Том 84, № 1 (2024)

The article analyses a set of Classical evidence reflecting the Egyptian conquest of Bactria or its attempt (Diod. I. 46–47; Tac. Ann. II. 60. 3; Strabo XVII. 1. 46), a statement of Manetho of Sebennytos on the vast conquests of king Sethos-Ramesses (I) (Manetho. Frg. 50 = Ios. C. Ap. I. 15. § 98–102), and the text of the hieroglyphic Bentresh Stela telling about the relations of Egypt under a king Ramesses with a distant Asiatic land of Bakhtan. These sources reflect the Theban tradition based on the memories of Egyptian expansion under Dynasty XIX, i. e. the conquests of Sethy I, who successfully restored the sphere of Egyptian hegemony in Asia after the Hittite assault at the end of Dynasty XVIII (Manetho’s Sethos-Ramesses (I)), and the wars of Ramesses II, who failed to continue that effort and had to conclude a compromise peace with the Hittites (Osymandias of Hecataeus of Abdera and Diodorus, Ramesses of the Bentresh Stela). The images of these kings were partially intermingled (Tacitus’ king Ramesses), and probably involved the recollections of the whole New Kingdom expansion in Asia (under both Dynasty XVIII and XIX). The historical Hittite Kingdom happened to be replaced in this tradition with Bactria due not only to the erosion of its memory and the transformation of its denotation but also to the Egyptian notion that the adversary of Egypt at that stage of history was a great and a very distant realm, which remained outside of the Asiatic empires of the first millennium B.C. for a long time.

The article is devoted to the classical monument of ancient Indian linguistics – Patañjali’s commentary on the Sanskrit grammar by Pāṇini. The author is inclined to date Pāṇini to the turn of the 4^th–3^rd centuries BC. Frequently cited arguments for dating Patañjali to the mid-second century BC do not seem convincing. The mention of the campaign of the Graeco-Bactrian king in the Ganges valley is nothing more than a terminus post quem. There is а reason to think that Mahābhāṣya was written no earlier than the beginning of the Common Era. Particular attention in the article is paid to the interpretation of the passage in which the Mauryan dynasty is mentioned. The words about the Mauryas, who make images of the gods for the purpose of profit, indicate Patañjali’s familiarity with the cycle of legends about Cāṇakya and Candragupta if not with the literary tradition reflected in the Arthaśāstra.

Based on public data from the Google Earth, the article shows that the largest ancient land-division system in the Northern Black Sea region in antiquity was in the Lower Dnieper area. The land division observed there is very close in its external features to the land division which has long been known in the Olbia region. In general, it can be attributed to the non-linear land division of the Taman-Olbian type. The article substantiates the assumption that land division in the Lower Dnieper region was associated with farming which was carried out by the inhabitants of the Scythian settlements of the fourth – the first third of the third century BC. Together with the region of Olbia the Lower Dnieper area formed a dual centre of the same type of land division with a significant agricultural potential. Another such dual centre of a land-division type but on a smaller scale was the Bosporus together with the region of Middle Kuban.

In recent years increased attention had been focused on the miniature epic known as the ‘Latin Iliad’. Close investigation of its relationship to Virgil’s epic ‘Aeneid’ and to the lyric poetry of Horace will illustrate that the author of the Ilias Latina composed a work reflective of the Neronian Age concern with the relationship between Rome and Troy, and with the problem of showing clemency to a defeated enemy. The second of these topics is of particular relevance in light of Seneca and his De Ira and De Clementia.

The paper presents a hoard of 46 Seleucid bronze coins found in 2021 in the south of the Republic of Dagestan (Russia). The core of this complex consists of 43 bronze coins of Antiochus IV, minted at Antioch on the Orontes. All of them belong to the so-called ‘Egyptianizing’ series, produced in the period from autumn 169 to autumn 168 BC. In addition to these coins, the hoard includes two coins of Antiochus IV from Seleucia on the Tigris. A unique feature of this hoard is the presence of a coin of Seleucid usurper Timarchos, probably issued in 162–160 BC. Most likely, the hoard was formed outside of Caucasian Albania and reflects the composition of the coin circulation in the eastern regions of the Seleucid kingdom in the second half of the second century BC.

This paper is the first publication of six Ancient Egyptian ostraca from the State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (I,1b 334, 340, 344, 347, 348, 362) with fragments of The Teaching of Khety, also known as The Satire of the Trades. The ostraca used to belong to the collection of the Russian Egyptologist Vladimir S. Golenischeff. They date from the 19^th– 20^th Dynasty and probably originate from Deir el-Medina.

The article focuses on the early scholarship of the Soviet Egyptologist Mikhail Korostovtsev (1900–1980), who dedicated himself to historical research only in the second part of his life. His academic works prior to the Second World War were not numerous, but his dissertation about Egyptian slavery during the 18^th dynasty became an important text marking a new stage in the Soviet historiography of antiquity because the theory of the ‘slave-owning society’ was considered to be the sign of ‘true’ Marxism-Leninism. Korostovtsev’s understanding of the social structure of the Ancient Near East was substantially influenced by his supervisor Vasiliy Struve, but Korostovtsev was not merely a disciple of Struve, for his own work with ancient sources and his conclusions show much higher accuracy than Struve’s. Moreover, he found no evidence for a large number of slaves during the 18^th dynasty, neither among the captive slaves nor among the private ones, except for a few examples that do not prove a widespread distribution of slavery. In this respect we could think of Korostovtsev as of a disciple of Yuri Perepyolkin, because in the same years he defended the ideas of Perepyolkin in his letters to Abram Ranovich: according to Korostovtsev, Marxist theory would become fruitless if it rushed to generalizations without proper verification by facts. In his own research, however, Korostovtsev was only balancing between the asserted generalizations about slavery in ancient Egypt and the actual evidence for the relatively modest spread of slavery during the 18^th dynasty.