THE words "culture" and "civilization" carry different meanings for different scholars. In this study both stand for that which is most fundamental and enduring about the ways of a group persisting in time. That is to say, they cover those values, norms, institutions, and modes of thinking to which successive generations in a given society have attached primary importance.

Numerous such discrete cultures have existed in time, and many can be recognized today. However, scholarly accords on the identification of cultures, past and present, cannot be presumed. Civilizations resist reliable mapping, and each scholar is therefore naturally inclined to chart his own way through the labyrinth of culture-related records by relying on mental processes of discernment, analysis, comparison, and evaluation that are congenial to him and his particular academic craft.

One of the major impediments in the path toward agreement is no doubt the fact that a culture—quite contrary in this respect to a state as this political unit is recognized in the modern state system and international law—is not administered by one center of authority and does not have precise boundaries either in space or in time. Indeed the contours of a civilization are bound to be fuzzy if only because the reach and intensity of its influence are unpredictable and because the timing of its impact cannot be controlled. Furthermore, not only are ideas—and these are the structural core of a civilization—airy and fragile entities which cannot be circumscribed as unequivocally as concrete events or institutions; they are also subject to more subtle metamorphoses than the latter in the sense that their life cycle cannot be dated or chronicled in manners common to the writing of straight political or economic history.