“WORLD EMPIRES” OF THE ANCIENT NEAR EAST OF THE FIRST MILLENNIUM B.C. IN THE THEORETICAL SCHEMES OF SOVIET AND POST-SOVIET HISTORIOGRAPHY

A feature of the Near Eastern history, observed in antiquity and in the Middle Ages in the first millennium B.C., is the emergence of vast centralized interregional states succeeding one another. In the late 19th century, the French Egyptologist Gaston Maspero showed that this was a gradual stage of integration of the microregion (following the interaction of the superpowers of the Late Вronze Age), and this point of view was shared by the Russian pre-revolutionary scholars N. Kareev and B. Turaev. Soviet research could not ignore the phenomenon, but had 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 the 1930s – 1950s was affected by Stalin’s own words about the transience of “Cyrus’ and Alexander’s empires”. However, starting with the work on 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 empires by the processes within the oldest societies of the region (their alleged “crisis” in the late second millennium B.C.) and by the need to integrate the region between the center (irrigational societies) and periphery (regions supplying raw materials). Post-Soviet research has 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 the demand for their firm political integration.