|
ИСТИНА |
Войти в систему Регистрация |
ИСТИНА ЦЭМИ РАН |
||
Rev.: Andrassy, P. Untersuchungen zum ägyptischen Staat des Alten Reiches und seinen Institutionen. (Internet-Beiträge zur Ägyptologie und Sudanarchäologie, Vol. XI). Golden House Publications, London, 2008статья
- Автор: Ладынин И.А.
- Журнал: Bibliotheca Orientalis
- Том: 51
- Номер: 1-2
- Год издания: 2014
- Первая страница: 135
- Последняя страница: 138
- Аннотация: ANDRÁSSY, P. Untersuchungen zum ägyptischen Staat des Alten Reiches und seinen Institutionen. (Internet-Beiträge zur Ägyptologie und Sudanarchäologie, Vol. XI). Golden House Publications, London, 2008. (21,5 cm., X, 179). ISBN 978-1-906137-08-3. The book by P. Andrássy is an infrequent case of publishing a thesis when decades elapsed after its defense. Initially a dissertation of its author defended in the Humboldt University at Berlin in February 1988, it was considered by the editors of the Internet-Beiträge zur Ägyptologie und Sudanarchäologie a fine specimen of Egyptological research carried out in a socialist state of the 20th century, namely in the former German Democratic Republic. When evaluated as such, any study has to be weighed up to the degree of Marxist methodological influence; and this point is discussed at some length in the editor’s preface (pp. iii-viii) and (notably, more laconically) in the introduction by the author herself (pp. 1-3). While the editor outlined the main features of the Marxist Formationstheorie (rather to the benefit of a Western reader who was not a student in a Warsaw Pact country before 1989-1991), P. Andrássy confined herself to naming as the cornerstone of her study the result of a discussion among the GDR historians of antiquity on the nature of the Ancient Oriental society (referring to Sellnow et al. 1978; see p. 2). The Altorientalische Klassengesellschaft was thus defined as a universal stage (Gesellschaftsformation) in the development of humanity with such features as the preponderance of free labourers united in rural communities, the state property on arable land (the private property on it not appearing before the end of that stage), and the state regime of the Oriental despoty performing important economic tasks. The conclusion of the book do not contradict to these points; and this serves to defining it as belonging to the Marxist mainstream of the GDR research. Problems arise, however, with defining as properly ‘Marxist’ the methodology provided by the aforementioned GDR discussion. It is certainly debatable what should be the definition and the limits of Marxist method; there was the ‘classical Marxism’ of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from its bearded founder to Kautsky; and there was the intellectual ‘Euromarxism’ of the 1960-1980s; but one would hardly doubt that the methodological Rome for the research in the countries of the Warsaw Pact was the Soviet Union. There existed the most developed and differentiated Marxist school of humanitarian research. However, its key research instrument was the notion of the socio-economic formation based on a certain form of exploitation (slavery or feudal rent in pre-industrial time, wage labour in industrial societies). The history was seen as a sequence of these formations roughly corresponding to the antiquity (the slave-owning formation), the Middle Age (the feudal formation) and the modern time (capitalism); but each of them was thought necessarily founded on one prevailing time of exploitation. The urges to postulate a specific ‘Asiatic mode of production’ showed themselves vain due to inability of their enthusiasts to point a type of exploitation different from slavery or rent that would prevail in these societies. The GDR scholars, to whom P. Andrássy referred, were obviously reluctant to choose any of these options as a definition of the Ancient Oriental societies and preferred to this rather amorphous phrases; the description they gave was somewhat close to the Soviet Marxist notion of the “early class societies”, which however never defined a separate formation. They committed thus a mortal sin against the Soviet Marxist method but made themselves freer for a pragmatic description of relevant material and for incorporating their results in world research. Another thing is somewhat unexpected in view of what has been said above: one can hardly define as truly Marxist the Soviet school of Egyptology. Its founder Vassily Struve made a sinuous way from being a student of Rostovtseff and admiring Eduard Meyer to authoring the concept of slave-owning society at the Ancient Orient, including Egypt; but the sincerity of his own belief in it, unlike his being a fair man unspoiled by totalitarian society, can be reasonably questioned. The giants of the Soviet Russian Egyptology of the 20th century Yu. Perepyolkin and O. Berlev (according to W.K. Simpson, one of the world’s five best Egyptologists; statement by S. Hodjash) were rather allergic of the Soviet Marxist method; with Perepyolkin this allergy went as far as to the reluctance to use any sociological terms in his writings. Their research of the Egyptian society was purely the comprehensive analysis of sources with attention to the Egyptian definitions that could be interpreted as social; and the generalizations they made are important, though unevenly known outside Russia. However, an advantage of a GDR researcher must have been namely knowledge of Russian; so there is every reason to assess the book of P. Andrássy specifically from the viewpoint of its use of the Soviet Egyptological research. The book by P. Andrássy is based on a full-scale consideration of the relevant evidence and takes into account major research on the administration of the Third Millennium Egypt that appeared before mid-1980s. After an introduction into the methodology and the sources (chapter I), the author comes to a description of the earliest Egyptian state and administration (chapter II) and the phenomenon of the Egyptian kingship (chapter III.1) – certainly, subjects too vast for the space they are granted in the book (resp. pp. 9-16 and 17-25). The most analytical part of the book is the study of the state administration in the Old Kingdom (the royal administration properly spoken and associated with the king’s palace, the office of vizier, administrative documentation of the period, the administration of the natural and working resources), which is largely based on the study of relevant titles and terms and their evolution (chapter III.2, pp. 26-104); two more paragraphs deal with the local administration of the period (chapters III.3-4). Obviously, the book is a study of the Old Kingdom administration well influenced by the Western research of the post-war period in this field, though the final section (chapter IV) and the conclusion (chapter V) of the book tend to outline the development of the entire Egyptian society in the Third millennium B.C. There are core themes in the book, which deserve a more detailed discussion. One of them is the vizierate as an institution of royal residence (III.2.2, pp. 32-46). According to Andrássy the introduction of this rank must have been connected with the emergence of monumental building (p. 43 and 123; an obvious reference to the role of Imhotep under Zoser but also, perhaps, a tribute to Gordon Childe’s criteria of civilization); the connection of vizier’s status with that of the royal son is considered a feature of Dynasty IV, which is not proved to come back to the early dynastic time (pp. 32-33). The emergence of separate offices of imy-rA kAt nbt nsw and imy-rA pr-HD is the evidence of not so much the repulsion of royal sons from exercising the authority as the differentiation of state administration (pp. 34-35). Vizier became the supreme dignitary only in mid-Dynasty V, when royal sons really ceased to occupy highest ranks (p. 37); further reinforcement of this office is seen under Dynasty VI, when the authorities of officials subordinate to vizier were limited and the local administration came under his control; at the same time the number of viziers reached up to two in the royal residence and one more in Upper Egypt. However, the predominance of the residential vizierate till the end of the Old Kingdom is beyond doubts (p. 41 f., 136); and generally the observations of the author allow her to deny any administrative disorganization to have been a factor in its ultimate crisis (p. 137). Another important point considered in the book is the definition of some terms for the working class of the Old Kingdom. According to Andrássy, the most comprehensive of them, mrt, applies to the peasants deprived of their connection to the rural communities due to the king’s right to dispose of the working force in Egypt exercised during the inner colonization (p. 65). In due course the author addresses another group designated nswtyw: she reasonably admits that the inscription of Mechen characterizes them as the proprietors of land bought from them by the official in Lower Egypt (Urk. I. 4.8); in this case nswtyw must be designation of commoners removed from their villages to be resettled (p. 108). The idea is plausible due to Mechen’s task of founding new settlements; it is natural, however, in this case to go further and to suppose that the term ‘royal (men)’ applies to these peasants’ status after their resettlement, while their initial denotation is obscure. Several notes by the author (the connection between administering mrt and AHt from Dynasty VI – p. 66; doubts if at the same period the Upper Egyptian title of nome ruler imy-rA niwwt mAwt should have in view true newly founded settlements – p. 107) lead to conclude that by the late Old Kingdom the inner colonization more or less ceased and the authority over land and its workers largely coincided. However, the important point is if the rural communities economically independent of state continued somehow to exist after the royal power started exercising its control over the working force of Egypt. In Russian Soviet research Yu. Perepyolkin believed it must have vanished (1949); and this became a reason for I. Diakonov to postulate in his typology of the early Middle Eastern societies the “second (Egyptian) model of evolution”, with the absorption of rural communities by the state economy (distinct of the Mesopotamian “first model”, under which these counterparts coexisted but the state prevailed, and the non-irrigational “third model”, where their proportion was opposite; 1982, 1983). Andrássy rather confined herself to saying on her last page that the nature of rural communities in Egypt of the Third Millennium B.C. must have gone through fundamental change (p. 156) but did not decides the question of their existence at all. These and other points considered, the book of P. Andrássy is certainly a reasonable and handy undertaking to define some trends in the history of the Old Kingdom society mostly on the terminological base traditional for its research in the West. With its timing and the specifics of its methodology, it should, however, have made a better use of the Russian Soviet historiography. Unfortunately, Andrássy confined herself to some publications by N. Postovskaya (1962), T. Savelieva (1962) and Yu. Perepyolkin (1955; 1960); she ignored later and much more important publications by the latter author (1966, with an eventual German translation by R. Müller-Wollermann, 1986; and 1988), as well as the fundamental works by O. Berlev on the Middle Kingdom (1972; 1978) adding to Perepyolkin’s research both in methodology and in the perspective of Egypt’s social evolution from the Third to the Second Millennium B.C. Finally, a regrettable but inevitable omission of not only the book discussed but the entire non-Russian research is the ignorance of a Russian Ph.D. dissertation by an Egyptian post-graduate T. Shehab el-Din defended at St.Petersburg in 1993. This study of the Egyptian autobiographical inscription was supervised by Berlev and bears, in the estimate of his colleagues, to say the least, a huge imprint of his own ideas on the institutions of the Old Kingdom. Notably, the remarks by Berlev on the vizierate of the Old Kingdom laid out in this study would be called for in any research of this topic. Moscow, Russia Ivan Ladynin
- Добавил в систему: Ладынин Иван Андреевич