many scientists, including the worldauthorities on ancient languages.Having said that however, it is well accepted that the center text on the Rosetta Stone is a distinctlanguage with distinct writing. Since it was found in Egypt it is assumed to be an Egyptianlanguage and because it appeared to be rare, it was assumed to be an official Egyptian language.Regarding the language's use, the academic world seems to be divided with some believing it isan Egyptian demotic or a peoples' language yet others believing it is an official Egyptianlanguage.If this language was indeed an Egyptian official language then it must have been used by the thenEgyptian rulers and the Pharaoh himself to write his decrees. Interestingly, the Egyptian rulers of the time were the Ptolemaic dynasty which lasted for about three hundred years. It is wellknown, especially in the academic world, that the Ptolemaic dynasty was a Macedonian dynastythat originated inside the Balkans or more precisely inside Macedonia in a town today called"Ptolemaida". The name of the dynasty comes from Ptolemy Soter, the first Ptolemy. PtolemySoter was one of Alexander the Greats' generals. He inherited Egypt, a part of Alexander'sempire, after Alexander's death. Ptolemy Soter's family name comes from his town of originlocated about fifty kilometers south of present day Bitola, Republic of Macedonia.The language Ptolemy Soter spoke was the language of the Pelagonian plain. The Pelagonian plain is located in the triangle between Lerin, Voden and Bitola. So it is not unusual to assumethat some words or linguistic elements from Ptolemy Soter's time, survived the two-thousandyears and may be present in the Macedonian language of today. If our assumption was correctthat Ptolemy Soter's descendents ordered the center text to be inscribed in the AncientMacedonian language which he brought with him from the Pelagonian plain, then we should beable to find clues of it in the modern Macedonian language or at least in the Macedoniandialectal language of the Pelagonian plain. If indeed this was the language of the AncientMacedonians than its roots are not Egyptian but Balkan. Ptolemais, from Ptolemy Soter toCleopatra VII the last Macedonian ruler of Egypt may have used this language for as long as theyruled Egypt. These were our first assumptions.It is understandable that as in science or in mathematics, the first step to solving a complex problem is to devise a sound theory and then look for evidence to support it. Our theory was based on the above premises which we believed were sound, logical and would lead us to theright solution.We cannot say that the problem was not complex. It was quite the opposite. Besides being facedwith deciphering the meaning of each symbol, we also had to identify sounds and figure out howthey would fit into constructing a language. It was a puzzle with many undefined elements but
 
luckily we found that today's science does have knowledge of this kind of writing which exists inthe larger territory of Europe. Almost all ancient European writing comes from the Pelasgians,the Etruscans, the old Dannans and other ancient northern people who had syllabic writingsimilar to that identified on the Rosetta Stone. Our latest findings have indicated that theCanadian Eskimos too had a writing system with markings which in large part are similar to theones on the Rosetta Stone. This kind of information is widely available even in encyclopedias.All you have to do is look up any title or literature with references to the writing of the CanadianEskimos and other American indigenous people or to the writing of the ancient European people.There is no need to dispute the syllabic nature of this writing system. It has been in official usefor long periods of time in Europe before the Roman period and before the arrival of the Latinscript on the European continent.
On account that you have established that the writing is syllabic, what is the mostappropriate name to call it?Professor Boshevski:
We have not given it any particular name; we call it by its characteristics"syllabic writing" or "the center text on the Rosetta Stone". This is a script of a very oldcivilization spanning the territory of Europe and Asia Minor which at some point in time was brought to the North American continent and was widely used by many nations. The Ptolemaisused a downscaled sophisticated version of it with a reduced number of symbols. This way itskeepers would have had an easier time remembering its rules and keeping track of them.Our job was to unravel this language's mystery which meant that we needed to identify itsgrammatical rules. After some investigation and by using today's Macedonian language asreference, a certain number of grammatical rules began to surface such as the formation of thesuperlative adjective with the prefix "na" (on, upon, to, up to, at, against) or its plural "nai". Moreabout this can be found in our publication "Po Tragite na pismoto i jaziko na antichkiteMakedontsi" (Tracing the Ancient Macedonian Writing and Language). Interestingly we foundthe term "na" in use three times.This discovery gave us some confidence that we were on the right track and that this may be thelanguage of the Ancient Macedonians. This may indeed be the syllabic writing of the AncientMacedonian language whose roots place it in the center of the Balkans on the Pelagonian plain.If so then this would be a script of European origins, older than the Roman civilization and froman aspect of writing, preceding the Glagolic and Cyrillic scripts of Kiril and Metodi which by theway, also originated in the same region.According to one of our most recognized cultural activists, Chernorizets Hrabar who by the wayalso was one of our motivators for starting this project, the people of the Balkans, before the brother saints Kiril and Methodi gave us our current writing, wrote in "cherti i retski" (lines andincisions). Interestingly we also found this term in the Pharaoh's decree. The actual term was"nareitsi" which by just looking closely is similar to the term "narestsi" and "cherti" and "retski".Russian literature describes the "cherti i retski" (lines and incisions) as a form of pre-Slav writing but does not tell of its time or how widely it was used. However in view of our discovery we
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