Vol 83, No 1 (2023)

The so-called “Daiva inscription” of Xerxes found in Persepolis addresses the activity of this Achaemenid Persian king in two lands, one of which is said to have been in commotion, while the other is alluded to have been characterized by unacceptable religious practices. Xerxes stresses his involvement in the restoration of order in both countries but does not mention their names. Egypt, Babylon, Greece and Bactria were all adduced as candidates by 20th-century scholars, while the recent mainstream scholarship tends to interpret the same accounts as abstract ideological statements without an anchor in time or space. The new approach advocated in this paper assumes that Xerxes resorted to historical narratives only in order to provide his own apologetic version of embarrassing events. In particular, his self-professed involvement in the destruction of the cults of evil gods is to be interpreted as a twisted account of the destruction of the Acropolis of Athens by the Persian army in 480 BCE. In the wake of the disastrous war against the Greeks, Xerxes strove to present it as a successful special operation against the Greek deities.

It is suggested that some kind of markers could be used to show the sequence of events in extensive motivation clauses of biographical honorific decrees, especially from the Hellenistic period. In order to find such markers, we analysed the most fully preserved honorary decrees from Olbia, Istros, Odessos and Apollonia Pontica. An attempt is made to determine how such markers were used by authors of policy decisions.

According to Roman surveyors, history of the most common system of Roman orthogonal surveying – limitatio – goes back to the disciplina etrusca, a complex of Etruscan rituals. There is no consensus among specialists regarding the degree of Etruscan influence on Roman surveying, since the Etruscan achievements in orthogonal surveying are scarcely known and the orthogonal plans of the Greek colonies in Southern Italy are much more famous. The archaeological evidence, in particular, the research of the Etruscan colony in Marzabotto, shows that there are traces of orthogonal surveying on the territory of the Etruscan cities. The organization of these settlements is close to the Greek cities with orthogonal surveying; however, there are also some features, which can be explained by the influence of disciplina etrusca. Some of them (the apparent orientation of the main roads of the settlement to the cardinal points, the presence of special signs at the roads’ intersection) were also important for the imperial surveyors, even though they recognized a need to take into account features of landscape and other practical considerations. The earliest traces of Roman land surveys, close to limitatio, date back to the 3rd century B.C. It can be explained by a closer knowledge of the disciplina etrusca, which became possible after the conquest of the main Etruscan religious centers.

This is the first publication of ancient coins from the collection of Chelyabinsk archaeologist Nikolay K. Minko (1880–1920), stored in the State Historical Museum of the Southern Urals (Chelyabinsk). This significant collection of coins (854 pieces), mostly of silver, has not been investigated yet. Forty-nine eastern Greek coins in the Minko’s collection are of particular interest, including the coinages of centers of Asia Minor, the Seleucids, Arsacids (Parthian and Elymaean), Sasanids, Ptolemies, as well as the Roman provinces of Syria and Egypt. This material expands the corpus of Seleucid, Ptolemaic, Parthian, Elymaean, and other Greek coins in the collections of Russian museums.

The article contains a publication and a tentative interpretation of a group of artifacts from the Egyptian collection of the A.S. Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (ГМИИ I.1a.5001, 4688, 4687, 4689, 4691, 4690–5005). Those are the masks placed on the mummies of sacred falcons and representing an Egyptian king. No analogies to them are known. The analysis shows that the masks’ images correspond to the standard of royal iconography used in the 3rd and the 4th centuries B.C. and that they can be attributed with enough certainty to Ptolemy II Philadelphus (282–246 B.C.). The masks belonged initially to the collection of Vladimir Golenischev, their provenance and the circumstances of their acquisition are unknown but one can suggest they originate from the necropolis of sacred falcons at North Saqqara. They could have been in use there in the reign of Ptolemy II, intended to stress the incorporation of divinity in him and his sacral legitimacy.

The introduction of Latin in Soviet schools remains an unexplored topic today. There are only brief accounts of this experiment in the memoirs of contemporaries. This article reconstructs the course of the reform on the basis of normative and legal documents, records, and memoirs, in which the most active phases can be distinguished: 1944–1948 and 1952–1954. The author manages to determine that A.V. Mishulin and N.F. Deratani had the greatest influence on the promotion of the idea of introducing Latin in school. However, the inconsistent implementation of the initiative, the lack of proper organization and methodological work and the lack of measures to explain the innovations to the general public led to the rapid curtailment of the reform. As a decisive reason for the exclusion of Latin from the curricula of Soviet schools the abolition of separate education in 1954 is called.

The symposium organized by Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University in cooperation with the Russian Historical Society (branch in the Republic of Tatarstan), the Russian Society of Intellectual History (Kazan Branch), the Russian Association of Antiquaries and the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences was dedicated to the 350th anniversary of the birth of Peter I (1672) and the 1100th anniversary of the adoption of Islam by the Volga Bulgaria (922).

On October 26-28, 2022, the All-Russian Scientific Conference "Zhebelev Readings-XXIV" was held at the Institute of History of St. Petersburg State University. The conference was attended by more than 80 scientists from universities, research institutes and museums in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kazan, Kaliningrad, Nizhny Novgorod, Rostov-on-Don, Samara, Saratov, Surgut, Yaroslavl, as well as from Belarus, Germany and Mexico.

Alexander Borisovich Nikitin was born in Moscow. His mother, Valentina Ivanovna, taught at the Moscow Architectural Institute, his father, Boris Semenovich, was a captain of the first rank, the author of a documentary story about the everyday life of intelligence "Green Sleeves". Being an excellent musician, after retiring, he became interested in the history of music and published two books devoted to the biographies of P.I. Tchaikovsky and S.V. Rachmaninov.

As far as we know, there were no monographs dedicated specifically to the first years of post-Mullanite Rome until recently, and the publication of the work in question by Oxford University lecturer Alison Rosenblit can only be welcomed. The author presents his work to the reader in this way: "This book is about the fragility of the Sullan settlement. Therefore, on the one hand, this is a story about the 70s and especially those that followed immediately after the autocracy of Sulla, 1979-1977.

In 1995, in the journal "Analecta Bollandiana", P. van Minnen published a text preserved on papyrus from the collection of Duke University (Durham, North Carolina). This text is the earliest hagiographic evidence of the martyrs preserved in the Coptic language, and is of interest by this very fact. But no less interesting is the story of the wanderings of the papyrus R. Duke. inv. 438 in modern times.