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Early Antiquity

Translated by Alexander Kirjanov
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.

486 pages | 4 maps | © 1991

Anthropology: Physical Anthropology

History: Ancient and Classical History

Table of 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 Invastion
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
Maps
Index

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