On December 26, 2009, barely reaching the age of sixty (born November 20, 1949), Andrey Mikhailovich Samozvantsev died suddenly. The external outline of his life was uncomplicated. He studied at the Department of Ancient World History of the Moscow State University Faculty of History (1967-1972) and here acquired the habit of scrupulous work with sources. The supervisor of the thesis on "Arthashastra" was E. M. Medvedev, who drew his attention to the problem of land ownership - one of the main ones for determining the social system of Ancient India. Andrey had the closest friendly relations with Evgeny Mikhailovich until the latter's death in 1985. A. M. Samozvantsev defended his PhD thesis in 1975 at Moscow State University on the topic "Theory of land ownership in Ancient India". It was published in 1978 as a monograph entitled "Property Theory in Ancient India". By this time, he had already become a researcher at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences. The change in the title of the work was due to the fact that Andrey Mikhailovich was not interested in socio-economic problems of land ownership, but rather in the terminology of sources and the relationship between the concepts of property and ownership in Indian law. He gave in his book a thorough analysis of fragments of the dharmashastra and Arthashastra on the issue of proof of property rights. He demonstrated, in particular, that, despite the use of different terminology, the Arthashastra reflects the same range of ideas as in the dharma literature. During his post-graduate years, A. M. Samozvantsev continued to study " Arthashastra "with the author of these lines - and in the late 1970s our book"Arthashastra: Problems of Social Structure and Law" was published. It was based on the commented translation of the third book of the monument devoted to legal topics. In addition to participating in the translation and commentary of the source text, Andrey Mikhailovich also wrote the research c ... Read more