Igor Mikhailovich Diakonov, one of the world's largest and most authoritative experts on the ancient East, was born on January 12, 1915 (according to Novomustil) and died after a long serious illness on May 2, 1999. Between these two dates-63 years of scientific activity (counting from his first scientific report in 1936) and all the storms of our time centuries. He was born in Petrograd, lived in Leningrad, and died in St. Petersburg. He was born a citizen of the Russian Empire, was a citizen of the Soviet Union, and died a citizen of the Russian Federation. Two world wars, a revolution, bloody repressions, persecution of dissent, flashes of hope and bitter disappointments - all this he experienced together with the country as everyone who had to live long in these times. The result of this long life (except for children, grandchildren, great - grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren) is about three dozen books and more than five hundred articles, as well as many students and admirers in many countries of the world. The word "about" means, firstly, that the works of I. M. Diakonov continue to be published, and secondly, that he did not know the exact number of them (because he never kept an account of them) and bibliographers do not know (because not all of his works are available in libraries). Creating an exhaustive bibliography is a matter of the future. Now it is only possible to briefly describe the main directions of his scientific activity and his monographic works. All the works of Igor Mikhailovich can be divided into three groups: 1) works devoted to political and socio-economic history; 2) works devoted to languages and scripts of the ancient East; 3) translations of written monuments of the ancient East, historical sources and literary monuments (in the latter case, we are talking about artistic translations). All these three groups consist of original monographs and articles (the vast majority of them, both in number and especially in volume), as w ... Read more