Abstract

The genesis of civilization has been an enigma for the historian and the social scientist. How does it happen that the homogenous stream of a tribal culture differentiates into the elite and folk traditions? The duality of cultural tradition in civilised societies is widely recognized and is designated by such paired terms as the classical and the lay, the aristocratic and the common, and the great and the little tradition of culture. Apart from architechtonic formulations of the philosophers of history and the various metaphysical and mythological models that we have inherited, this question has to be approached from an empiric angle on the basts of cultural data about ancient civilizations available to us.