Abstract
IN his Huxley Lecture for 1945 before the Royal Anthropological Institute, the eminent American anthropologist, Dr. A. L. Kroeber, put forward an interesting hypothesis concerning the origin and diffusion of the more important cultures (The Institute 2s. 6d.). The Greek word oikoumenê, ‘the inhabited’, referred to what they thought of as the whole habitable world—that from the Pillars of Hercules to what the Indians called the Seres—a belief which is naturally no longer tenable. But the fact remains that this tract does still correspond to a great historic unit, and if the term is shifted to mean the range of man's most developed cultures, then we have a convenient designation for a set of related happenings and products of significance to both historian and ethnologist.
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RISHBETH, K. The Ancient Oikoumenê as an Historic Culture Aggregate. Nature 158, 387 (1946). https://doi.org/10.1038/158387a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/158387a0