“World” superpower: Asian conquests of the Eighteenth Dynasty in pre-war Soviet scientific and educational literature

Abstract

The paper deals with the treatment of the Asian conquests of the Egyptian Eighteenth Dynasty (16th-14th centuries BC) in Russian historiography of the Soviet pre-war period. It is revealed that the influence of a homogenously tendentious massive of Egyptian sources (which naturally portrayed these conquests in an exaggeratedly triumphant light), exerted a kind of pressure on researchers and prompted them also to depict these conquests in an exaggerated way in comparison with the reality that could already in those times be well traced on the basis of then available sources. To explain the reasons for the expansion of the Eighteenth Dynasty in Asia, in the spirit of wide-spread trends of world historiography of the epoch, comparative-speculative constructions and analogies with phenomena of other times rather than the data of Egyptian sources were used. It is noteworthy that such an “estrangement” from the sources, even up to serious contradiction with them, in favor of speculations and distant analogies, was much more developed in Marxist-Leninist speculative schemes (which interpreted Egyptian expansion in Asia first of all as a hunt for slaves) than in works of non-Marxist authors of the epoch who were much more moderate in this respect. B. A. Turaev showed a tendency to correct some generally accepted speculative and exaggerated features of widespread Egyptological schemes of the time in favor of concrete data from sources.