Kulturowe przyczyny rozwoju i upadku Sumeru oraz Starego Państwa egipskiego
The Cultural Causes of the Rise and Fall of Sumer and The Egyptian Old Kingdom

Summary/Abstract: RESEARCH OBJECTIVE: The main goal of this article is to broaden the hermeneutic viewpoint by examining processes that occurred in early writing cultures. The purpose of this is to provide a more complete answer to the question: “What features of culture promote social integration, and which are crisis inducing?” The analyses presented in the article serve to delineate a field of research that could determine the features of legitimate interpretations of social processes. Additionally, these analyses outline the perspectives for further critical research on the culture forming potential of early narratives. THE RESEARCH PROBLEM AND METHODS: The article examines the problem of the validity of descriptions of early historic cultures, in which the social context is fragmentary and descriptions from the time are strongly tainted with mythology. Basic philosophical methods are applied: comparative and meta philosophical analysis combined with hermeneutics and elements of philosophical dialectic. THE PROCESS OF ARGUMENTATION: The article begins with an out line illustrating the stages preceding the emergence of the first historic cultures. The broad perspective used in the description serves to reveal a fuller sense of the first known narratives, where the answer to questions about the sources of the human world is an important theme. Selected contents of Egyptian and Sumerian literature are analyzed; significant similarities and differences of both cultures are indicated, and the role of large architectural undertakings for social processes is discussed. An analysis of Egyptian and Sumerian institutional structures allowed for the formulation of generalized conclusions concerning the causes of major crises and ways to overcome them. RESEARCH RESULTS: The comparative analysis of Sumer and of the Old Kingdom of Egypt enabled us to grasp how culture forming processes proceed in societies with low literacy levels. Characteristics of religious message with a high degree of metamorphic thinking helped shed light on the most significant interpretive errors made based on the criteria of modern pragmatism. The analysis also demonstrated the limited possibilities of understanding pre philosophical societies shaped in contexts that vary significantly from contemporary ones. CONCLUSIONS, INNOVATIONS, AND RECOMMENDATIONS: The comparative analysis conducted here allowed us to demonstrate the need for further research, revealing deficiencies in existing studies in the fields of philosophy of religion, social psychology, and art theory; as well as to tentatively expand on Piotr Steinkeller’s postulate to study cultures “on their own terms.” At the same time, at a general level, it helped to outline a field of research that could provide new arguments explaining the reasons for the slowdown in the development of early writing cultures, and expand on general hypotheses concerning which socio-cultural characteristics accelerate the rate of development and which characteristics impede it, generating crises. The analyses presented in the article can be interpolated into research on contemporary social processes, weakening dogmatic tendencies based on interpretive schemes.

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