The Formation and Significance of Assyrian Narrative for the Soviet Historiography of Antiquity

Abstract

The author of the article, using the method of backward chronology, highlights characteristic features of the narrative about Assyria from the beginning of the 21st century until the middle of the 20th century, and points out that I. M. Dyakonoff, who used to be the leading Assyriologist, gradually had delegated to his pupils almost all of the aspects of Assyrian history, retaining the history of Sumer within his major research scope. On the basis of archival documents, the author shows that the Assyrian narrative of I. M. Dyakonoff had been generally shaped even before the war, during his work on the chapters for the multi-volume “World History”. His Assyrian narrative was formed under the influence of the “Cambridge History of Antiquity” and V. V. Struve’s lectures: in the first case, this was evident in the presentation of a large amount of material; in the second case — in the desire to search for non-obvious explanations of the essence of historical processes. Moreover, I. M. Diakonoff did not share V. V. Struve’s views on the Assyrian history and attempted to present his position. The author concludes that the shift of I. M. Diakonoff’s interests from Assyrian history to mainly the history of Sumer was inevitable and was very unlikely to have been caused by the desire to supersede academician V. V. Struve in his status of the classic of Soviet scholarship. Two main factors influenced this transition: first, the features of Soviet historical scholarship, which presupposed a search for in-depth explanations almost exclusively in the socio-economic field, and secondly, the specificity of Assyrian sources, which contained scanty information about socio-economic processes.