Albanopolis
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Albanopolis (Albanian: Albanopolis; Ancient Greek: Ἀλβανόπολις, romanized: Albanópolis) was a city of the Albanoi, an Illyrian tribe. Albanopolis has been located by various scholars at the modern-day village of Zgërdhesh or at Krujë. The ancient city may correspond with later mentions of the settlement called Arbanon and Albanon during the Middle Ages, although it is not certain this was the same place. The city appears in the literature in 150 AD, almost 300 years after Roman conquest of the region.
The city and its tribe gave their name to modern Albania.
Attestation
The toponym Albanopolis has been found on a funeral inscription in Gorno Sonje, near the city of Skopje (ancient Scupi), present-day North Macedonia. It was discovered in 1931 by Nikola Vulić and its text was analyzed and published in 1982 by Borka Dragojević-Josifovska. The inscription in Latin reads "POSIS MESTYLU F[ILIUS] FL[AVIA] DELVS MVCATI F[ILIA] DOM[O] ALBANOP[OLI] IPSA DELVS". It is translated as "Posis Mestylu, son of Flavia, daughter of Delus Mucati, who comes from Albanopolis". It dates to the end of the 1st century or beginning of the 2nd century AD.
Ptolemy (100-170 AD) is the only author who mentions Albanopolis. He mentions it in the third book of Geographia as a city of a tribe he refers to as the Albanoi.
Name
The toponym Albanopolis is composed of "Albanoi", a tribe name, and "polis", a Greek word meaning "city, castle, fortification". Hasan Ceka argued that the suffix "polis" was added at a later date by copyists of Ptolemy's work. Johann Georg von Hahn noted that in some manuscripts the city is mentioned as "Albanos polis" or "Albanos". Ancient ethnic names are rarely found in combination with "polis".
The ethnonym Albanoi assumed a particular importance in the ethnogensis of the Albanians, as it became their endonym, under circumstances that are no longer recognizable.
Location
The Austrian diplomat Johann Georg von Hahn was the first to identify Albanopolis with Zgërdhesh, an archaeological site in the western foothills of Mount Krujë. During his research in the area, he did not find other ruins which could be linked with the ancient city. Aurel Plasari finds Zgërdhesh as the most convincing location, and argues that the Albanoi were a people who lived in the region between Mat and Shkumbin. Plasari argues that some statements made in Geographia did not necessarily describe the contemporary world of Ptolemy, because he relied on the much older writings of Ionic and Hellenic geographers. As such, the Albanoi could be a reflection of older accounts rather than a reality of the 2nd century AD.
However, archaeologists such as Thomas Maurer and Elvana Metalla have proposed that Zgërdhesh cannot be identified with Albanopolis. According to their findings, Zgërdhesh flourished during the Hellenistic period and was largely abandoned during the Roman imperial period. Albanopolis, on the other hand, is believed to have become a prominent settlement during the earlier phases of the Roman imperial period. Instead, Maurer and Metalla propose that Albanopolis was located to the east; in the river valleys of the Black Drin or the Upper Vardar in the Šar Mountains.
