Macedonian names and makeDonski pseudo-linguistics: The case of the name Kopria

		Το παρόν άρθρο πρωτοεμφανίστηκε στις 2 Αυγούστου του 2009 στο Αμερικανικό διαδικτυακό περιοδικό Αμέρικαν Κρόνικλ: http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/11266 Μιλτιάδης Ηλία Μπόλαρης Miltiades Elia Bolaris Βalkan Illusion - phantasia archaica: "...it is very interesting to note that many of the authentic ancient Macedonian words, according to their etymology and pronunciation, have a striking resemblance to the appropriate words used in the modern Macedonian language (and other so called "Slav" languages)[sic]"..."Kopria. This name has possible connections to the noun "kopra" (a dill). It is a well-known practice to derive personal names from those of the plant world. In 16th century Macedonia one finds the female name Kopra." From: "Similarities between ancient Macedonian and today's' Macedonian Culture (Linguistics and Onomastics)" by Aleksandar Donski, celebrity propagandist and self proclaimed "historian" from Skopje, FYROM. Kopria / Copria / Κοπρία: In the early 1970's, a clay "pithos" type jar was found in Egypt in an illegal excavation. It quickly found its way to the Louvre Museum. Inside it there was a lead sheet insrcibed in Greek and a tiny clay statuette of a female figure in a kneeling, submissive position. Her hands were tied to her back with thirteen bronze pins piercing through her clay body. In "The ethnic origins of a Roman-Era Philtrokatadesmos (PGM IV 296-434)", Christopher Faraone, professor of Classics at the University of Chicago, describes how this find corresponded closely in text and in the clay doll treatment to another find, inscribed in (PGM IV. 335-406): "Marvelous love binding spell (philtrokatadesmos): Take wax (or clay) from a potter's wheel and make two figurines, a male and a female. Make the male in the form of Ares fully armed, holding a sword in his left hand, and threatening to plunge it into the right side of her neck. And make her with her arms behind her and down on her knees...". Then we hear of several other jars with clay or wax figurines with the thirteen bronze needles pinched in them and the accompanying lead katadesmoi that have been found and are being circulated among museums and legal or (mostly) underground art and antiquities dealers. The (PGM IV 296-434) is unique among them for its length and complexity. It demands from chthonian deities like Pluton, Kore Persephone, Hermes-Thoth and Adonis to bind a girl and "deliver" her - bound through infatuation and erotic passion - to the man who lustfully desires her. The full text of this Philtrokatadesmos can be found in the public domain, but here I will bring the middle part of it, that is of particular interest to us: "...I adjure you (ἐξορκίζω / exorkizo ), all spirits (δαίμονες / demones ) in this place, to assist this ghost (δαιμων / demon). Rouse yourself for me, corpse spirit ( νεκυδαίμων / nekydemon ), whoever you are, whether male or female, and go into every place, into every quarter, into every house, and bind Κοπρία / Kopria, whom her mother Ταέσις / Taesis bore, the hair of whose head you have, for Αἰλουρίων / Ailourion, whom his mother named Κοπρία / Kopria bore, that she may not submit to vaginal nor anal intercourse, nor gratify another youth or another man except Αἰλουρίων / Ailourion only, whom his mother named Κοπρία / Kopria bore, and that she may not even be able to eat nor drink nor ever get sleep nor enjoy good health nor have peace in her soul or mind in her desire for Αἰλουρίων / Ailourion, whom his mother Κοπρία / Kopria bore, until Κοπρία / Kopria, whom her mother Ταέσις / Taesis bore, whose hair you have, will spring up from every place and every house, burning (with passion), and come to Αἰλουρίων / Ailourion, whom his mother named Κοπρία / Kopria bore, loving (and) adoring with all her soul, with all her spirit, with unceasing and unremitting and constant erotic binding, Αἰλουρίων / Ailourion, whom his mother named Κοπρία / Kopria bore, with a divine love, from this very day, from the present hour, for the rest of Κοπρία / Kopria's life...etc etc...Do not disobey my commands, ghost, whoever you are, whether male or female, but rouse yourself for me and go into every place, into every quarter, into every house, and bind Κοπρία / Kopria, whom her mother Ταέσις / Taesis bore, the hair of whose head you have, for Αἰλουρίων / Ailourion, whom his mother named Κοπρία / Kopria bore, that she may not submit to vaginal nor anal intercourse, nor gratify another youth or another man; and that she may not even be able to eat nor drink nor get sleep nor be at peace in her soul or mind in her desire, day and night, for Αἰλουρίων / Ailourion, whom his mother named Κοπρία / Kopria bore, loving (and) adoring him with all her heart, with all her spirit, like her own soul, Κοπρία / Kopria, whose hair you have, loving with a divine love, until death, Αἰλουρίων / Ailourion, whom his mother named Κοπρία / Kopria bore. Now now quickly quickly! ...and again....and bring Κοπρία / Kopria, her mother Ταέσις / Taesis bore, whose hair you have, to Αἰλουρίων / Ailourion, whom his mother named Κοπρία / Kopria bore, burning, blazing, melting away in her soul, her spirit, her feminine part, loving (and) adoring with a divine love, until death, Αἰλουρίων / Ailourion, whom his mother named Κοπρία / Kopria bore. Now now quickly quickly!..." and so on and so on, it continues... Bibl.: David G. Martinez, PMich 757: A Greek Love Charm from Egypt, Ann Arbor, 1991. This is an immensely powerful, deep and dark magical text, that is casting hair-raising spells of magic, witchcraft, desire, fear and curse, repeating itself again and again, pressing, hammering and pounding point after point, word after word, threatening, cursing, begging, exhorting, exorcising and adjuring. It was written sometime between the 2nd and the 4th century AD and it comes to us from Roman-occupied but Greek-speaking Egypt, still fully immersed in her Hellenistic and Ptolemaic legacy. The characters appearing on this Philtrokatadesmos (besides the Demons and Spirits, Gods and other divinities, named or implied) are four persons, whose names the katadesmos preserved for us in posterity: There is young maiden named Κοπρία / Kopria, her mother, Ταέσις / Taesis, a young man, Αἰλουρίων / Ailourion and Ailourion's mother also named Κοπρία / Kopria. At first sight, to any Greek speaking person Κοπρία / Kopria sounds like a very unusual choice for a name. Kopria as a noun means literally a pile of kopros, dung, the excrement of humans and (mostly) animals. To the modern mind this sounds like a most undesirable word, and just the thought that someone would want to use it as a name for their baby girl is unthinkable, to say the least! But then, I have not seen many modern religious processions where every pious parishioner is partaking in the religious reveling by carrying a huge phallus around the neighborhood either. Yet this was commonplace practice in Greek religion. In the "Oxford Classical Dictionary", E. Mathews tells us that "While there was a natural tendency for desirable attributes to be chosen, it was not always the case, and it remains a matter of psychological curiosity why some forms where chosen, and even handed down within families: thus, "aisxros" 'ugly' forming "Aisxros", "Aisxra", "Aisxriwn", "Aisxrw"; "kopros" 'dung' forming "Kopriwv", "Kopria, "Kopris"; "simos" 'snub-nosed' forming "Simos", "Simulos", "Simiskos". I dare to say that he is probably wrong, since it is rare, if not impossible that a tradition happens for no reason, hidden or apparent. There is always an explanation; we simply have to look deeply in the undercurrents of it, to discover it. To the Greeks, dung was simply viewed as an integral part of the cycle of life. A natural byproduct of life, which only created a problem of handling. The myth of the fifth labor of Heracles is very telling. Having first killed with his bare hands the Nemea Lion, having eliminated through dagger and fire the Lernea Hydra, having caught unharmed the sacred Hind of Ceryneia and having captured alive the Erymanthean Boar, Heracles was now being asked by Eurystheus to do the humanly impossible: to clean the κόπρος / kopros the dunk out of the Augean Stables in one single day. It was such a huge task, that Heracles using brains and engineering as much as brute force to dig out channels to divert two rivers, was able to clean up years of accumulated cow excrement without even getting his hands dirty by it. Such was the effect this monumental task had on him, that having finished it, Heracles instituted the Olympic Games at the very site of his fifth labor (at Olympia, in the Peloponnese), as ancient legend tells us. The beginning of the first Olympiad marked for the Greeks the beginning of their collective calendar, in the same way Christians count everything from before BC and after AD today, or the founding of Rome was used for the Romans. The fact that such a task was tied to the most important religious festival of the Greeks should give us a powerful and clear hint that the Greeks did not seem to be bothered by this "kopros-related" beginning of this, their most important national religious festival. The photograph in the beginning of this article is from a metope of the temple of Zeus in Olympia, and it is showing Heracles working on his fifth labor, cleaning the kopros of Augeas, under the guidance of Athena. The existing epigraphical record of Hellenic inscriptions is full of mentions of females that were named Κοπρια / Kopria, and only one in its closest male equivalent, Κοπριανος / Koprianos. Here below are a few characteristic inscriptions: In the Macedonian city of Beroia we locate inscription I.Leukopetra 128, about a preteen girl named Kopria, that is being dedicated to the Great Mother of Gods: Μητρὶ Θεῶ<ν> κοράσιον ὀνόματι Κοπρίαν, ἐτῶν ∙ ιʹ ∙ ὃ λαβὼν ἐξ ἕμα- To the Mother of Gods a young girl named Kopria, years 10, which having taken from ema- A loving dedication by a husband to the memory of his deceased wife from Eordaia in Macedonia in on inscription EAM 131, which reads: Δάμαχος Κοπρίᾳ Ἀλεξάνδρου ἡρωίδι τῇ συνβίῳ ἐκ τῶν ἐκείνης μνήμης χάριν. Damachos to Kopria daughter of Alexandros, a hero lady, to his life's companion to the grace of the memories of her life From Thessaloniki, again in Macedonia, comes a simple inscription, IG X, 2 1 387: Κοπρία Πολυ- νείκης χαῖρε. Kopria, daughter of Poly nike Greetings Further west, in Sicily we find the funerary stela IG XIV 137 where in a very rare occurrence, as mentioned above) the name is being used in its masculine form, as a man's name, Koprianos: Κοπριανὸς ἐνθάδε κῖτε Koprianos lies here From Thebes, in Central Greece, comes inscription SEG 42:538 : Κοπρία Φιλήτῳ τῷ ἰδίῳ ἀνδρὶ μνίας χά- Kopria To Philitos her own husband in memory South of Thebes, in Athens, Attica we find inscription IG II² 12221 Μωμὼ Κοπρίᾳ τῇ θυγατρὶ μνήμης χάριν. Μomo to Kopria her daughter in memory's grace Having gone the full circle, we now return again to Hellenistic Egypt where in the museum of the city of Alexander, Aλεξανδρια / Alexandria / Al Iskendariya, we find inscription Breccia, Alexandria Mus. 359: Κοπρία (ἐτῶν) λ...ʹ Kopria (age) 3... To our amazement we see that the name Kopria, despite modern expectations to the opposite, was a rather wide spread name in the ancient Greek world. It was actually very popular in the fertile plains of Macedonia. To us, removed as we are from the ancient society by more than two thousand some years, this name sounds strange, to say the least, because of the connotation we ourselves bring onto it. The explanation, I think must lie elsewhere. Everything in life depends on how you decide to view things. In my opinion, the name Kopria, in the mind and the ears of the ancient Greeks did not as much bring the obviously undesirable connection of the foul smell and sight of kopros / dung, as the positive attributes of it. We need to forget, some of us, our city upbringing, and think for a moment as farmers, with cultivated fields, orchards and gardens, and this will bring us on the right track. An expression exists in modern Greek "από την κοπριά το ρόδο / apo tin kopria to rodo" which translates into "from the manure comes the rose". The expression refers to a child that grew up to become a good person, despite a deficient upbringing, coming from a "bad" family. This expression, I believe, can become the key to understanding the usage of the name Kopria among all ancient Greeks, and the Macedonians in particular. It vividly and clearly expresses what we must understand the Greeks saw in manure, in kopros : not the pile of smelly dung, that the city person sees in it, but the promise of a fertile field that the farmer reads into it. The ancient Greek word κόπρος / kopros, which incidentally has exactly the same meaning in modern Greek, is a direct derivative of the Indo-European root word *kokwr, of the same meaning : dung / manure. Like the huge erect phalluses at the religious processions of the ancient Greeks, kopros was also seen by them as a blessing to the fertility of the agricultural land. Until very recently, horse and cow dung was used not only as a source of excellent field and garden fertilizer (as it is still used today, despite its foul smell, even in the gardens of expensive homes, albeit now sold in colorful plastic bags that have photos of beautiful roses printed on them), but it was also saved and used in winter as a fuel to heat the home. It was even used as a very practical heat insulation, being spread on the exterior walls of the humble, unbaked-brick walls of the farmers' homes.  Today we cannot even begin to comprehend the mere idea of spreading animal excrement on the exterior walls of our homes, but in ancient times, and in fact up to recent memory, this was simply a practical fact of life, as it still is in less advanced parts of the modern world. This is why the name Kopria, literary meaning "of the manure" despite the impossible odds to us, was in fact to them a very normal name. It is a well documented fact that this was an immensely popular name with the ancient Greeks, as attested in the epigraphical record from Macedonia to Athens and from Egypt to Sicily. This therefore, should make us think in this direction. Since the name Κοπρία / Kopria, was being given as a name almost exclusively to female babies ( with only one rare exception from Sicily, that we were able to find in the epigraphical record, in similar male equivalent as Κοπριανός / Koprianos and the also the names Kόπρις / Kopris and Κοπρίων / Koprion, found in the LPGN : http://www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk/publications/vol3a/vol3a_names/v3amk_u.html), I believe that it must be seen as a family investment towards the good will of the fertility deities; an assurance for agricultural fecundity, a hope for wealth through fruitfulness and finally as a promise for familial growth through health and fertility of the female body. In fact it not very unusual that the name Κοπρος / Kopros and Κοπρια / Kopria appear also as toponyms in several places of the Greek world. There is the ancient municipality of Κοπρος / Kopros in Λαυρεωτικη / Laureotike, near the modern village of Legrena, in Αττικη / Attica. There is a small Aegean island called Κοπρια / Kopria, in the Cyclades, between Naxos, Keros, Koufonesia, Amorgos and Donoysa (Greece, Cyclades, Eparhia Naxou [coordinates: 36.9875 25.63833] (http://www.geonames.org/maps/google_36.988_25.638.html). There is a town square called Kopria in the island of Alonissos and a cape Kopria in Pelion, in Thessaly. Strabo / Στραβων the Geographer in his description of Sicily and the terrible double monster of Scylla and Kharybdis, he also speaks of a beach shore by the straits of Messina, between the tip of the boot of Italy and Sicily. It is close to the Sicilian Greek city of Tauromenion / Ταυρομενιον which in Greek means the city of the bulls, and the Italians now call it Taormina. The beach was named by the Sicilian Greeks Kopria. Despite the explanation for the name of Kopria beach that Strabo passes to us, I think that considering that it was next to the city of the bulls, we can already start guessing quite accurately how the beach got its name: "ἐντεῦθεν δὲ καὶ τὴν φυγὴν ἐποιήσατο ἐκπεσὼν ἐκ τῆς νήσου. δείκνυται δὲ καὶ ἡ Χάρυβδις μικρὸν πρὸ τῆς πόλεως ἐν τῶι πόρωι, βάθος ἐξαίσιον, εἰς ὃ αἱ παλίρροιαι τοῦ πορθμοῦ κατάγουσι φυσικῶς τὰ σκάφη τραχηλιζόμενα μετὰ συστροφῆς καὶ δίνης μεγάλης· καταποθέντων δὲ καὶ διαλυθέντων τὰ ναυάγια παρασύρεται πρὸς ἠιόνα τῆς Ταυρομενίας, ἣν καλοῦσιν ἀπὸ τοῦ συμπτώματος τούτου Κοπρίαν." "In the ship-channel, only a short distance off the city, is to be seen Kharybdis, a monstrous deep, into which the ships are easily drawn by the refluent currents of the strait and plunged prow-foremost along with a mighty eddying of the whirlpool; and when the ships are gulped down and broken to pieces, the wreckage is swept along to the Tauromenian shore, which, from this occurrence, is called Kopria." Στραβων Γεωγραφια 6.3.2 / Strabo, Geography 6.2.3 Finally there is a Κόπραινα / Kopraina beach by the city of Arta in 'Ηπειρος / Epeiros and a Kopria beach οn the island of Ρόδος / Rhodes. Beauty, someone could argue, is not just in the eye, but also in the ear of the beholder. Words are only vocalizations. They are meaningless sounds in themselves. It is for us to attach the meaning to them. Once a baby girl was born and the fertility-wishing name of Kopria was given to that girl, the girl was in turn giving new meaning to the word, like all babies bring new meaning to the name we sometimes randomly attach to them. The Artan boys and girls going with their parents to the "full of dung" beach shown above, might initially laugh at hearing the name, but they do love going to the beach and the name then becomes synonymous with the fun and play they enjoy and the beautiful childhood memories it brings to them later on. What´s in a name? that which we call a rose  By any other name would smell as sweet; tells us William Shakespeare (1564–1616) in Romeo and Juliet Act II, Scene II, 47-48. Yet, despite Shakespeare, who wrote his play some eighteen centuries too late for her, on a tombstone inscription belonging to a girl from Macedonia, we find traces of a naïve grievance of this girl for the name given to her by her parents: Οὔνομα μὲν Μακέταις ἐπιχώριον. οὔνεκα μεμφθή μηδέ ενί. Κοπρίαν μ' ὠνόμασαν γενέται. Kaibel, Epigr. Graeca 313 (also mentioned by G. Babiniotis) "The name itself is local to the Maketais" (note: Μακέταις / Maketais was another name for the Macedonians) "because of it the blame should go to no one" (μηδέ ενί = μηδενί). "Kopria I was named by my parents". So then, we realize that this would not have been this Macedonian girl's first name of choice, had she been given a voice on the matter. Yet she accepts it because it is traditional and "local with the Maketais", the Macedonians (Μακέταις ἐπιχώριον). But personal names are never a matter of personal choice: they are always given to us, as children, as a matter of tradition. Parents have their own reasons (tradition based, ideological or religious) for choosing names for their offspring. Professor Donski from Skopje has (not unwittingly) confused the ancient Greek name Kopria, with the Slavonic word for dill, the aromatic plant whose seeds are used to give the anisette taste to ouzo and other similar anise drinks. We comprehend his agony in trying to try to find some phonetic excuses to hold on from, and try to create imaginary connections with the ancient Greek past of the Macedonians, but we cannot allow him to get away with such an unscientific trick in support of Skopje's Slavomacedonian nationalism. The aromatic plant dill, which the Greeks call Anethos / Ἄνηθος or Aneson / Ἄνησον, appears in most Slavonic languages in a word that is similar sounding to Kopria, yet it comes from a completely different linguistic root. Dill in Bulgarian is kopur [копър], in Ukrainian krip [кріп], in Russian ukrop [укроп], in Slavomacedonian kopra [Копра] in Slovak kôpor, in Polish koper and in Czech kopr. Through association with the Slavs, it was also taken on by the Albanians [Kopër, Kopra] and the Yiddish speaking Jews of Eastern Europe [קאָפּער, קראָפּ, קריפּ, אוקראָפּ Koper, Krop, Krip, Ukrop ]. The Slavonic names for dill are all derived from a common Slavonic root *kapr´ = dill, which in turn is related to the Baltic-Lithuanian kvapas = smell, aroma and kvepia = fragrant. There is absolutely no relation that can be credibly established between the (attested 1500 years later) Slavonic name for dill, therefore, and the ancient Macedonian Greek name Kopria/Κοπρία. Note: My thanks to Soteria Tsimoura / Σωτηρία Τσιμούρα a graduate student of Media and Communications in Germany, for her invaluable assistance in the creation of this article and her tireless suggestions and corrections of this and many other manuscripts. M.B.

Macedonian names and makeDonski pseudo-linguistics: The case of the name Sitas

Balkan Illusion - phantasia archaica:

"...it is very interesting to note that many of the authentic ancient Macedonian words, according to their etymology and pronunciation, have a striking resemblance to the appropriate words used in the modern Macedonian language (and other so called "Slav"[sic] languages). " Sita. A name that is identical to the present day Macedonian adjective "sita" (eating to satisfaction). The male name Sitko is present in todays' Macedonian onomasticon." Quote taken from: "Similarities between ancient Macedonian and today's' Macedonian Culture (Linguistics and Onomastics)" by Aleksandar Donski, celebrity historian from FYROM.

Sitas/Σίτας - Sita/Σίτα

In the archaeological museum of Gloucester in England someone can stare at a curious funerary stele. It is a rough but beautiful carving of a Roman horseman in relief. His head is protected by a Roman helmet and he is holding an oval shield on his left hand. He is holding a spear on his right hand, attacking a local barbarian who has already fallen to the ground and is desperately making a last ditch effort to defend himself with his sword.

The Latin inscription at the bottom of the stele reads as follows:

RVFVS SITA EQVES CHO VI
TRACVM ANN XL STIP XXII
HEREDES EXS TEST F CVRAVE
H S E

Rufus Sita, Horseman of the Sixth Cohort
of Thracians; 40 years (old); paid (for) 22 (years);
His heirs, according to his will, had this made.
Here is the site (of his grave)

The stele gives us a wealth of information about the deceased soldier. His name was Rufus Sita. Rufus, his first name being Latin, was already a Roman citizen. His original name was Sita, but after joining the army and adopting the Latin name Rusus as his first name, the Thracian name Sita became his second, family name. He was a horseman of the VI / sixth Cohort of Thracians: Cohors Sextae Thracum equitata – The Sixth Cohort of Thracians – part mounted . He served 22 of his 40 years in the Roman army. He died in Britannia, far from his native Thrace, serving the Imperial Roman army as a cavalry man.

His heirs, dutiful to the Thracian religious legacy of the “Thracian horseman” (a recurrent theme of almost all Thracian funerary stelae) had Sita's image carved showing him as a knight. This image fused Sita’s imperial army military function as a Roman cavalry man with his native Thracian religious legacy as a Thracian horseman, fighting evil for the good of mankind. The only substitution is the desperately fighting British barbarian trampled underneath his horse, instead of the agriculturally destructive Boar that would have been the more proper Thracian imagery. Sitas the Roman is shown defeating the barbarian as Sitas the Thracian would be defeating the wild boar. He is defending the Pax Romana instead of the tree of life. In Thracian religious imagery the tree of life, with its chthonian snake hanging from the branches, is the symbol of the agricultural land and its produce and the wealth derived from it. The chthonian snake is the tree of life’s protector dragon.

The mythology of Sita’s beloved Thrace is thus merged and integrated with this soldier’s legacy as a Roman frontier defender. The docile chthonian snake entangled in the branches of the Thracian agricultural tree of life is fused with the people of the Roman Empire whose duty it is for Sitas to defend. The land of his native Thrace, after all, was an integral part of this same Roman Empire. The British barbarian who is viewed as the destructive force that endangers with his raids the well-being of the dutiful Roman citizenry and the wild boar whose raids on the fields of his native Thrace brought destruction to the fields and the agricultural wealth of the Thracian farmer were thus being defeated by Sitas. Sitas was in this imagery commissioned by his heirs openly identified with the Thracian Hero-Pyrmeroulas. Pyrmaroulas’s name is derived from pyros/πυρός, a Greek-Thracian isogloss meaning the wheat and barley seed.

Sitas was there to defend both. This was his realm. This was what he lived, fought and died for. He was a true Thracian horseman, a Hero/ Ήρως both in real life and in post-mortem legend.

The name Sitas is fairly common in Thracian onomastics. Aleksandar Donski claims that this is somehow a Slavomacedonian, a “Makedonski” name, but Sitas has no relation to the Modern Slavic inhabitants of FYROM, nor was it a name common to the Greek speaking Macedonians. It is definitely a Thracian name. In John Wilkes' book on The Illyrians, we read that: “The Illyrian component is markedly stronger in Dardania, including Das(s)ius, Scerviaedus and Andia, but Thracian names are also found, Sita and Nanea...”
Ancient Dardania is the same land that the Byzantine Greeks later called Kossyfopedion/Κοσσυφοπέδιον which the Slavs shortened to Kosovo and Metohia / Косово и Метохија, Μετόχια indicating lands belonging to Greek Orthodox monasteries. The Dardanian city of Scupi is modern Skopje, a city that, while Dardanian and Kossyphopedian by history and geography now strives to be recognized as “capital of a (misplaced and misnamed) Macedonia, a Slavonic Makedonija”.

John Wilkes informs us that Sitas is a Thracian name that appears in the epigraphic record of Illyria and more specifically of Dardania. The proximity of Dardania to Macedonia and the phonetics of the name are enough to confuse someone into thinking that this Greek-sounding name could possible be an ancient Macedonian name, but it is not.
Dio Cassius (Δίων ὁ Κάσσιος) a Greek historian (born 155AD at Nicaea of Bithynia in Asia Minor, died about 240AD) wrote an extensive history of the Roman nation. In the 51st book of his history, where Dio Cassius is speaking of the army of Marcus Crassus we read about a blind Thracian king named Sitas/Σιτας, king of the Thracian tribe of the Dentheletae:

“ἐπεὶ δὲ τόν τε Αἷμον ὑπερέβησαν καὶ τὴν Θρᾴκην τὴν Δενθελητῶν ἔνσπονδον αὐτοῖς οὖσαν κατέδραμον,
ἐνταῦθα ὁ Κράσσος τὸ μέν τι τῷ Σιτᾷ τῷ τῶν Δενθελητῶν βασιλεῖ τυφλῷ ὄντι ἀμύνων, τὸ δὲ δὴ πλεῖστον περὶ τῇ
Μακεδονίᾳ φοβηθεὶς ἀντεπῆλθέ σφισι, καὶ αὐτοὺς ἐκ τῆς προσόδου μόνης καταπλήξας ἐξέωσεν ἀμαχεὶ ἐκ τῆς χώρας.”

“and once they crossed over Haemus and overran the part of Thrace which belonged to the Dentheletae, and was in treaty with the Romans, here Crassus, in part to defend Sitas, the king of the Dentheleti, who was blind, but mostly out of fear for (an attack against) Macedonia, went out to meet them and throwing them into a panic just by his approach, he pushed them out of the country without even a battle.”
Δίων ο Κάσσιος Ρωμαικη Ιστορια, Βιβλιον 51-23-4 / Cassius Dio, Roman History, Book 51-23-4

Another Thracian name, similar sounding to Sitas but obviously related to it is Sitalkes. We know of several Thracians by this name, the most famous being Sitalkes son of Teres and father of Seuthes, all of them being great kings of the Odryssian Thracians. Sitalkes reigned between 431 - 424 BC. He is mentioned by the historian Thucycides. Sitalces was the son of Teres and King of the Thracians. Teres, the father of Sitalces, was the first to establish the great kingdom of the Odrysians on a scale quite unknown to the rest of Thrace, a large portion of the Thracians being independent.
Thucydides 2.29 - Athenian alliance with Sitalces (431 BC).

The Athenian comedy writer Aristophanes, in his comedy the Acharnians/Aχαρνεις mentions a Sitakes too:

(Κῆρυξ) προσίτω Θέωρος ὁ παρὰ Σιτάλκους.
(Herald)
Bring in Theoros, who has returned from the Court of Sitalces.
(Θέωρος) ὁδί.
(Theoros) (rising; he wears a Thracian costume.)
I am here.
(Δικαιόπολις) ἕτερος ἀλαζὼν οὗτος ἐσκηρύττεται.
(Dikaiopolis) Another humbug!
(Θέωρος) χρόνον μὲν οὐκ ἂν ἦμεν ἐν Θρᾴκῃ πολύν --
(Theoros) We should not have remained long in Thrace...
Αριστοφάνους Αχαρνείς / Aristophanes, Acharnians, 425 BC

Lastly, there is a Sitalkes (Σιτάλκης) taking part in Alexander's Asian expedition as (very tellingly) the leader of the Thracian light armed troops, Alexander's Thrakes akontistai/Θράκες ακοντισταί, the javelin men. He was a prince and most probably the son of the Thracian King Kersobleptes. This Sitalkes had been given a Government post in Macedonian occupied Media under Parmenion whom he assassinated under orders of Alexander. He was likewise also later himself executed on orders of Alexander, for brutal misgovernment, upon Alexander's return from India.

Since we are already close to India, let us leave the Thracian Kings Sitas and Sitalkes and the Τhracian prince Sitalkes who was in the service Alexander, and their native Thrace for a while and let us travel to the Orient even further to the far East, to lands Alexander the Great and his Macedonians never visited.
We hear that in distant Thailand, there is a Buddhist Goddess whose name in the Thai language is Nang Sida and in the Lao language is Nang Sanda. The same Goddess in nearby Malaysia is called Siti Dewi (Dewi means Goddess. The Latin word Deus-God, the Greek Dios/Διός, genitive form of Zeus and the Greek word Theos/Θεός-God as well as the words Divine and Deity in English are all derived from the same Indo-European root). Thai and Lao and Malay are not Indo-European languages of course. But nearby Northern India, where Buddhism started from speaks in Indo-European tongues, is. The ancient language of India was Sanskrit, one of the main pillars, along with Greek, Latin and Germanic, of modern Indo-European linguistic research.
Since Buddhism had its beginning in Hinduism, so we go searching for the Goddess Sita in India, and indeed we soon find her: Sita / सीता is the incarnation (avatara) of the Goddess Lakshmi who in turn is the Goddess of wealth, prosperity and generosity. We need to remember this point. Sita is also the wife of Rama, the legendary king of Ayodhya, an ancient Indian city still in existence, whose wealth and prosperity on the northern plains of ancient India was fabled and lusciously described in Ramayana, one of the main Hindu epics. Rama was in fact considered the seventh incarnation (avatar) of the supreme God Vishnu. Laxshmi decided to descend to earth as Sita, and to toil and endure the hard life so as to become an example to mankind by showing men and especially women that through hard work and virtue wealth and prosperity can be reached. This is why Sita is considered the purest prototype of the proper Hindu woman.

Sita as legend has it was found as a baby in the fields in a furrow in a ploughed field, so everyone assumed her to be the natural daughter of Bhudevi, the Mother Earth Goddess. In fact the original meaning the Goddess Sita's name in Sanskrit is “furrow”: the channel in the field produced by the slow pulling of the plough. It now becomes apparent that Sita is definitely an agricultural deity a deity of wealth that comes from ploughing the fields and the manual toil of agricultural activities. Sita / सीता is “someone of the furrow”, the deity “of a cultivated field”.
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The word “situs” in Latin indicates something or a land in neglect, land that is in need of cultivation. The word Σίτος / Sitos in both modern and ancient Greek means wheat, corn and grain in general. In modern Greek it is also called Στάρι / Stari or Σιτάρι / Sitari. Σιταγωγέω / Sitagogeo in ancient Greek meant the transporting of the grain from the fields And Σιταγωγός / Sitagogos was the specially modified grain transport ship. The word Σιτεύω / Siteuo in both modern and ancient Greek means to fatten the animals by supplying them with plenty of barley seeds and Σιτοβολώνας / Sitobolonas is the field that produces plenty of wheat. Thessaly, in Greek is called the Σιτοβολώνας / Sitobolonas of Greece, for its importance in wheat production that feeds the country. In Dorian Greek (the “northwest” variance of which was spoken in Epirus, Aetolia and Macedonia) Σιτάθην / Sitathen was equal to the Attic and Ionian Εσιτήθην / Esitethen which is the past tense of Σιτέω / Siteo which means to feed someone (original : with grain and wheat). The modern Slavo-macedonian word sita which means to eat to fulfillment, having no Slavic equivalent leads us to believe that (like thousands of other Greek words in this Slavic dialect that borders Greek speaking areas) is most certainly a loan word from the Greek noun Sitari / Grain-Weat and its derivative verb Sitepsa /Σίτεψα, meaning I am already full of food or I became fat with too much food.

A Greek name that is etymologically and semiologically distantly related to Sitas is found on an inscription from the island of Euboea, where among numerous other Greek names we also encounter the name Sitarchos/ Σίταρχος:

Regions : Aegean Islands, incl. Crete (IG XI-[XIII]) : Euboia (IG XII,9) , IG XII,9 245, Euboia — Eretria — early 3rd c. BC — cf. Addenda Ultima p.VII — cf. IG XII,supp.183,24
Σώστρατος Θέωνος Ζαρ(ηκόθεν)
Αἴσωπος Νήσωνος ἐγ Ν(—)
Εὐαγόρας Λυσιστράτου ἐγ Ν(—)
Φιλώνιχος Φιλήμονος Ζαρ(ηκόθεν)
Χαίριππος Χαιριδήμου Ζαρ(ηκόθεν)
Δ̣ίμων Βύβακος Στυρ(όθεν)
Σκύθης Παραμόνου ἐγ Νε(—)
Κλεόδημος Δαφνίωνος Στυ(ρόθεν)
Σίταρχος Θέωνος Ζαρ(ηκόθεν)
Sitarchos son of Theon, from the town of Zarekos

Sitarchos was originally a trade name describing the official who was entrusted with the duty of procuring the grain necessary to feed (προς σίτησιν/ pros sitesin) the city. His office was called Sitarchia/Σιταρχία as this inscription from Cyprus indicates:

SEG 20:244 SEG 20:243 SEG 20:245
Fragmentary petition addressed to Ptolemy VI or Ptolemy VIII by troops
stationed at Paphos. Fragment of a stele of fine white marble.
Kypros — Nea Paphos (Kato Pafos) — ca. 154 BC? — AJA 65 (1961) 100, 4
[— — ἀπολ]ε̣λ̣ε̣ι̣μ̣μ̣ένοι(?) Λ̣[ύκιοι(?) — — — — — —] the devastated Lycians
[— φιλαν]θρωπηθῆναι ἀπ̣[ὸ — — — — — — — — —] philanthropically assisted by
[— βασι]λικῆς δόσεως [— — — — — — — — — — —] royal donation
[— — — —]ω̣ν τὰς Σιταρχί[ας — — — — — — — — —] the Sitarchies

An equivalent officer in South Italian Greek of Magna Graecia / Μεγάλη Ελλάς would be called Sitagertes / Σιταγέρτης, as is attested in the following inscription:
IG XIV 645 Italy, incl. Magna Graecia:
...ἄλλαι συνθήκαι γεγράπται. ℎότι δέ κα μὴ πράξει ℎο ἀνℎελόμενος κὰτ τὰν συνθήκαν ἢ μὴ ἐν τοῖς χρόνοις τοῖς γεγραμμένοις, ℎυπόλογος ἐσσήται τοῖς πολιανόμοις καὶ τοῖς σιταγέρταις τοῖς ἐπὶ τῶ <ϝ>έτεος, καθὼς καὶ ἐν τᾶι ἄλλαι συνθήκαι γεγράπται...

...as written other treaties. Whatever responsibility the undertaker takes upon himself to complete according to the contract if he does not complete within the agreed time frames, he will be held accountable to the polianomoi (πολιανόμοις - the city law-officials) and to the sitagertai (σιταγέρταις - the city grain-officials) of that year as it is written in the related contracts...

In Macedonia, and more particularly in Paionia, we find the name Sita, on a double funerary inscription:

Regions : Northern Greece (IG X) : Macedonia , Spomenik 71 (1931) 74,174 , Spomenik 71 (1931) 75,175
Makedonia (Paionia) — Resava: Čakovec — date? — Dimitsas, He Makedonia 287 — cf. TIR K34,109 (prov.)
Γαΐᾳ Τίτου Βυρδί-
ων Σίτα τῇ συμ-
βίῳ καὶ ἑαυτῷ ζῶν.
Τίτῳ Βάκχα Νεικη-
σὼ τῷ ἀνδρὶ καὶ αὑτῇ
ζώσῃ.
To Gaia, daughter of Titos Byr-
dion son of Sitas to his life-
companion and to himself while still living.
To Titos son of Bacchas, Neike-
So to her husband and to herself
while still living.

The names are mixed. Gaia and Titos/Titus are clearly Latin names, which indicates that this inscription is dated to the Roman era. Byrdion / Βυρδίων, as K.G. Kourtides in his “Istoria tes Thrakes”/History of Thrace (Κ.Γ.Κουρτίδου, Ιστορία της Θράκης, 1932) tells us is a typical Thracian name, along with Βύζος/Byzos, Βίτων/Biton, Βίττος/Bittos, Δέβειθυς/Debeithys, Δίτύβιατος/Ditybiatos, Πιατοϋς/Piatoys, Βίθυος/Bythios, Βείθίβτράλης/Beithybtrales, etc).
Bacchas / Βάκχας and Nikeso / Νεικησὼ are Greek names. This leaves us Sitas, which, as we saw in the beginning of this article is also a Thracian name. therefore, while this inscription is found in Macedonia, it is obvious that we are encountering Hellenized and Romanized Thracians, quite possibly intermarried with Greek speaking Macedonians and Hellenized Paionians.
This is the only inscription that we have been able to locate that the name Sitas is documented in Macedonia.

Moving away from Macedonia now, we move to western China, where we encounter the curiously Greek-sounding Tocharian-B language. Tocharian was spoken by an extinct and yet to be indentified indo-European-speaking people that inhabited what is now Xinjiang, a land now inhabited mostly by Turkic speaking Uigurs and Han Chinese. In the literary documents of the Tocharians we find the word “sito” which meant “grain field”.

Looking deep into our common indo-European legacy, we find the common Indo-European root word *seh1i- whose original meaning was: “to sow”. This word seems to be the original root of all the Sitos-related cognates found in Greek, Latin, Tocharian, Sanskrit and Thracian. But this, as we will find out, is only the beginning.
The word sitos/σίτος means “wheat” in Greek. It is a very ancient word since it already appears documented as “si-to” in Linear B clay tablets of Mycenaean / Achaean Greek from the mid-second millennium BC. Sitos happens to be one of those rare words that are lost in the mist of the distant linguistic pre-history of the Eastern Mediterranean. The only other word which I can think of that is so widespread across diverse linguistic families, from Africa to Europe and the Middle East, is the word for “cat”, which also transcends linguistic family barriers, possibly due to its Egyptian origin.

The Greek “sitos” for wheat appears as an isogloss “zitu” in Basque (the only local
non Indo-European language of the European continent) and it means “cereal”. It also appears as “zid” in ancient Sumerian, a very ancient Semitic language of Mesopotamia, where it means “wheat flower”. The word for “wheat” or “corn” in ancient Egyptian is “sw’t”. In most Slavonic languages zito/ Житo means cereal (Russian, Bulgarian, Serbocroatian, Slovenian and Slavomakedonski among other languages and dialects. Сито/Sito means “sieve” in Russian and Serbian, and it is used mostly to describe the flower strainer used for cleaning up the flower from the grains, so it is related to sitos and to zito. In Greek an almost identical isogloss exists: sita/σήτα, meaning the strainer net, obviously related etymologically to the wheat grain. The white (wheat ) bread is called Sitnyj chleb / ситный хлеб in Russian, an obvious isogloss of sitos/σίτος and zito/Житo.

Aleksandar Donski is trying to convince us that “according to etymology and pronunciation” Sitas is a “name that is identical to the present day Macedonian adjective "sita" (eating to satisfaction).” But if we look into Russian, we find out that an almost identical and for sure related word exists in Russian too: Ситост/Sitost, eating to fulfillment. Сытный / Sitnij means ritchly nourishing in Russian. Are the Russian Makedonci too?

If you ask some delusional pseudo-macedonians in Skopje, professor Boshevski of the so called Macedonian Academy of the Arts and Sciences of Skopje, among others, they will answer in the affirmative: all the Slavs, the pseudomacedonians claim, are indeed Makedonci. If we are to retain some semblance of seriousness though, we will have to admit that sita and sitost and sitnij are Slavic isoglosses. Therefore, if we also remember the Greek verb siteuo, then the picture becomes very cleare: Since wheat became domesticated and was first cultivated somewhere around the middle east, deep in our human prehistory, almost ten thousand years ago, and since the early Indo-Europeans learned the trade of cultivation from the early inhabitants of Mesopotamia and Anatolia it becomes explainable why the word for wheat is so common to so many linguistically diverse people such as Egyptians, Greeks, Tocharians, Slavs, Basques and Sumerians, among others, all being related through the use of this rich and nutritious cereal.
Let us then return to the ancient Thracians. The word “Siros” meant the place where someone stores the grain, in the Thracian language, the granary.
( http://indoeuro.bizland.com/project/glossary/thra.html ).

The name of my hometown Serres / Σέρρες, an ancient city dominating the agriculturally fertile basin of Strymon / Στρυμών river in Central-Eastern Macedonia of northern Greece, whose preΗellenic name is Sirris / Σίρρις, according to Herodotus, is probably related to the Thracian word Siros, the granery. The name of a village in the nearby province of Drama, Sitagroi/Σιταγροί, the “Wheat fields”, shows that such a name would not be unusual. Sitagroi is a very ancient village after all, about 7000 years old: Prehistoric Sitagroi: Excavations in Northeast Greece, Ernestine S. Elster, Colin Renfrew, 1968-1970, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2004.06.21. Volume 2: The Final Report. Monumenta Archaeologia, 20. Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, 2003. ( http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2004/2004-06-21.html ).

Sitas, we can now say with a high degree of certainty, was a Thracian name, which (while distantly connected as a word to the common -for many Indo-European and not only languages - word for the wheat grain) was nevertheless unrelated as a name to Greek, not necessarily derived from it. No stone inscription or other literary documentation exists that can tie this name to the Hellenic-speaking ancient Macedonians. On the other hand Sitas is most definitely not a Slavic name either. It is too ancient a name to be even considered as a south Slavic name. The Slavs did not arrive into the lower Balkans until the 7th century AD, several hundred years after the first attestation of this name by Thucydides and long after the Thracians had lost their linguistic and ethnic identity. The name Sitas, therefore (as well as the related Sitalces/Sitalkes and Sitalkas/Sitalcas), is most definitely and clearly a Thracian (Tracum, as the Rufus Sitas inscription reminds us) name whose original meaning was derived from the word for wheat-grain and the wealth that is derived from its cultivation.