Book
The Periphery of the Classical World in Ancient Geography and Cartography
The chapter describes the peculiarities of the creative method of Strabo and tells about the possibilities and perspectives of the use of his description of the Black Sea region as a source of historical knowledge.
The chapter describes the peculiarities of the creative method of Strabo and tells about the possibilities and perspectives of the use of his description of the Black Sea region as a source of historical knowledge.
The article considers the reflection of the Egyptian military exploits of the New Kingdom perceived as reaching the boundaries marked with great rivers in the Classical historiography.
The edition is a collection of conference reports, held by the Russian Society of Classical Studies in cooperation with the Scientific and Educational Centre for Classical Studies at Yaroslavl Demidov State University with the financial support of the Russian Foundation for Basic Research (project 18-09-20043). The collection includes reports of thematic plenary sessions: 1. Ancient civilizations of the East and the West: common, special, contacts. 2. Real sources of the study of ancient societies: finds, collections, interpretations. 3. The ancient Greek polis: economy, power, political leadership. 4. Legal regulation in ancient societies. 5. The Roman state of the era of the Republic and the Principate: power and its carriers. 6. Romans, Italic peoples, provincials, barbarians: „own“, „neighbors“, „others“. 7. The man of ancient society: worldview, value system, interpersonal communication, leisure. 8. Christianity: society, ideologues, believers. 9. Classical historians: society and scientist.
The aim of the paper is to propose an interpretation of the concept backing Manetho’s treatise on Egyptian history (first half of the 3rd century B.C.). The present, starting, part of the article is intended to give necessary general observations on the Egyptian ideas of the world’s evolution (including the absence of cardinal difference between the mythological time and the real history) and its cycles, about the large historical periods reflected in the Egyptian narrative tradition (in the Royal Canon of Turin, in the literary texts reflecting the events of the First Intermediate Period etc.). Reasons are given to consider the evidence of the Classical authors (especially Josephus Flavius) and the Christian chronographers connected with the name of Manetho authentic to his original work.
The paper analyzes the underexplored aspects of the development of the Russian geographical tradition, especially the spatial dimensions of the production of geographical knowledge. It explores the debates among Russian geographers, statisticians, ecologists, and economists in the context of their cooperative involvement in the regional cadastral surveys and in other government-sponsored projects. The paper argues that the distinctive Russian focus on regionalization has been a product of the more or less explicit admission by the elites of a continental empire that their mastery over space cannot be achieved by means of eradicating difference or by subsuming it under the binary distinction between the metropole and the periphery. Instead, Russian authorities and intellectuals had continually to negotiate and renegotiate the strategies of rationalizing and controlling the social and natural inner boundaries within the empire's space, and this resulted in conflicting projects of regionalization.
The collection of the articles publishrd in honor of prof.I.E.Surikov
The article deals with an important problem of the world and Russian Egyptology, i.e. with the interpretation of a statement by the Alexandrian scientist of the 4th-5th centuries A.D. Theon on an era “after Menophris” (ἀπὸ Μενόφρεως) allegedly started at the beginning of the “Sothic period” in 1322/1 B.C. The first part of the article analyses the polemic on the identification of the name *Μενόφρις with a specific Ancient Egyptian royal name, with a special attention towards the positions of the Russian Soviet Egyptologists V.V. Struve and O.D. Berlev. The former one forwarded in 1920s was embedded in the world scholarship and contained a number of errors, which remained unnoticed due to a decline of the scholarly criticism at the period. On the contrary, Berlev’s position (1999) was totally original and in fact trail-blazing for the ultimate solution of the problem. The second part of the article proposes a development of Berlev’s position. The epithet “Memphite” (*Mn-nfry) that backed the name *Μενόφρις and was originally applied to Zoser, the inaugurator of the “Sothic calendar”, could be transferred on an image of a great king that reigned in Egypt after the catastrophe of the Amarna time. This king could be considered the founder of the “Memphite time” in Egyptian history, the creator of the “Sothic’ calendar” and respectively the contemporary of the start of a “Sothic period” (Theon’s “Menophris’ era”).