Book chapter
The Northern Black Sea Region in the “Geography” of Strabo
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 abstract from a paper tells about the views of Strabo on politics and their influence on his depiction of the Bosporan history.
The collection of the articles publishrd in honor of prof.I.E.Surikov
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 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”).