Early Antiquity

By I. M. Diakonoff

The internationally renowned Assyriologist and linguist I.
M. Diakonoff has gathered the work of Soviet historians in
this survey of the earliest history of the ancient Near East,
Central Asia, India, and China. Diakonoff and his
colleagues, nearly all working within the general Marxist
historiographic tradition, offer a comprehensive, accessible
synthesis of historical knowledge from the beginnings of
agriculture through the advent of the Iron Age and the Greek
colonization in the Mediterranean and the Black Sea areas.

Besides discussing features of Soviet historical
scholarship of the ancient world, the essays treat the
history of early Mesopotamia and the course of Pharaonic
Egyptian civilization and developments in ancient India and
China from the Bronze Age into the first millennium B.C.
Additional chapters are concerned with the early history of
Syria, Phoenicia, and Palestine, the Hittite civilization,
the Creto-Mycenaean world, Homeric Greece, and the Phoenician
and Greek colonization.

This volume offers a unified perspective on early
antiquity, focusing on the economic and social relations of
production. Of immense value to specialists, the book will
also appeal to general readers.

I. M. Diakonoff is a senior research scholar of ancient
history at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Leningrad
Academy of Sciences. Philip L. Kohl is professor of
anthropology at Wellesley College.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jun 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226144672

Book preview

I. M. DIAKONOFF is a senior research scholar of ancient history at the Institute of Oriental Studies, Leningrad Academy of Sciences.

PHILIP L. KOHL is professor of anthropology at Wellesley College.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 1991 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 1991

Printed in the United States of America

00 99 98 97 96 95 94 93 92 91   5 4 3 2 1

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-14467-2 (e-book)

Originally published as Istoriya Drevnego Mira, volume 1: Rannyaya Drevnost’, revised edition. © 1982, 1989 Chief Division of Eastern Literature, Nauka Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

drevnego mira.   1, drevnost’. English

    Early antiquity / I. M. Diakonoff, volume editor ; Philip L. Kohl, project editor.

        p.      cm.

    Translation of: drevnego mira.   1. drevnost’.

    Includes index.

    ISBN 0-226-14465-8

    1. History, Ancient.   I. , Igor’ Mikhaǐlovich.   II. Title.

D57.I88 1991

930—dc20

90-24148

CIP

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Early Antiquity

I. M. Diakonoff

Volume Editor

Philip L. Kohl

Project Editor

Translated by Alexander Kirjanov

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Contents

Foreword by Philip L. Kohl

Introduction by the Editorial Board

1 General Outline of the First Period of the History of the Ancient World and the Problem of the Ways of Development

I. M. DIAKONOFF

2 The City-States of Sumer

I. M. DIAKONOFF

3 Early Despotisms in Mesopotamia

I. M. DIAKONOFF

4 The Old Babylonian Period of Mesopotamian History

N. V. KOZYREVA

5 Sumerian Culture

V. K. AFANASIEVA

6 The Predynastic Period and the Early and the Old Kingdoms in Egypt

I. V. VINOGRADOV

7 The Middle Kingdom of Egypt and the Hyksos Invasion

I. V. VINOGRADOV

8 The New Kingdom of Egypt

I. V. VINOGRADOV

9 The Culture of Ancient Egypt

I. A. LAPIS

10 The First States in India and the Pre-Urban Cultures of Central Asia and Iran

G. F. IL’YIN and I. M. DIAKONOFF

11 Asshur, Mitanni, and Arrapkhe

N.B. JANKOWSKA

12 Mesopotamia in the Sixteenth to Eleventh Centuries B.C.

V. A. JAKOBSON

13 The Hittite Kingdom

G. G. GIORGADZE

14 Syria, Phoenicia, and Palestine in the Third and Second Millennia B.C.

I. M. DIAKONOFF

15 The World of Crete and Mycenae

YU. V. ANDREYEV

16 Greece of the Eleventh to Ninth Centuries B.C. in the Homeric Epics

YU. V. ANDREYEV

17 Phoenician and Greek Colonization

YU. B. TSIRKIN

18 India, Central Asia, and Iran in the First Half of the First Millennium B.C.

G. F. IL’YIN AND I. M. DIAKONOFF

19 The First States in China

T. V. STEPUGINA

20 China in the First Half of the First Millennium B.C.

T. V. STEPUGINA

Notes

Maps

Index

Foreword

PHILIP L. KOHL

On the English translation

The organization and nature of this book, Early Antiquity, and its conceptual relation to the two remaining volumes in the three-volume Soviet study on The History of the Ancient World are discussed in the Introduction. This Foreword explains some difficulties associated with the English translation of this work and tries to familiarize its English-reading audience with certain characteristics of Soviet Marxist historiography on antiquity. First, a brief description of the history of the translation is required.

I first learned of the three-volume study The History of the Ancient World while visiting Leningrad in fall 1983 as a member of an American delegation of archaeologists to the Soviet Union. Dr. I. M. Diakonoff of the Leningrad Branch of the Oriental Institute of the USSR, Accademy of Sciences, provided the delegation with a single copy of the first edition of the work and suggested that it would be worthwhile to translate this recent synthesis of his and, primarily, fellow Leningrad colleagues’ historical studies of the ancient world. This single copy of the limited first edition ended up gathering dust in my library in Wellesley, dutifully having been set aside in my To Do file on collaborative research with Soviet scholars. It might have remained there had I not had the opportunity the following year to travel to Leningrad to participate in the Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale, where I again met with Dr. Diakonoff and discussed with him at length his desire to have a major work of his translated into English. Several possibilities presented themselves, including the recently published work primarily written by him: Istoriya drevnego Vostoka: Zarozhdenie drevneishikh klassovykh obshchestv i pervye ochagi rabovla-del’cheskoi tsivilizatsii [The history of the ancient East: The birth of the most ancient class societies and the first centers of slave-owning civilization] (Moscow, 1983), but he reaffirmed his desire to have the multi-authored three-volume The History of the Ancient World translated, since it was in his opinion more up-to-date, better represented his current understanding of developments in ancient Mesopotamia, and offered the inestimable advantage of providing a synthetic overview to antiquity as a whole. Its introductory chapters (see the Introduction and Lecture 1, this volume) attempt to structure and interpret the discussed historical materials according to an explicit, consistent, and expanded historical framework as evolved by Soviet scholars in the general Marxist tradition, which, Dr. Diakonoff believed, would be of considerable interest to Western readers.

In fall 1984 the University of Chicago Press contacted me about the possibility of translating this work, which had by then appeared in its second revised edition in the Soviet Union, and details, as acknowledged below, concerning the translation and editing of the final text eventually were hammered out among the interested parties in Chicago, Leningrad, and Wellesley. Some of these details, as well as specific problems related to the translation of a general popular work of this kind, should be explicated further. All of volume 1, Early Antiquity, initially was translated by Mr. Alexander Kirjanov and then entered by Ms. Daria Kirjanov, his daughter, into my file on the Wellesley College mainframe computer. These rough translations were then sent lecture by lecture to Dr. Diakonoff in Leningrad for corrections and revisions, a process complicated not only by long-distance mail service but also by the fact that a substantially revised third edition, upon which this English translation is ultimately based, appeared in the Soviet Union during the course of this editing. I then incorporated the revised and edited text on my word processor and mailed the corrected copy once more to Dr. Diakonoff for his final approval.

Though necessary, such a laborious procedure is, to say the least, time-consuming and helps explain why so few outstanding works of Soviet historical scholarship are translated. Some particular difficulties beset the translation of the The History of the Ancient World because it is intended for a general educated lay audience. First and fundamentally, the reading publics of different countries differ, and this fact is particularly striking when contrasting the potential market, if you will, for this book in the Soviet Union to that in the United States. A cursory comparison of the reading materials available for purchase in a subway stall or street corner kiosk in any major Soviet city with those on sale at equivalent locations in American cities would quickly convince anyone of this difference. The interested Soviet reader does not expect a novel approach to the data or the advancement of a new all-encompassing theory to provide the latest perspective on ancient history; a product is not expected to be sold, but current knowledge is to be presented in a straightforward, accessible form within an understood and generally unquestioned theoretical framework. It is for such an audience that The History of the Ancient World was originally written. The English-reading audience is likely to be considerably diverse, consisting of specialists from a range of disciplines—anthropology, history, Assyriology, classical studies, etc., interested in a theoretically distinctive materialist interpretation of the past—as well as university students interested in a general overview to antiquity.

The expectations of such potential readers necessarily will differ. As explained in the Introduction, this book was not primarily written for specialists; it is not annotated or extensively footnoted and, not infrequently, controversial theories and interpretations are presented as unproblematic, as givens. Let me just mention two examples in which theories of American scholars are cited favorably in this fashion; D. Schmandt-Besserat’s theory (itself originally based on an idea of P. Amiet) on the use and significance of tokens for understanding the beginnings of writing (see Lecture 2); and D. McAlpin’s thesis that ancient Elamite and the Dravidian language family are cognate (Lecture 10). Scholars familiar with the literature will immediately realize that such interpretations are either sharply contested or inconclusively demonstrated.¹ Such controversy also occasionally concerns fundamental questions of interpretation and classification, such as the scale and nature of the private/communal sector in ancient Mesopotamia. Debates on some of these issues also rage within the Soviet specialist literature (see below).

A related difficulty is due to the lack of access to or familiarity with the latest results of Western research on particular problems. Thus, for example, H. Weiss’s fundamental work on the beginnings of urbanism in northern Mesopotamia and his writings on the productivity/unit area of the dominantly rainfall-based agriculture in northern Mesopotamia compared with the exclusively irrigation-based agriculture in the south are not presented here.² There is an inevitable lag time in the diffusion of knowledge across the still-significant political frontier that separates Soviet from Western scholarship, though fair recognition of this fact admits that this temporal gap works in the opposite direction as well; indeed, we tend to be far more ignorant of recent Soviet scholarship on antiquity than they are of our work. In any event, one of the primary purposes of this volume is to facilitate the transmission of knowledge across this unfortunate boundary.

The editor of the English edition, thus, is presented with a problem. Should one flag such debatable theories by reference to the relevant opposed literature? Should one note recent research that supports or contradicts an interpretation made in one of the lectures? In my opinion, two arguments militated against such interference. First, given the considerable time and geographic areas covered in this collectively written study of antiquity—literally stretching in time from Neolithic origins to the fall of Rome and in space from the western Mediterranean to East Asia—no single editor could possibly note all controversial areas of interpretation. Collective editorship was not feasible. Second and more important, the documentation required to address this problem would change the character of the work. The introductory chapters of each volume and all the lectures are clearly synthetic interpretations of a vast corpus of data. Final truths never should be expected in history, and intelligent readers will immediately recognize that their approximation will be rougher and less precise in a generalizing work of this kind. In a very few cases I took the liberty of noting some relevant research. These always occur in the footnotes and are marked Editor’s note (PLK); the other, more numerous instances designated Editor’s note (IMD) refer to additions made by the principal Soviet editor, I.M. Diakonoff.

One must not exaggerate the problem; nearly all of what is presented is consensually accepted by all historians. For the remainder, it should suffice simply to let the reader beware of these difficulties at the outset and seek on his or her own alternative perspectives on particular topics of interest.

Early Antiquity, volume 1 of The History of the Ancient World, is a work written by a group of historians and linguists largely working at the Oriental Institute in Leningrad. Difficulties associated with collective authorship are discussed in the Introduction, but it is important to emphasize here that substantial differences of interpretation exist even within this closely collaborating circle of scholars. Some lectures devote more, some less, space to straightforward political history or cultural description. Others focus more intensely on socioeconomic reconstruction. Such diversity in perspective and presentation, of course, may constitute more a strength than a liability, and the reader should evaluate each lecture on its own.

The historical/linguistic perspectives of the authors also should be noted; we are told that the study of languages provides the key for penetrating the mental processes or spiritual world of antiquity, whereas archaeological data, the material culture record, often are implicitly or even explicitly regarded as of relatively limited value for reconstructing the socioeconomic structure of ancient societies. Such a perspective, of course, has merit and may indeed be more right than wrong, but again caveat lector.

Finally, the overall organization of the work, the sequence of lectures, should be mentioned: materials are presented roughly in chronological order, though each individual lecture treats separately a specific area of early civilization. Thus, fourth through early second millennia B.C. developments in Egypt are presented after a comparable review of the early history of Mesopotamia but before treatments of the beginnings of civilization in South Asia, Central Asia, and, finally, East Asia. Such a framework is logical and, given the collective authorship, constitutes perhaps the only feasible structure. However, by its very nature this structure tends to minimize historical interconnections among separate areas; it threatens to obscure the single world historical process of development in which all the societies were involved. Thus, paradoxically, this comprehensive history of antiquity can be read from a perspective that stresses the internal evolution of separate societies, each of which finally reaches the same typological stage of development (see below).

Despite this inherent, if not inevitable, limitation, the work fulfills its main purpose. The format of the lectures, the periodization and typology elucidated in the introductory lectures, and the guiding hand of Dr. Diakonoff and the editorial board are all responsible for the creation of a unified work; the fundamental goal of presenting the histories of separate early civilizations as part of an integral or universal historical process (vsemirnaya istoriya) is achieved, despite the problems associated with collective authorship and organizational framework. Certain questions, however, inevitably emerge and must be addressed. How are separate early states with their incipient class structures temporally, typologically, and historically related to one another? How satisfactory or complete is this canvas that purports to sketch in broad strokes the main features of the ancient world? What is the vision of the past, the view of history, that permeates this study and how does it conform to or distinguish itself from an orthodox stage theory of development? And, finally, how does this macro-historical collective Soviet overview compare with the overviews of Western macrohistorians—be they explicitly Marxist-inspired or not?

Soviet Historiography on Antiquity: Common Problems, Particular Solutions

An outside observer attempting to describe any complex school or relatively unified corpus of scholarship always confronts the double-edged difficulty of disentangling common features, more or less universally shared by adherents of the school, from those characteristics and concerns specific to individual scholars. This difficulty is particularly pronounced when generalizations are made concerning Soviet scholarship, for the Western observer must be aware of and somehow consciously correct for stereotypic prejudices that permeate Western understanding of all things Soviet. One such grossly inaccurate, albeit all-pervasive, image is that of a monolithic, dogmatic, highly entrenched orthodoxy to which everyone submits either through brainwashing or coercion. Whether applied to society at large or to a branch of scholarship, such as ancient history, this image distorts reality, actually shedding more light on Western prejudice than Soviet practice. Yet, it is also legitimate to describe national traditions of research in the historical sciences, and Soviet scholars themselves consciously refer to the Soviet school of economic historians of the ancient Orient³—a phrase that explicitly acknowledges the existence of such a school and, correspondingly, some commonality of interest or approach that defines it.

Before attempting to list some of the features characteristic of Soviet writings on antiquity, one first must demolish the above-mentioned caricature. Soviet historical and social science writings abound in polemic, sharply contested points of view, the articulation of which often shocks uninitiated Western readers. As illustration of this penchant for polemic within Soviet historiography on antiquity, one can cite two recent debates that were featured in major Soviet journals. Vestnik drevnei istorii [The journal of ancient history] devoted several issues⁴ to the presentation and criticism of a new, detailed linguistic theory purporting to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European language and culture. Disagreements ran deep and were baldly expressed. Similarly, two recent issues of Narody Azii i Afriki [Peoples of Asia and Africa] (1984, nos. 2–3) presented a roundtable discussion (kruglyi stol) on the state and law in the ancient East led by V. A. Jakobson, one of the contributors to Early Antiquity.⁵ Many fascinating issues were raised in this discussion, some of which are also discussed in The History of the Ancient World: including the origins of law; the relationship or relative dependence/independence between religion and ethical and moral norms, on the one hand, and law or legal justice, on the other; culturally based differences in the expression of law, which is defined in classic Marxist terms as written codes that express and sanction the interests of the ruling class. During this discussion, specialists, utilizing different source materials, differed sharply in their views on fundamental questions of interpretation; similarly structured presentations with rebuttals in Western jounals may wan in comparison to the tone and tenor of this debate.

One of the major points of contention in this roundtable discussion on ancient law also forms the major theoretical question addressed in the Introduction to Early Antiquity: namely, the distinctiveness of historical development in the East relative to the West (i.e., for antiquity—classical Greece and Rome). There is no reason to recapitulate the history of scholarly writings on this seemingly timeless, perennially recurring question; the summary in the Introduction sketches its main contours quite adequately, though it also may partially mislead the unfamiliar reader. The Introduction discusses the debate over the distinctiveness of the East, the phenomenon of Oriental despotism, the validity of the Marxist concept of an Asiatic mode of production, and so on, as a problem intially formulated and today still raging primarily within Western scholarship.⁶ In its review of Soviet writings on the subject, the Introduction is uncharacteristically mild, intentionally conciliatory, as it glosses over very real and profound differences among Soviet scholars that appear regularly—indeed, with increasing frequency—in their literature.⁷ The History of the Ancient World aims at presenting developments in antiquity as part of a single, unified process—the universal history of humanity; its intent is to emphasize the common, shared features at the expense of the particular and, in so doing, lump together disparate civilizations into similar typological categories. From this perspective, classical Greece and Rome theoretically must resemble ancient Near Eastern civilizations.

The disagreements within Soviet historiography on such fundamental issues of interpretation, however, are real; and it is healthy that they are debated openly in their literature. Those who have followed English translations of several of Diakonoff’s major theoretical studies on the private/communal sector in ancient Mesopotamia, the nature of the dependent labor force, and the phenomenon of helots in early antiquity, for example, will also realize that his interpretations have been critcized (almost predictably) by Soviet theorists and historians, particularly by the Georgian scholar G. A. Melikishvili, whose criticisms are mentioned only in passing in the Introduction.⁸ The disagreement between these two scholars continues, as reflected in Melikishvili’s recent summary article Ob osnovnykh etapakh razvitiya drevnego blizhnevostochnogo obshchestva [On the basic stages of the development of ancient Near Eastern societies],⁹ which, among other points, attacks the periodization of antiquity presented in The History of the Ancient World. Other issues of contention include the scale and significance of the so-called private/communal sector in third millennium B.C. Mesopotamia and the related problem of the relative size and dominance of the temple/state sector in early Near Eastern irrigation civilizations; the character of the later military states of the second millennium B.C. (or Diakonoff’s third way of development, see Lecture 1); the nature of the classical Greek polis compared with contemporary and later Near Eastern cities; and property relations in classical Greece and Rome and how they should be distinguished from those present in Near Eastern societies. The interested reader should consult Melikishvili’s cited works and contrast his interpretations with the overview presented in The History of the Ancient World. Here, one should only be aware that the debate on fundamental questions of interpretation both outside and within the Soviet Union continues and that The History of the Ancient World provides only a particular perspective on a vast corpus of data, a particular reading set forth in a logically consistent, economical, and readable form.

If answers to fundamental questions differ, what then unites Soviet historical writings on antiquity? Can one legitimately refer to a Soviet school of economic historians of the ancient world? It is insufficient simply to label Soviet scholarship on the ancient world as Marxist or to find a common denominator in historical materialism as an answer to these questions for, at least, two reasons. First, not all Soviet historians are Marxists, though it probably would be fair to say that those who are not Marxists, have pursued their historical researches without challenging Marx’s or Lenin’s writings, indeed often without referring to this paradigm and its classic literature at all. That is, the debates—occasionally vitriolic—that have occurred and continue to rage in the Soviet literature have taken place within recognized limits; whether or not Soviet historical writings will be as self-circumscribed in the future is unclear, though it, at least, is questionable whether this silence or default by omission will continue as Soviet society evolves and accepts and openly debates more of its own internal contradications.

Second, as any observer of Western Marxism immediately recognizes, not all Marxists, including Soviet historians, interpret Marx and his successors in the same fashion. In the West, tremendous, at times irreconcilable, differences exist among scholars professing to write within the Marxist tradition;¹⁰ in the Soviet Union, this tendency may be muted, but it is still possible to detect differences, and one may find relatively more deterministic or vulgar materialistic interpretations alongside others emphasizing the more voluntaristic, class struggle side of Marxism.

The Introduction to Early Antiquity stresses the shared interests and common perspectives of the numerous contributors to The History of the Ancient World, asserting that it was the conscious decision of the editorial board to select scholars sharing a particular approach or orientation to historical data. This claim too should be tempered somewhat, at least insofar as it is fair to judge the orientation of specific contributors in terms of their other published works.

For example, the views of M. A. Dandamaev, a contributor to volume 2 of The History of the Ancient World, The Florescence of Ancient Societies, on the slave-owning character of Neo-Babylonian and Achaemenian societies differ markedly from the long-accepted, more orthodox position of Diakonoff that more or less slavelike dependents were the major exploited labor force throughout all periods of antiquity. The contrast is explicitly drawn by Dandamaev in his recently translated Slavery in Babylonia: From Nabopolassar to Alexander the Great (626–331 B.C.):

Slavery never reached in Babylonia such a degree of development that one can speak of slave labor as having the leading role in the economy. Slave labor was only one of several types of forced labor and not always the most significant. . . . That there was no predominance of slave labor in any branch of the Babylonian economy is not the main point; more important is that labor in agriculture was furnished primarily by free farmers and tenants and that free labor also dominated in craft industries.¹¹

Certainly, not all the contributors consider themselves representatives of a particular school, though, as noted, it is not without interest for both theoretical and obviously practical reasons that nearly all the contributors work in Leningrad. Dr. Diakonoff and his editorial board have chosen scholars whom they personally have known and collaborated with for years. Given this context, it would be surprising if one could not detect certain common themes and frameworks for understanding the past that characterize the works of this Leningrad circle of historians of the ancient world.

Even outside this circle, within Soviet historiography as a whole, one can detect a common sense of problem, a common arena of debate that unites scholars as sharply opposed as Diakonoff and Melikishvili. Here, reference to a particular reading of Marx is appropriate. Melikishvili writes that

in order to arrive at a characterization of the socioeconomic system of any society, it is quite important to identify its class structure, particularly the status of the direct producers. However, one must not forget that the class structure of society is itself derivative and depends on the division of labor operative in that society—the economic base, the fundamental expression of which is property relationships. . . . since it is the economic base—the totality of the relationships of production—that defines a system (society), it will be understood that one system may be distinguished from another above all in terms of that base, of the relationships of production, which, in the words of Marx, are expressed in property relations. Proceeding from this assumption, researchers are entirely justified in recognizing property relationships as the system-forming element of a given society.¹²

This is developed from a straightforward, unambiguous interpretation of Marx’s famous Introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and summarizes the orthodox, or classic, Marxism espoused by most Soviet Marxist historians of antiquity. Certain emphases, however, are apparent. The primary task of the historian is to characterize the socioeconomic system of a society. Thus, there is a concern for definition, a need to construct a typology that reduces the bewildering kaleidoscopic array of historical data into a manageable, understandable whole. Primary effort is expended on defining stages of development and describing their characteristics; less energy is devoted to explaining processes of change or how societies evolve from one developmental stage to another. The Marxism shared by many Soviet historians of antiquity is certainly not vulgarly materialist in the sense of reducing social complexity to features of the environment or of explaining institutions in terms of the functions they perform to solve problems ultimately posed by nature. Nor is theirs a Marxism emphasizing changes in the forces of production. The general disparagement of archaeological data already has been noted;¹³ while mentioned, technological developments are not emphasized relative to the reconstruction of social groups in terms of their access to means of production. The concern, quite properly, is with the reconstruction of direct primary production, which for antiquity always meant agricultural production—thus, the emphasis on the critical variables of landownership and land use.

As the reader soon will discover, The History of the Ancient World is not a speculative account but a rich summary based on the distillation of primary source materials. Most contributors are internationally known specialists in their fields, and their lectures here detail current historical knowledge. As emphasized in the Introduction, however, source materials for antiquity often are so incomplete that they cannot serve as the sole basis for reconstruction, and consequently, the theoretical perspectives of the authors help them fill in the lacunae and guide them consciously or not in fleshing out their portraits of past societies and epochs. One aid frequently employed in this task is the use of an evolutionary theory that finds its Marxist origins in F. Engels, Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State. For the Western reader, the terminology associated with this particular evolutionary perspective may have a slight anachronistic ring. For example, in the second section of Lecture 1, we read that accelerating progress distinguishes the early class society from barbarism, the level that even the most developed primitive society cannot exceed. Societies are ranked on an ascending scala societatis, and it may not always be clear how they can mutate or so transform themselves in order to be classified at a new evolutionary level.

Evolutionary theory also sometimes serves as the basis for reconstruction when the texts are silent. For his controversial interpretation of a large and important private/communal economic sector in third millennium B.C. Mesopotamia, Diakonoff utilizes a variety of arguments, one of which is based principally on his understanding of the final stage of advanced patriarchal barbarism:

In the same way as the medieval society inherited certain features of the ancient society structure, the ancient society did also inherit certain still more ancient structures from the society which preceded it. Arising from the primitive pre-urban, pre-class society, the ancient society could not have been divided solely into slave-owners and slaves; the numerically predominant part of the population could not fail to consist of what had been inherited from the mass of the population of the pre-class society. . . . it certainly was a mass of personally free persons, at least in so far as the family heads were concerned.¹⁴

Although the texts themselves do not inform us that this was the case, such a mass of free citizens theoretically must have continued to exist during the time when the state and temple sectors first slowly developed; later it was the impoverished members of this citizenry who hired themselves out as laborers for the large centralized economies. The point is not to question this reconstruction, which may seem logical and convincing, but to emphasize its epistemological basis: a vision of preclass society that is derived ultimately from Engels’s Origin, though bolstered, of course, with later historical and ethnographic evidence.

Evolutionary teminology permeates the created ordering of antiquity. We are presented with different ways of development along which preclass societies evolved into stratified states. Mesopotamia and Egypt are thus distinguished and both are separated from the military states (Hittite, Mitannian, etc.) that arose later outside the irrigated heartlands of the Nile and Euphrates valleys. On the one hand, these types are abstracted from history, transcending strict chronological limits:

. . . societies belonging typologically to early antiquity do not necessarily arise only in the chronological framework of the classical ancient Orient: in certain places the same typology can also be traced in the first millennium B.C. and—albeit for a short time—in the first millennium A.D., as, for instance, in northern and eastern Europe. In the tropics, in mountainous zones, and in piedmont regions, the same typology may linger and even reemerge as late as the second half of the second millennium A.D.¹⁵

On the other hand, specific discussions always emphasize and make clear that the factor of time—the period when early states emerge—is crucial. In reference to the later second millennium military states (or his third way of development), Diakonoff writes that

the fact that these societies took longer to attain the level of a class society and of civilization gave Egypt and Lower Mesopotamia the time to exert a powerful cultural influence on these areas—an influence aimed precisely at strengthening the authority of temples and of the royal power.¹⁶

These types, thus, are related to one another historically (i.e., they mutually influence one another), as, undoubtedly, also would be true for areas for which we cannot adequately reconstruct their early ways of development from the available historical evidence (e.g., India and China).

The question arises as to whether or not an unnecessary tension has been fostered between the historical account and the abstracted evolutionary types. Are the latter really necessary for writing a universal history? The purpose they serve must be the simplification and ordering of data, but their use exacts the price (reinforced by the organizational framework of the work) of minimizing the historical relationships and interconnections among the separate societies that transformed themselves into states during the course of the same world-historical time.

Marxism and Beyond: The Missing Dialogue

The History of the Ancient World does not concern itself solely with the reconstruction of socioeconomic systems. Its Marxism is not the crude variety that cleanly separates phenomena of the base from those of the superstructure. Some of the most fascinating sections attempt to reconstruct ancient thought: mythologies, worldviews, early systems of proto-ethics, and later philosophies. In these sections, ancient ideology is not simply reduced to false consciousness, though ancient thought is viewed as related to and ultimately derivative of social reality; that is, social experience determines consciousness, more than the reverse. The discussions of how reality colors consciousness and, in turn, is changed by it under the relatively low level of development of productive forces in antiquity are insightful and stimulating.

In Lecture 1 Dr. Diakonoff adumbrates an agenda for a future generation of historians. As the mature reflections of a great scholar, his suggestions deserve careful attention; as recommendations for a more complete accounting of the past by a leading Soviet Marxist historian, whose writings over a long and distinguished career have substantially refined and sustained their still-dominant stage theory of successive socioeconomic formations, they are of great intellectual interest. The attempt is to provide a more comprehensive understanding of the past than that obtained from an exclusive focus on the interplay between changes in the forces and changes in the relations of production.

Maintaining his materialism by citing the well-known dictum that an idea becomes a material force once it is seized by mass consciousness, Diakonoff argues for a history of emotions that utilizes and extends analytical techniques developed by social psychologists. Major historical events of universal historical significance, such as the initial spread of Islam or the French Revolution, cannot be adequately explained by nor deduced from a consideration solely of developments in the forces and relations of production. Why some movements have succeeded and others failed and why they occurred precisely when they did cannot be explained simply by consideration of economic phenomena. His is a call for a historical social psychology, a new, much more comprehensive history of culture that considers everything that . . . has an impact upon society and that induces men and women to socially valid actions.¹⁷

These thoughtful, provocative suggestions are offered to future historians of antiquity, but they are of interest to other specialists concerned either empirically or theoretically with macrohistorical developments: anthropologists, archaeologists, historical sociologists, economic historians and historically minded economists, social psychologists, and, of course, medieval and modern historians. It is impossible to read this section without reflecting upon the unfortunate absence of reference to trends in contemporary Western historiography and to Western macrohistorical studies and critiques and defenses of historical materialism.

One would like to know, for example, how Diakonoff would evaluate the macrohistorical works of certain French Annales historians in terms of his called-for historical social psychology. Would Braudel’s use of a plurality of times from the longue durée to the event be considered a useful or a confused and obfuscatory analytical technique for ordering history on a macroscale? Superficially, at least, the well-known attempts to write histories of the mentalités of given periods (e.g., the studies of G. Duby, J. LeGoff, P. Aries) seem to have already set in practice Diakonoff’s recommendations for a more complete understanding of the past. Or do they? Would Diakonoff criticize them on fairly obvious materialist grounds? Diakonoff undoubtedly would insist that whether one writes an histoire des mentalités or a historical social psychology of the sort he envisages, the critical task is to relate the collective representations or psychology of a society at a particular point in time to its social structure, internal contradictions, and class antagonisms. He would correctly assert that if these connections are not made, the result may be a kind of muddled, imprecise history of ideas in which the mentalités are viewed either as inexplicably resisting change or teleologically exhibiting a gradual drift towards enlightenment.¹⁸

In certain respects, Diakonoff’s discussion of the limitations of previous socioeconomic historical research and suggestions for a history of emotions and a broadened history of culture seem to anticipate or independently voice many of the objections articulated by M. Sahlins in his not-insensitive and—to a Marxist purist—disturbing critique of practical reason.¹⁹ Conceptual differences, of course, are manifest. Sahlins emphasizes the symbolic ordering of Western (or, here, industrial) society and its nonreflective, culturally conditioned belief in objective reality and the dominance of pragmatic activities and seeks a historical synthesis of conventionally posed alternatives, such as structure and history, materialism and idealism, or infrastructure and superstructure. Diakonoff appeares unaware or, at least, unconcerned with the problem of subjectivity and never abandons an essentially historical materialist position, though attempting to extend the traditional reading of Marx among Soviet historians. Nevertheless, certain points of similarity remain. It can be argued that with some modification, Diakonoff’s recommendations might be rephrased to incorporate the anthropological concept of culture initially developed by F. Boas, a change that for Sahlins would represent the initial, minimally necessary emendation to Marx. If this were attempted, one could, perhaps, more clearly detect and understand the differences that separate a more sophisticated historical materialism from the symbolic anthropological or culturological approach of Sahlins.

Unfortunately, this exercise is unlikely ever to be undertaken, for these possible protagonists carry on totally different scholarly discourses. Here, one can only note and regret the lack of common conceptual ground, the absence of a shared vocabulary and literature among scholars concerned with essentially similar theoretical problems on either side of the East-West political divide. The absence of dialogue is as apparent as it is unnecessary. Western readers of The History of the Ancient World will appreciate the quality of historical research on antiquity conducted by Soviet specialists, a fact long recognized by ancient Near Eastern scholars. However, when one turns to broader theoretical concerns, an unfortunate vacuum exists in which Soviet and Western scholars seem to be either unaware of or out-of-date with each other’s works. There are for example, more recent Western overviews and macrohistorical theories than those advanced by Spengler and Toynbee (as intimated in the Introduction). In reality, though, the problem is more serious on the Western side, where the tendency is to dismiss out of ignorance (including the inability to read Russian) Soviet writings as dogmatic and uninteresting. The condemnation is not only uninformed but paradoxical: how can such benighted theory produce such quality scholarship? One is reminded of the equally illogical political view that fears a Soviet Union bent on world domination while at the same time predicts the imminent collapse of its economy—a thought that inexorably leads one to the gloomy, if realistic, expectation that communication among scholars, as well as politicians, is likely to improve substantially only when the objective conditions for its persistence themselves change; that is, when both sides move beyond the cold war realities of the last forty years and define a new relationship. Translation of Early Antiquity, obviously represents no such breakthrough, but it does provide us with a unified current overview of antiquity and constitutes a small step toward maintaining and extending a sadly underdeveloped dialogue among interested, open-minded scholars and laypersons on the nature of long-term historical developments. For the moment, all we should do is simply sit back and enjoy this integrated vision of ancient history presented to us by a group of Soviet specialists.

Many people worked on the English translation of Early Antiquity. A. Kirjanov provided a rough translation of the entire volume and completed his task in the time promised. My duties as project director and final editor were immensely simplified by the fact that Mr. Kirjanov’s translations were entered into the Wellesley computer by Ms. Daria Kirjanov, a former student at the College. Initially, I must confess to being somewhat intimidated by the rigorous standards of editing insisted upon by Dr. Diakonoff; his command of English and impeccable sense of grammar, no doubt, increased my consternation. Obviously, he is primarily responsible for the standards of consistency and editorial uniformity present in the work. Wellesley College must be acknowledged for the support it provided, especially for covering the expenses of mailing rough and edited drafts to Leningrad; the help of the Department of Anthropology’s secretary at Wellesley, Ms. Edna Gillis, in the final preparation of Lectures 11 and 19 also must be mentioned. Publication would have been impossible without the assistance, indeed encouragement, of the University of Chicago Press, particularly of its most able and understanding editor Ms. Karen Wilson. I would also like to thank Dr. Norman Yoffee at the University of Arizona for his support and for originally suggesting to people at the University of Chicago Press that I actively participate in this project and Dr. C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky of Harvard University for critiquing the initial draft of this Foreword. My wife, Barbara Gard, son, Owen, and daughter, Mira (who was born during the long gestation of this work), must be praised for their tolerance of my sequestering myself for inexplicably interminable hours in our computer room. Without their unreasonable patience and encouragement this work would not have appeared.

And, finally, I wish to acknowledge that it has been a privilege to have worked with Dr. I. M. Diakonoff on this project. The breadth of his erudition and stature as a scholar require no more comment. Once we had agreed upon a system of editing and regularly corresponded, all work proceeded smoothly. I like to believe this was accomplished not only because we shared the same professional goal of producing a scrupulously accurate and readable translation but also because we grew to appreciate each other as colleagues and friends. I am most grateful to have had this opportunity.

Introduction

THE EDITORIAL BOARD

General Remarks

The occasion to write this book arose out of work conducted over many years by a large group of collaborators at the Oriental Institute of the USSR Academy of Sciences and other scholarly institutions during the preparation of the extensively documented, multivolume Istoriya drevnego Vostoka [History of the ancient orient]. As the latter publication is oriented toward specialists, our editorial board and group of authors decided to write the present work in the interest of reaching a broader public. Directed at a wider audience, this work examines the history of ancient class societies and states that once existed in Asia, Europe, and North Africa as part of the process of the historical development of humanity. Scholars of numerous scientific and educational institutions from all parts of the Soviet Union participated in this effort.

Thus, our publication, which will consist of three volumes (Early Antiquity, The Florescence of Ancient Societies, and The Decline of Ancient Societies), is an attempt to create a historical account involving the entire ancient world. It is based on contemporary knowledge and a clearer understanding not only of the individual features of specific societies but also of the general features characteristic of ancient class societies as a whole. We hope that it also will contribute to the solution of ongoing theoretical controversies on this subject. The authors believe that the idea that specific ancient societies exhibit an absolute dissimilarity among themselves has arisen through examining them according to unsuitable reference scales that are either too restricted spatially or too narrow temporally. The authors contend that a comprehensive view of all ancient societies, seen in relation to each other, will reveal general outlines of a regularity in the historical development of humanity. The readers will judge whether or not we were right.

Today’s universities offer separate courses on the specific histories of Greece, Rome, and the ancient Orient. In the case of the Orient, the courses end abruptly at arbitrary periods in the development of the various Asian or African societies, and their histories are not presented as integral parts of a universal historical process. Vsemirnaya istoria [Universal history] (vols. 1–2, Moscow, 1955–56) does permit a comparison between the more significant societies in the context of universal historical development; however, it is too voluminous and, therefore, does not offer a general perspective. Moreover, new data have made this work, to a considerable degree, obsolete.

Other than Vsemirnaya istoria, no general, comprehensive survey of the history of the ancient world has appeared in the Soviet Union. This lack is due to the difficulty of treating material covering so many societies and periods (a fact that sometimes leads to general textbooks being written by authors insufficiently versed in the historiography of some of the societies treated). It was therefore decided to assign the writing of each section of the book to specialists in particular fields. Keeping in mind the experience gained in the publication of Vsemirnaya istoria, we tried to avoid excessive unification of the authors’ texts. Thus, the present publication is actually a collection of lectures in book form, read by different experts, each in his or her own way, but presented so as to create a general overview. Without supplying exhaustive data (because the contents of each lecture were determined by the specific interests, abilities, and resources of the individual lecturer), such a series should ideally offer a general notion of the subject matter with which it deals. The contents of the book, however, are ultimately determined by the staff of lecturers available. Our book, thus, suffers from inevitable gaps, and there are some differences in the views adopted by the various writers on specific questions, as well as some dissimilarities, for example, in treating cultural questions concerning different societies. Each lecturer presents his or her own point of view; and depending on an author’s individual interests and preferences, the character of the presentation, as well as the relative emphasis on the different materials presented (e.g., the amount of information on political, ethnic, or cultural history relative to socioeconomic information), changes from lecture to lecture. The editorial board assumes responsibility for the overall scientific and methodological quality of this book without necessarily agreeing with the individual authors or particular questions.

On theoretical issues, there is no unanimity among Soviet historians (the problem is discussed in more detail below). This lack of agreement naturally is reflected in our text. The editorial board did not consider it possible to impose its own viewpoint, though a general editorial statement appears in the introductory chapter to each volume. In order to ensure a certain degree of structural integrity for the book, however, the editorial board preferred to invite scholars to contribute who share most of their theoretical positions and who work within the mainstream tradition of Soviet scholarship. Such authors would, we believed, reflect more or less faithfully the views of the majority of Soviet scholars. However, other opinions on a number of important theoretical questions do exist among scholars, as we will attempt to show below.

Notwithstanding the closeness of their theoretical viewpoints, it is quite understandable that there are disagreements among our authors, as an attentive reader will easily discover. Yet, it is important to emphasize that despite disagreements on minor points, the authors based themselves on similar theoretical premises and had a similar understanding of their task, so that these lectures by no means constitute a shapeless collection. Rather, it represents a well-defined entity whose parts, ultimately, are closely knit together.

During the editing process, the editors made various suggestions and asked the authors for certain modifications of their texts. The final decision, nevertheless, lay with the author. In the interest of unity, the editorial board also took the liberty of expressing its own opinion about the material presented by the individual authors—namely, in the general theoretical sections preceding each of the three volumes of the work. The editors actually intervened only where the designed length of the book or other technical considerations warranted such action. The suggestions and factual corrections of numerous scholars who read the manuscripts were taken into careful consideration.

Given the character of this publication as lectures in book form, the sections are called lectures rather than chapters. There are four reasons justifying such a designation: the independence of the sections; the fact that some of them are actually based on lectures delivered at universities or other institutions; the fact that the amount of material, in most cases, fits into the time span normally allotted to a lecture; and, finally, the fact that such a format may be helpful in using this book as a reference manual. It is necessary to emphasize that this book does not pretend to replace existing textbooks, particularly university texts on Greece and Rome, which develop the material in more detail but fail to show the position of the societies treated within the overall human historical process. As we have already stressed, this book does not claim to be an exhaustive treatment of all regions and problems of the ancient world. At the same time, the lectures, written independently by different authors, partially overlap. We hope, nevertheless, that this book conveys an integral and more or less internally consistent view of the ancient world.

Convinced of the unity of the historical process, the authors considered it possible to adopt a single periodization system for the history of ancient class societies and divided the materials into three stages, constituting three separate volumes. The first stage (the formation of class society and the state and the early forms of this society) encompasses a long time span, stretching from the end of the fourth to the end of the second millennium B.C. The second stage (the florescence of ancient societies and the highest development of the slave economy) begins with the introduction of iron at the end of the second and beginning of the first millennium B.C. and lasts throughout the entire first millennium B.C. The third stage (the decline of ancient societies and the appearance of features indicating the transition to feudalism) occupies approximately five centuries of the first millennium A.D.

The detailed characterization of each stage, of its economic, political, and cultural features, is given in the introductory lectures preceding each of the three volumes. Within each volume we tried to examine the individual countries chronologically. Each volume is subject to a typological principle of periodization. As far as possible, we characterized the various countries according to their respective stage of historical development. Expecting a wide readership (i.e., students, teachers, and anyone interested in ancient history), the staff of writers aimed for simplicity, clarity, and an accessible presentation (based on scientific data available in the early 1980s).

Discussion of Theoretical Problems in Contemporary Ancient Historiography

Any textbook on history in our country is usually preceded by an introductory section defining the subject under consideration and stating the fundamentals of the Marxist approach to history. The present work is not a textbook; it is intended for readers with a sufficiently high educational background who are sufficiently versed in the fundamentals of historical materialism. Today, the Marxist method maintains a dominant place among Soviet historians and occupies an important position all over the world. As admitted by many Western scholars, there does not exist in the West any complete and consistent theory of history regarded as a single process, a theory comprehensive enough to match that of historical materialism. We will assume that the latter is known to the readers and will attempt to acquaint them with those theoretical problems that today remain unresolved.

The central questions of the discussion, which some years ago concerned Soviet historians, can be formulated in philosophical terms as follows: What is the correlation between the general and the particular in the development of the different societies and civilizations during the precapitalist period? The question can be rephrased in terms of historical science as follows: Is there a single, common path of development for all precapitalist societies (unavoidably with local variants), or are there several? Of course, all Marxist historians adhere to the concept that, in the final analysis, the relations of production are determined by the level of development of the means of production. Yet, in theory, it is quite possible to accept that specific local features of the means of production (e.g., those depending on geographical factors) can lead, under certain specific conditions, to peculiar trends in production relations, thus producing typologically different societies. In its most general form, this question asks whether the West (i.e., Europe) and the East (i.e., virtually the rest of the world) have been developing in more or less the same way, or whether the course of development each has followed is radically different.

The idea of a radical difference between the East and the West arose in European scholarship long ago. European philosophers, historians, and writers of belles-lettres became interested in the East as early as the seventeenth century. They built their theories on the Bible, on the sparse and not always reliable information of Graeco-Roman writers, and later on information acquired from European ambassadors at the courts of Oriental rulers, from travelers, missionaries, and, since the middle of the eighteenth century, from colonial functionaries. These theories were used by ideologues of the growing bourgeoisie for their political aims. The attitude toward the political order of the East swung from idealization, which presented the social and state order of Oriental societies (especially of China) as models to be emulated (L. Levalier, Voltaire, F. Quesnay), to sharp condemnations of and warnings against any attempts to follow these examples (F. Bernier, Ch. Montesquieu, and J. J. Rousseau in France and D. Defoe in England). On the whole, however, the dominant viewpoint was that the fundamental difference between the East and the West consisted in the absence of private property in the Orient. It was assumed that all the land in that part of the world belonged to the monarchs as their property, and that this supreme proprietorship was the foundation of Oriental despotism and of general slavery.

The same point of view, with sundry variations, predominated in the beginning of the nineteenth century. Representatives of pre-Marxian political economy (Adam Smith, J. Stuart Mill, et al.) and philosophy (G. F. W. Hegel) subscribed to this idea, despite information available at that time about the existence in many nations of community relationships, private property, and so on.

In studying the problems of capitalist society, Marx and Engels inevitably became interested in societies that had not yet reached the level of capitalist development—hence, their interest in the Orient. However, they began studying the Orient only in 1853, with most of their efforts concentrated between 1857 and 1859. Their opinions stemming from these studies were outlined in a draft of a manuscript by Marx, Precapitalist Economic Formations (not published during Marx’s lifetime). The Preface to The Critique of Political Economy offers a more succinct review of this subject. In his analysis, Marx formulates the regular succession of modes of production: In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society.¹ This is the first expression of a dialectical materialist view of history as a single developmental process. This conclusion, of course, was drawn from the scientific data accumulated up to that time. Let us point out, however, that Marx’s formula assumes that an Asiatic mode of production precedes the ancient—that is, the slave-owning mode of production. Also his formula lacks another natural human developmental stage: the primitive mode of production. The later works of Marx and Engels developed the fundamental principles of historical materialism in more detail, and as new data became available, these principles evolved further, and particular features of historical processes were better understood.

Information about the work of historians during the period in question (i.e., about writings that were used by Marxist theoreticians), can be found in special publications dedicated to historiography. Here we will only mention the work by L. H. Morgan: Ancient Society; or, Researches in the Line of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (1877). In his Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, Engels notes that Morgan’s book has the same significance for the history of primitive society as Darwin’s theory of evolution has for biology.² Morgan’s book was written from an independently derived materialist position and contained considerable data about preclass social structure as well as about approaches to the emergence of class society; that is, about data illustrating the fundamental positions of historical materialism, which could and did lead to further and deeper studies.

We must point out that after the appearance of the first volume of Capital, the term Asiatic mode of production disappears from the writings of Marx and Engels. It is also absent from Lenin’s works (except, of course, in references to the earlier publications of Marx and Engels). On the whole, the development of historical materialism led to the conclusion that society passed through three consecutive developmental stages or formations in the precapitalist period: primitive order, slave-owning order, and feudalism.

The end of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century saw a rapid development of Oriental studies and an accumulation of enormous amounts of new information, which was not easy to sort out. Among the professional historians of that time, there was no unified conception of history, except for the hypothesis of cyclical development, a theory that was rapidly losing its supporters. According to this hypothesis, development occurred from primitive feudalism to Graeco-Roman capitalism, from capitalism back to feudalism, from there to a new capitalism, and so on. This hypothesis was most vividly presented by Eduard Meyer in the several volumes of his History of Antiquity (published between 1884 and 1902; numerous reeditions appeared until the middle of the twentieth century). A somewhat similar cyclical theory was suggested by Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West, 2 vols., 1918–23). Based on his theory, Spengler thought it possible to present the spiritual form, duration, rhythm, meaning, and product of the still unaccomplished stages of our Western history. However, Spengler’s predictions did not come true. In the West the views of the philosophers W. Dilthey, B. Croce, and R. Collingwood became most important. They thought that history could be understood only insofar as it is made comprehensible by professional historians working on specific problems; nothing more can reasonably be expected. Most historians limited themselves to the accumulation of new data.

That the cyclical theory of history is unsatisfactory for explaining the latest events of world history soon became evident. It followed from this that its explanation of any stage of history could be questioned. This lack of satisfaction contributed to a great degree to the rise among Russian historians of an interest in the Marxist theory of the historical process, which had already had its adherents in Russian academic circles as early as the 1890s to 1910s (e.g., N. I. Sieber and A. I. Tyumenev). This interest continued to grow in the 1920s and 1930s, when historians began to seek, along with the rest of the intelligentsia, their niche in the emerging Soviet society.

A general interpretation of newly acquired data from the perspective of the fundamentals of historical materialism was urgently required. After long discussions in which different solutions were suggested within the framework of Marxist theory, a general interpretation was proposed in 1933 by V. V. Struve (originally, a student of E. Meyer) in his address Problem of the Origin, Development, and Decline of Slave-Owning Society in the Ancient Orient and in his article Plebeians and Helots. Struve’s outstanding erudition (he used Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and classical sources) allowed him to support the conclusion that ancient Oriental society, despite all its specific features, belonged to the slave-owning type. This theory was not immediately accepted. One of Struve’s most active opponents, A. I. Tyumenev, learned Sumerian in order to verify this conclusion. For fifteen years he investigated Sumerian administrative and economic documents; his findings, however, can be regarded as not fundamentally disagreeing with those of Struve.

From then on, especially during the postwar period, the concept of the slave-owning character of ancient Oriental society was dominant among Soviet historians.³ This viewpoint affirms the unity of the universal historical process, leaving no ground for the Europe-centered and Orient-centered concepts of universal history. Almost all the authors of our book have worked in the tradition established by Struve and Tyumenev.

In the West during this period and slightly later, Arnold Toynbee’s theory of universal history was most popular. He presented it in the ten volumes of his A Study of History (1934–57). According