Online: Year 12 of Akhenaten in the Context of the Near Eastern Political and Military History

History of the Ancient World  

Year 12 of Akhenaten in the Context of the Near Eastern Political and Military History
By Ivan A. Ladynin and Alexander A. Nemirovski
Cultural Heritage of Egypt and Christian Orient No. 5 (2010)

Introduction: When proposing a theme for the Egyptological conference in Helwan, the Arab Republic of Egypt, in May 2005, one of the authors of this article chose at first to talk about the general evolution of Egyptology, with special regard at the gradual decrease of historical studies in it during the 20th century. The thesis he intended to postulate was that this decrease is a great danger to our discipline. When the Egyptologists of the ‘heroic age’ were writing their respective histories of Ancient Egypt1, they were willing to present in them its comprehensive picture reflecting facts as they were known, social conditions and culture of the Egyptian civilization. Now the prevailing trend of Egyptology is the highly specialized studies of language and texts, or religion, or archaeological and artistic artifacts; but these studies, however useful for developing the methods of research, cannot be a value of themselves. They badly want a framework, which would turn each specific achievement of an individual researcher into a piece of an integrate mosaic.