«Мировые державы» Ближнего и Среднего Востока I тыс. до н.э. в теоретических схемах советской и постсоветской историографии древности

Вестник Пермского университета. Серия: История. 2021. № 1. С. 118–128.

Ladynin I. A.

A feature of the Near Eastern history observed still in antiquity and in the Middle Age in the First Millennium B.C. is the emergence of vast centralized interregional states succeeding one another. The French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero showed in the late 19th century that this was a gradual stage in the integration of the microregion (following the interaction between the superpowers of the Late Вronze Age), and this view was shared by the Russian pre-revolutionary scholars N. Kareev and B. Turaev. The Soviet research could not ignore the phenomenon but has to put it in the context of the Marxist categories of the socio-economic “basis” and the political “superstructure”; oddly, an approach to the problem in 1930-1950s was affected by Stalin’s own words about the transience of “Cyrus’ and Alexander’s empires”. However, starting with the work at the multivolume World History in the mid-1950s the Near Eastern empires were treated as an important, moreover, a diagnostic feature of the second part of antiquity following the transition to the Iron Age. The paramount role in formulating this point belonged to Igor Diakonoff and his colleagues, who explained the emergence of the empires by the processes inside the oldest societies of the region (their alleged “crisis” in the late Second Millennium B.C.) and by the need to integrate the region of its center (irrigational societies) and periphery (regions supplying raw materials). The post-Soviet research developed the theme rather meagerly. A factor strangely overlooked in the forwarded schemes is the rapid economic development of the Near Eastern societies having entered the Iron Age, which backed a demand for their firm political integration

Keywords: Ближний Восток, antiquity, soviet historiography, империи, отечественная историография, Post-Soviet Historiography, древность, Ancient Near East, global history of empires