Abstract. Cast rings, made of bronze and precious metals, with images on shields and inserts (cameos and intaglios) are found on urban and rural necropolises in many regions of the ancient world. Products of this type are known among finds of predominantly Hellenistic and Roman periods (scholars date them respectively to the 3rd–2nd centuries BCE and the 1st–4th centuries CE), but they also occur in earlier layers. All the items characterized in this article come from the excavations of ancient Lower Don sites. Despite the objects in question were concentrated in a certain area, they were not separated into the items of Greek and barbarian cultures. Tanais (3rd century BCE – 5th century CE) and Elizavetovskoe settlement (6th–3rd centuries BCЕ) were contact sites of the settled and nomadic population, and this determined the features of the local culture. Trade and political links with the Northern Black Sea settlements explain the existence of analogies and allows us to clarify the semantics of images. The main objective of the study was to analyze the symbolic meanings of apotropaic animals’ images on rings. The study of ancient finger rings, their comparison with the products of other settlements allows us to trace common features in the iconography of mythological characters. The “unification” of images is not accidental, since all of them had to go back to a single original image. The relevance of the topic is due to the lack of generalizing analysis of the Lower Don rings and, in particular, protective functions of their images. The author revealed that according to the beliefs of the local population, apotropaic animals, especially very popular lions and griffins, could protect the deceased in the afterlife and his burial from plunder. Part of the material is published for the first time. All finds are also for the first time considered in the context of the semantics of apotropaic animals’ images. The study shows that the finger rings functioned as apotropes and have similar iconography with different objects of the ancient material culture.

The article provides an example of the use of the Books of Ranks for reconstruction of military careers of the Russian military and political elite in the 16th–17th centuries. The Books of Ranks are the most important source for biographical studies of the period in question, since they contain the information on the most significant appointments to the positions in army regiments and fortress garrisons. Prince V.I. Shuisky, the future czar, attracted the scholarly attention mainly as a political figure of the Time of Troubles. There is still no research on the initial stage of the prince’s career and his military activities. The objective of this article is to reconstruct the military service of Prince V.I. Shuisky in the last third of the 16th century and to fill the gap through studying the Books of Ranks. The work characterizes the official position of the Shuiskys, who occupied an important place in the military hierarchy. The Rise of Prince I.A. Shuisky after the Polotsk campaign shows an increase in the influence of the middle branch of the family. The author analyzes the early years of Prince V.I. Shuisky’s service, represented only in the Books of Ranks, and concludes that the prince fell behind in his career growth. The study reveals the relationship between the prince’s official appointments and the service of his ancestors and relatives. A sharp change of the prince’s official position occurred, most likely, at the will of the czar. The author stresses the link between the military ranks and involvement in the political struggle under Feodor Ivanovich and Boris Godunov. Prince V.I. Shuisky possessed significant military and administrative experience and he was in demand by the army, but did not belong to the most active noblemen in the military service. Despite his high noble status and the subsequent fate of the prince, the information on the first years of his life and activity unrelated to politics is contained mainly in the Books of Ranks, and they have to be deployed as a principal source for biography studies of Russian nobles.

Charles Davenant (1656–1714) went down in the history of Great Britain not only as a publicist, historian, and statesman, but also as a participant in Anglo-Scottish negotiations on a union treaty in the early 18th century. The purpose of this study is to characterize the theorist’s attitude to the problem of the unification of Great Britain. Until now domestic or foreign historiography has barely touched this topic. The article considers the evolution of the theorist’s attitude to the problem of the Anglo-Scottish Parliamentary Union, and also identifies the main arguments used by Davenant in formulating his position. It also seems important to compare the views of the publicist with his English and Scottish contemporaries’ approach to the problem of the union. On the basis of the analyzed sources, it can be judged that Davenant’s attitude to the issue of the union changed under the influence of the political situation and his own career considerations. In the late 17th century Davenant, who at that time aligned himself with the Tory opposition to the government, was an opponent of the union. However, at the beginning of the next century, he returned to public service and supported the union project. The theorist’s new standpoint was reflected in the text of the Memorial relating to a Union between England and Scotland, written by him on the eve of the conclusion of the union. A comparison of Davenant’s views with the work of his contemporaries suggests that his beliefs generally fit into a certain trend in the British public thought of the early 18th century, which characteristically appealed to the idea of economic feasibility of the Anglo-Scottish association. Не considered it possible to “tie” Scotland to England economically, with intensified trade relations and migration between the north and south of Great Britain, which would strengthen the political unity of the two countries. Davenant’s views were also original, as he believed that the unity of Britain could be ensured not only through economic integration, but also through active print propaganda to the people of both parts of the island.

The first decades of the 21st century have witnessed special scholarly interest to a wide range of problems related to the socio-cultural study of collective mentality. This inevitably leads to the actualization of the research on mass historical sources that characterize the public mood in early 20th-century Russia. The “Letters of the Black Hundreds and Other Persons” are kept in the archival fund of the Union of Russian People in the State Archive of the Russian Federation. The fact that letters to political parties and organizations in the early 20th century, unlike to letters to Soviet authorities, have not been fully studied, determines the relevance of the article. The most effective way to analyze conservative and monarchist sentiments reflected in the “Letters of the Black Hundreds and Other Persons” is the method of content analysis, which allows getting the so-called hidden information from the source and significantly increasing its informative output. The result of applying this methodology to the “Letters of the Black Hundreds and Other Persons” was the identification of six significant semantic categories that are most often found in the epistolary texts and, thus, reflect a steady mood of their authors. An analysis of the semantic content of each of the categories made it possible to see all the currents of the public mood revealed by correspondents, and to identify the ideas of the right-wing monarchist ideology dearest to them. Paired occurrence of the most representative semantic categories allows supplementing their characterization. The textual analysis of the “Letters” demonstrated that through their messages the correspondents most actively broadcast their “support for the autocracy”, nationalist statements, anti-revolutionary sentiments, “support for and protection of the Orthodox faith,” upholding of the Union of Russian people and A.I. Dubrovin, personally. The fact that the expressions of support for autocracy and the Orthodox faith, nationalistic and anti-revolutionary statements are simultaneously found in most letters points to the existence of a stable conservative and monarchist mentality among the vast majority of correspondents, and the interpretation of these data in the article clarifies, in many aspects, historiographic assessments of their political and social views.

After the Locarno Conference of 1925, the idea of deploying the Locarno’s experience for concluding multilateral guarantee pacts in other regions of Europe, other than Western, gained particular popularity. Rafael Erich, the Finnish representative in the League of Nations, was a person who voiced this idea as a “Northern Locarno” project. It has not become an object of research in historical literature, as the project was rejected by the involved parties even before its official discussion. However, the study of its perception is necessary for better understanding the political climate in Europe in the mid-1920s and the politics of the minor Baltic countries and the Great Powers advancing their own interests in the Baltic region. The objective of this article is to examine the German reaction to R. Erich’s project as a demonstration of inconsistency in the German Baltic policy. The very idea of developing a multilateral guarantee pact in the Baltic grasped the minds of German diplomats. On the one hand, such a security system would be a bar against German revisionist aspirations in the east. On the other hand, due to the significant economic and political influence of Germany in the Baltic republics, Finland and Sweden, the “Northern Locarno” could be instrumental for maintaining German dominance in the Baltic region. Not daring to speak openly, either for or against the project, the Foreign Ministry of the Weimar Republic limited itself to collecting information from the Scandinavian and Baltic press, which wrote very negatively about the “Northern Locarno”. In addition, the USSR strongly opposed Erich’s project, while one of the primary goals of the German diplomacy was maintaining good relations with it. Finally, Germany refused to support the Finnish project since its alleged negative consequences outweighed positive ones. In subsequent years, the tactics regarding the “Northern Locarno” (i.e. avoiding open discussions and maintaining active interaction with the Soviet Union) were employed by Germany against the Polish plan of an “Eastern Locarno”

The article analyzes critical assessments of the concept of Russia- Eurasia in modern Western literature. The author especially focuses on Marléne Laruelle’s Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire, Alexander Etkind’s Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience and Bruno Maçães’s The Dawn of Eurasia: On the Trail of the New World Order. The author shows that some common shortcomings of these studies are determined by certain principles of the Western intellectual tradition. Thus, M. Laruelle seeks to portray the doctrine of the Eurasians as a heap of contradictions, but her strategy itself reflects the specific positivist rationality of the West, which, due to the adherence to the idea of subject/object opposition, divides the world and universalizes conflicts. This approach that is not wholly alien to Eurasian thinkers accounts for many of the Eurasian movement’s limitations and failures. The theoretical potential of the key concepts of Eurasianism, i. e. “place-development”, “everyday profession of faith”, “demotia” etc., remained unclear. The author offers a new approach to Eurasian thoughts based on the principle of (self)transformation of reality, which leads to the mutual transfiguration of humankind and the world. The afore said limitations of the Western methodology of history are inherent in the book by A. Etkind, who considers the history of Russia from the perspective of the socalled internal colonization. Following J. Habermas, the author defines it as an innovation of modernity, which “falls into the world of life from outside … and force it to assimilate”. The article reveals the inconsistency of this “colonialist” view of the Russian history and indicates the possibilities and real historical phenomena that allow seeing in the history of Russia not so much the colonization of the Russian world by Western “innovations” as meeting points, free “compatibility” of colonization and an alternative worldview, called “countercolonization”. This can be a basis of the global and prospective Euro-Asian world system, which includes Russia. B. Maçães’s book already admits an optimistic scenario of the integration of Eurasia and the West.

The capital’s palace complexes of the 6th–4th-century BCE Achaemenid Iran in Pasargadae, Susa and Persepolis embodied the principle of a synthesis of arts, in which architecture and sculpture, as well as the landscape environment, were organically combined. A special type of Iranian regular garden — a paradise — emerged in the era of the Achaemenids and its remains were excavated by archaeologists in the center of the palace complex in Pasargadae. The analysis of ancient texts (the works by Xenophon and Lucius Flavius Arrian) reveals the specifics of ancient Persian gardens-paradises and hunting parks, their various categories, organizational features and semantics of the palace garden. The study of cuneiform tablets from the “Fortification” and “Treasury” archives of Persepolis also provides valuable data on the hiring of special workers who cared for the royal gardens. Additionally, the Elamite cuneiform tablets from Persepolis evidence the existence of home gardens (“partetaš”) that, being predominantly agricultural, markedly differed from the paradises. The examination of the extant stone irrigation system of the royal paradise in Pasargadae reveals a strict geometric layout of the Achaemenid gardens with intersecting alleys that create a four-part garden structure. Subsequently, Iranian landscape-gardening art will take this composition as the basis of the Persian four-part garden (“chahar bagh”). The presence of compact park pavilions brings the royal paradise of Pasargadae closer to the earlier Assyrian gardens in Khorsabad and Nineveh in the late 8th–7th centuries BCE. In the classical Achaemenid palace complexes in Susa and Persepolis, landscape-gardening art loose its significance and supplemented architecture. Due to this fact, the royal gardens of the Achaemenids in the 5th– 4th centuries BCE were more compact and intimate. In this regard, the author considers the relevant issue of localization of the palace gardens in Susa and Persepolis. He explores the problems of typology and reconstruction of landscapegardening art in Achaemenid Iran on the basis of all the collected archaeological data and written sources.

According to the sources, the term “in Powers” was used in the titles of various Russian iconographies; the widespread and well-known one is: “The Saviour in Powers”. The origin and nature of this image are largely open to question. Its meaning has not been revealed: the word “Powers” can define either “angelic powers” or “divine creative power and might”. The article draws attention to the fact that every Russian icon with “in Powers” in its title has the same quadrangular pointed elements with the symbols of the evangelists. The author suggests that the term “Powers” is related not to the angels, as is commonly believed, but to these star-shaped figures. They are the most noticeable and characteristic details of “The Saviour in Powers” and other iconographies with similar star-shaped objects. And it is reasonable to assume that these iconographies, especially “The Saviour in Powers”, are named after them and not after comparatively small and hardly visible “transparent” angels. In the author’s view, the epithet “in Powers” was initially applied to the icon of the enthroned Savior in a star-shaped “radiance”, which was located in the center of the Deesis row. And here it meant “divine creative power”. Repeating in other icons, these (and similar to them) star-shaped figures should have been associated with the epithet “in Powers” and could add it to their titles. It is also possible that it was attributed to both angelic powers and star-shaped figures that would allow using “powers” in the plural form.

The factory founded by M.V. Lomonosov in the village of Ust’- Ruditsa in 1753 for “manufacturing glass of different colors invented by him, and beads from it, bead stringings and all kinds of other haberdashery items and garments” ceased to exist no later than 1768. The article presents the results of the analysis of smalt glasses made in M.V. Lomonosov’s chemical laboratory and the Ust’-Ruditsa factory in 1749–1767. It allows reconstructing the unique technology of their production. This technique consists in the use of two frits – a high lead “yellow frit” and a potash “white frit”, as well as bone ash and lime. At the first stages of working with glass, the scientist employed ready-made frits produced at other factories. In addition to the bone ash the scientist used white arsenic and antimony as additives that cause the clouding of glass. Thus, we can assume that it was M.V. Lomonosov who, for the first time in Russia, added bone ash as glass opacifier. Using one and the same amount of colorant he managed to change color by varying the ratio of two frits. This explains the long-established fact that, with the help of a relatively narrow set of colorants (copper, iron, manganese, cobalt, antimony, gold and silver compounds), the scientist created the wide palette of smalt glasses. The first attempted mathematical processing of smalt analysis data allows defining the compositions of individual components in glass and the ratio of charge components. It has been suggested that the uniqueness of this technology and its specificity for smalt glass manufacturing served as an obstacle to its employment at other factories. However, M.V. Lomonosov did not work in vain. The skills of “compiling matter”, using colorants, producing “golden ruby” glass and the scientific approach to the technological process were undoubtedly developed at his factory in Ust’-Ruditsa.

At the turn of the 18th–19th centuries an English court portraitist Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830) was able to capture and reveal the character of his outstanding contemporaries who were associated both with Russia and Great Britain. The artist himself never visited Russia. Nevertheless, his work was known here, and Russian patrons and private collectors accumulated his works. The popularity of the artist is evidenced by the fact that several copies of his best works were made. In the first half of the 20th century part of these works were added to the collections of Russian museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts (later called the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts), where they have been held since 1924. The purpose of this article is to show the artist’s ties with Russia using the example of a small but diverse collection of Lawrence’s portraits from the funds of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts: Alexander I, Elizaveta Ksaverievna Vorontsova (née Branitskaya), Nikolai Alexandrovich Sablukov, Antonio Canova, Julia Peel (née Floyd), and Sally Siddons. The article compares the original painted images with their copies and written memoirs of contemporaries, gives descriptions, reconstructs the history of the creation of portraits and their copies, and briefly discusses the provenance of these works. The article also indicates the main phases of the life of Lawrence’s Russian models, relating facts about the patrons’ ties with both Russia and Great Britain. Although in general the work of Thomas Lawrence has been studied in sufficient detail by foreign experts, the article closes a certain gap. This is one of the first studies on the artist’s relations with Russia which describes Lawrence’s works from the collection of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts. The author provides unique data from the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire, the archive of Prince Vorontsov, and also publishes for the first time in Russian the letter written by Robert Peel to Thomas Lawrence, dated January 17, 1825.