The alleged 'social revolution' in Egypt: The dispute and conflict between Vassily Struve and Solomon Lurye in the 1920s

Abstract

The article considers an episode of the Leningrad academic life in the 1920s, the dispute between the Egyptologist Vassily Struve and the Classicist Solomon Lurye (Salomo Luria) on the problem of the alleged “social revolution” in Ancient Egypt. Such interpretation of a few Ancient Egyptian texts (first of all, The Admonitions of Ipuwer and The Prophecy of Neferty) was forwarded by V. Struve not later than in 1919; it was connected with the interpretations of his teacher Boris Turaev and of the German Egyptologist Kurth Sethe and largely coincided with the vision of these texts by Adolf Erman, the leader of the German Egyptological school at the beginning of 20th century. In the early 1920s, this hypothesis was met with strong objections by S. Lurye, who denied the historical message of the texts. The dispute turned into a conflict caused by S. Lurye’s accusations of plagiarism against V. Struve. Symptomatically, the background both for this dispute and the conflict that followed could be the difference between the attitudes of V. Struve and S. Lurye towards the Russian revolution: S. Lurye welcomed it (especially its stage between February and October 1917), while B. Turaev and, at that time, his pupil V. Struve saw in it, first of all, a great upheaval (the same must be true about A. Erman’s attitude towards the German revolution of 1918). The article publishes the detailed drafts of V. Struve’s response to S. Lurye’s accusations.

Keywords

• solomon lurye
• vassily struve
• egypt
• “social revolution”
• the admonitions of ipuwer
• the prophesy of neferty
• dispute
• plagiarism