The paper treats expressions in which Manetho’s narrative about the Hyksos period, known in literal quotation and detailed retelling by Josephus, describes the actors of power in Egypt at different phases of this period. On the eve of Hyksos invasion, according to Manetho, there was one king in Egypt and “the hegemonizing ones” (rulers, leaders) who stand apart from him in the context, and analysis of the text shows that they are the local rulers who performed quasi-independence under the nominal sovereignty of kings of a certain dynasty. In the phase of Hyksos control over all of Egypt, the Hyksos kings of Avaris are depicted as supreme rulers over the “kings of Thebaid” and “[kings] of other Egyptian lands” who are titularly equated with their Hyksos overlords by Manetho; at some point they overthrow the Hyksos yoke and begin the war against Avaris. By the end of this struggle, by Manetho, only the Theban kings are acting on the Egyptian side. This picture largely coincides with real history (the fragmentation of Egypt before the emergence of the Avaris kingdom and at the times of its hegemony; the division of all of Egypt between Avaris kingdom and the Theban kingdom independent of it in the last phase before the fall of Avaris). This reveals Manetho's high awareness of the real situation of the Second Intermediate Period; some primary sources of this awareness were probably inscriptions and literary compositions that directly reflected the interaction between various local rulers contemporaneous to each other.
The present work deals with serpent-fighting motifs from Anatolia of the second millennium BC reconsidered in the light of recently discovered composition with a serpent-fighting scene on an Old Assyrian seal impression from Kültepe kept at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow (I 2 б 1591). Besides this sealing, the famous representation at the Malatya Relief H (the orthostat AMM 12250) and myths of Illuyanka and Hedammu are compared to each other according to various criteria of depicting the hero, the monster and the fighting scene itself. The scholars often regarded Malatya Relief H as representing the plot of Illuyanka myth, but the discovery of dragon-slaying scene on the Pushkin Museum’s sealing gives grounds for its re-analyzing. It is revealed that the pictorial monuments from Anatolia in contrast to the textual ones depict the hero acting alone; most of Anatolian dragons have front paws.
The ultimate fighting is shown in iconography as a close combat struggle while in the narratives the close combat seems to give more advantage to the serpent. The composition similarity of Malatya Relief and the Pushkin Museum’s sealing is demonstrated in general as well as in concrete details. This fact allows to trace the development of the Neo-Hittite dragon-slaying imagery and plots to pre-Hittite times (the dragon-slaying motif as depicted in the orthostat AMM 12250 roots back at least to the 18th century BC when similar features were reflected at the Old Assyrian sealing from the Pushkin Museum I 2 б 1591) and to solve some problems of interpretation for the Malatya Relief H (number of monster’s heads, identification of monster’s parts stretched up to the hero’s figure, possible role of the dagger, etc.).
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