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Кольцо вокруг Египта: изоляционистские мотивы в "Книге победы над Сетом" и в Стеле сатрапа
The Ring Around Egypt: Isolationist Motives in the Book of Victory over Seth and in the Satrap Stela
Ladynin Ivan A., Karlova Ksenia F.
The article considers a fragment of the so-called Book of Victory over Seth (a text of the fourth century B.C. aimed at the magical defeat of the god Seth and, respectively, Egypt’s foreign foes). This fragment (Urk. VI. 29. 8–15) seems to reflect the notion that the foreign lands around Egypt (their ‘circle’, dbn) were the habitation of the ‘dead’ (mwt) Seth and a dangerous and totally strange world. Any foreign expansion had therefore no value. This notion correlates well with the concept of the Satrap Stela of 311 B.C. presenting the wars of the Satrap Ptolemy as defensive and juxtaposing Egypt with all other countries, with similar allusions to the image of Seth. Probably, the isolationist concept of both texts was largely the same and was intended to explain Egypt’s inability under Dynasty XXX and later under the Satrap Ptolemy to eliminate, respectively, the menace from Persians and from Antigonus and Demetrius.