Oriental Despotism after sixty years of ancient history : Marxist historians of antiquity to the new archaeology of the Achaemenid Empire (1964-2025)
Type de matériel :
TexteLangue : français Détails de publication : 2025.
Ressources en ligne : Abrégé : Pierre Briant is Professor emeritus at the Collège de France, Paris, where he has taught The History and Civilization of the Achaemenid World and the Empire of Alexander the Great from 1999 to 2012. The scholar shows how the ideas of Karl Wittfogel developed in his Oriental Despotism gradually vanished from the historiography of the Ancient Orient. First, Marxists and Marxologists such as Pierre Vidal-Naquet engaged themselves in a sharp critique of the book translated to French in 1964. Since then, as Pierre Briant explains in his new book Sur les traces de l’empire des Grands rois. Enquête d’historiographie (1931-2023), Les Belles Lettres, 2025, critical primary sources have been uncovered, with Oriental Despotism losing any relevance for the specialists of the Achaemenid empire.
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Pierre Briant is Professor emeritus at the Collège de France, Paris, where he has taught The History and Civilization of the Achaemenid World and the Empire of Alexander the Great from 1999 to 2012. The scholar shows how the ideas of Karl Wittfogel developed in his Oriental Despotism gradually vanished from the historiography of the Ancient Orient. First, Marxists and Marxologists such as Pierre Vidal-Naquet engaged themselves in a sharp critique of the book translated to French in 1964. Since then, as Pierre Briant explains in his new book Sur les traces de l’empire des Grands rois. Enquête d’historiographie (1931-2023), Les Belles Lettres, 2025, critical primary sources have been uncovered, with Oriental Despotism losing any relevance for the specialists of the Achaemenid empire.
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