Vol 83, No 2 (2023)

The text Dendara IX, 152.15 mentions two epithets of Horus of Behdet: km nHH ‘end of eternity’ and n mrH=f ‘immortal’, where the category of ‘eternity’ is opposed to ‘immortality’. The present study contains a lexicographical and contextual review of the sources on the divine epithet km nHH ‘end of eternity’. The commentary aims to trace the evolution of forms and features of the verbal formula r km nHH / r km Dt ‘until eternity ends (until the end of eternity)’ up to its transformation into a theological category. The nominal form km nHH ‘end of eternity’ is attested only in Dendara IX, 152.15 and Edfou VII, 270.1. These texts for the first time identify the god with the beginning and the end of eternity, although he is usually characterized as ‘the beginning and the end’ of the gods. In addition, the term km ‘total’ in the title km nHH ‘end of eternity’ shows the god not just as an abstract limit of eternity, but as a force that destroys eternity as a negative element. The history of the title km nHH ‘end of eternity’ is an example of transformation of a feature of mythological rhetoric into a theological concept that opposes time to space of eternal life.

The Byzantine lexicon Suda in one of its entries mentions Simonides of Ceos, a historian and genealogist, who was, according to this sole testimony about him, a grandson of the lyric poet of the same name and lived in the fifth century BC, before the Peloponnesian War. This writer is usually believed to be a real person. F. Jacoby in the Fragmente der griechischen Historiker ascribes to him seven fragments, two with certainty and five as ‘questionable and doubtful’. R. Fowler in the Early Greek Mythography considers Simonides the grandson to be the author of only two fragments, but still does not deny his historicity, although he agrees that there are some incongruities in the evidence (one of the fragments is of Euhemeristic character, in another fragment peacocks appear as poultry – things that are more usual in the Hellenistic period). The article analyzes all seven fragments and makes an attempt to prove that the fifth century BC mythographer Simonides, the poet’s grandson, never existed; some of the fragments ascribed to him by Jacoby should be attributed to the lyricist, while others – to the littleknown Hellenistic author Simonides the Younger (whose grandfather of course could not be the poet) mentioned in Pliny’s Natural History. Some other examples of abundant gross errors in Suda’s entries on early Greek historians are also cited in the article.

The article is devoted to the history of rural area (territorium) of the cities of Roman Hispania of the fifth ‒ seventh centuries AD with a special attention to the evolution of the terminology and to the continuity of social institutions formed in the system of ancient municipal communities. It is emphasized that the destructive processes of the fifth – seventh centuries and the disappearance of the main municipal institutions (curiae, comitia, magistraсies) did not touch the territorium. In the situation of replacement of the Roman municipal community by the ecclesiastical community the territorium preserved its ancient configuration, administrative functions and the forms of economic and social life, including the forms of space development, land property organization and meetings (conventus) of the rural population (vicini). The activity of these conventus was a natural consequence of the municipal collectivism, which requires that the decision-making process had to be done publicly (publice). The spread of Christianity with its collectivistic values became an additional factor which increased this tendency. The Barbarian settlement in the fifth century did not change the situation, since the Barbarians fitted into the Late Roman system of landowning and into the social organization of Roman Hispania like a new military elite.

This is a continuation of the publication of ancient and Byzantine coins from the collection of the well-known Chelyabinsk archaeologist Nikolay Minko (1880–1920), stored in the State Historical Museum of the Southern Urals (Chelyabinsk). This significant museum collection (more than 850 coins, mostly silver) has not been previously published. The article presents 53 coins of the Bosporan Kingdom, the Late Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire, as well as a glass gem found by N. Minko in Crimea. Of particular interest is the unique hoard of silver coins of Alexius Ι Comnenus. All these coins were collected by N. Minko in Feodosia and Sevastopol, in the area of which the archaeologist conducted excavations in 1909–1911.This material expands the corpus of ancient and Byzantine coins in the collections of Russian museums.

There are two ostracons with the Hymn to the Nile flood among Golenischeff’s ostraca stored in the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (I,1b 327, 355). One of them, ostracon I,1b 327 (Golenischeff Number 4470), has been known since long.  Here we present its quality photograph, infrared photograph, digital image enhancement with DStretch programm, a corrected hieroglyphic transcription and a Russian translation. The second ostracon I,1b 327 (Golenischeff Number 5528), recently attributed in 2022, contains three lines of the same Hymn.

The article discusses the experience of establishing the periods of ancient history and developing its general scheme in Russian and Soviet research of the twentieth century till the 1980s. The development of such schemes was not considered as a specific task in the pre-revolutionary scholarship. In the 1930s–1950s there was an intention to tie the periods established traditionally in scholarship with the stages of the development of slavery; the formation of state at the beginning of antiquity was seen as a result of splitting the society into antagonistic classes, and the end of antiquity was ascribed the nature of a revolution. In the 1950s–1960s the evolution of ancient communities in their various forms was taken as a determining factor for the flow of ancient history and defining its stages; the influence of the ‘revolution of the slaves’ theory was eliminated. In the Late Soviet period the views of Igor Diakonoff on the development and the periodisation of ancient history, which matched well with the schemes developed by historians of ancient Greece and Rome, became particularly important.