This was a difficult question to phrase - but what I'm curious about is: did Asian culture, Middle Eastern culture, European culture, African culture, Mesoamerican culture, etc, generally organize their social hierarchies, agricultural practices, government structures, scholarship, and so on, in similar ways? And if so, was it through trial and error that each came to similar practices that were, in those time periods, the most efficient systems, or through subtle cultural exchange? Or are the similarities I frequently notice in histories of these cultures a product of retroactive attempts by western scholars to provide a western analog to their ostensibly western audience?