Tiumenev, Aleksandr Ilich

Born Aug. 12 (24), 1880, in St. Petersburg; died June 1,1959, in Leningrad. Soviet historian specializing in ancient history. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1932).

Tiumenev graduated from the faculty of history and philology at the University of St. Petersburg in 1904. He was a research worker at the Leningrad Division of the Communist Academy from 1928 to 1931 and the State Academy of the History of Material Culture from 1931 to 1938.

Tiumenev’s principal works dealt with the history of ancient Eastern and classical societies, the methodology and sociology of history, and problems of Russian and world history. He was the author of the first Marxist works to treat the history of ancient Greece and Rome as the history of a single slaveholding formation with its own specific laws of development. He dealt with the socioeconomic history of Sumer in his important work The State Economy of Ancient Sumer (1956). Tiumenev considered the ancient East and the classical world to represent two different types of slaveholding societies.

Tiumenev was awarded the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.