A temptation for many who are concerned with history and the typology of cultures and civilization is to say, ‘That didn’t happen, so it couldn’t have happened’, or, in other words, ‘This is unknown to me, so it must be impossible’. This in fact means that the chronological section, so tiny in comparison with the total written and oral history of mankind, which we can study thanks to the written documents which have been preserved, is taken as the norm for the historical process, and the culture of this tiny period as the standard for human culture.1