socio-economic literature for parts of our‘super-region’reflects an
impasse in attempts to understand the relationship between the holders
of power and the territories in their possession. A look at territorial
divisions, as we will see later below, provides one way of getting around
this impasse.
DESCRIBING A REGION—THE ANCIENT
GEOGRAPHY OF THE EAST BALKANS
Another way in which modern historiography has sought to distance and
polarize the different parts of the east Balkan–north Aegean economic
region has been to define Thracian royal practices in terms of Persian
ones, whilst approximating Macedonian practices to those of the wider
Greek world.^61 There are methodological as well as historical difficulties
with this approach. Whilst it is perfectly legitimate to consider whether
long-term historical connections with neighbouring cultural groups on
the Asiatic side of the Bosporus had an impact on the organization and
articulation of socio-economic practices on the European side, whether
or not a relatively small kingdom, namely Odrysian Thrace, with a short
institutional history, can legitimately be compared with a large territorial
entity, the Achaemenid kingdom, whose institutional roots lie as much
in centuries-old Babylonian and Assyrian practices as they do in the
more recent innovations of the Achaemenid kings themselves, is a
different kind of argument altogether. The trend of Macedonian histori-
ography has been to compare Macedonian and Greek institutions.
Whilst many Macedonian practices can be assimilated comfortably
with Greek traditions (and recent research has done a great deal to
illuminate these common traditions), there has been less scholarly
enthusiasm to explore what made Macedonia regionally distinctive. It
is even less clear why Thrace, a culturally related and neighbouring area,
should be assumed to have been organized in ways that were structurally
and politically fundamentally different from those of Macedonia, despite
the shared experience of the Greco-Persian Wars. The ephemeral ambi-
tions of Persia in southern Europe during thefirst three decades of the
fifth centurybcdeserve a closer look if we are to evaluate the nature of
the Persian legacy in economic terms.
(^61) Hatzopoulos 2002; Zournatzi 2000; for different nuances on Thracian and Persian
tribute, Stronach and Zournatzi 2002.
Regionalism and regional economies 217