The Institute’s main task is training specialists in the history and philology of Classical Orient and Antiquity. The Institute is unique in that Orientalists, Classical philologists and ancient historians work there under the same roof as a team, which enables it to advance a wide range of interdisciplinary areas of research and teaching techniques.

The teaching at the Institute is inseparable from scholarly research, translation of ancient Eastern, Greek and Roman records, and publishing. The Institute’s research fellows are engaged in a wide variety of subjects ranging from linguistic to cultural studies.

The principal fields of specialization are: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Laos and Thailand, Mongolia and Tibet, Iran, ancient India, the Muslim India and Pakistan, the languages and cultures of Dravidian India, Turkey and Turkic-speaking countries of Central Asia, the Arab world, Africa—Ethiopia and Eritrea, ancient Mesopotamia, the Old Testament and its world, the Christian Orient, Syriac and Neo-Aramaic studies, ancient Greece and Rome, the archaeology of the ancient East, eastern and south-eastern regions of Russia.

The Institute conducts research in close cooperation with Russian and international centres of learning.

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