Egyptian slavery in the early writings of M.A. Korostovtsev

The article focuses on the early scholarship of the Soviet Egyptologist Mikhail Korostovtsev (1900–1980), who dedicated himself to historical research only in the second part of his life. His academic works prior to the Second World War were not numerous, but his dissertation about Egyptian slavery during the 18^th dynasty became an important text marking a new stage in the Soviet historiography of antiquity because the theory of the ‘slave-owning society’ was considered to be the sign of ‘true’ Marxism-Leninism. Korostovtsev’s understanding of the social structure of the Ancient Near East was substantially influenced by his supervisor Vasiliy Struve, but Korostovtsev was not merely a disciple of Struve, for his own work with ancient sources and his conclusions show much higher accuracy than Struve’s. Moreover, he found no evidence for a large number of slaves during the 18^th dynasty, neither among the captive slaves nor among the private ones, except for a few examples that do not prove a widespread distribution of slavery. In this respect we could think of Korostovtsev as of a disciple of Yuri Perepyolkin, because in the same years he defended the ideas of Perepyolkin in his letters to Abram Ranovich: according to Korostovtsev, Marxist theory would become fruitless if it rushed to generalizations without proper verification by facts. In his own research, however, Korostovtsev was only balancing between the asserted generalizations about slavery in ancient Egypt and the actual evidence for the relatively modest spread of slavery during the 18^th dynasty.