Раннее государство в Древнем Египте

Summary

Chapter 1 ("Climate and Landscape") deals with long-term ecological trends that had affected the genesis of Ancient Egyptian civilization. Particular importance is attached to the latest reconstruction of principal climatic rhythms of the Holocene carried out in Moscow Institute of Energy (Russia). Special attention is paid to variations of the Nile discharge and silt deposition, as well as to the eustatic processes by the Delta shoreline.

Chapter 2 ("Enclave Protostate"), analyzing ecological and archaeological data, presents a novel conception of enclave territorial structure of the Archaic state in Egypt, with two capital centres of formation: Memphis at the Delta apex and Thinis in Upper Land. This conception differs fundamentally from traditional egyptological versions of centralized and despotic nature of the early Egyptian state.

Chapter 3 ("Gift-Exchange") paves the way to social-anthropological interpretation of pharaonic history. The hypothesis is argued that primitive gift-exchange was the basic principle of the Early Dynastic political organization in Egypt.

Chapter 4 ("The Old Kingdom"), based on previous ones, suggests a paradoxical idea of the "Pyramid Age" Egypt. The point is that the Old Kingdom, inseparable from the Archaic epoch, had failed in making a despotic state and come to nothing more than a quasi-egalitarian system of relations between kings and nomarchs, according to the qift-exchange principle. Such a system in pharaonic Egypt was secured by the most ancient "private" property dt — "flesh" of its owner, concentrated within large nobles’ estates pr(w) dt and independent of kings’ possessions.

Chapter 5 ("The Middle Kingdom") estimates the epoch under consideration in Egypt as a transitional period from the early state with enclave foundation to the mature centralized "empire" Influenced (not provoked!) ecologically by droughts and low Niles, revolutionär social-political reorganization in the post-Old Kingdom Egypt is argued to have been directly connected with corruption of "private" estates pr(w) dt and elimination of the gift-exchange in Ancient Egyptian society.