The historical view, trained on the sudden origins of monumental arrangements, celebrates its own projection and thus legitimates its own needs for grandeur. The anthropological view is quite different. It draws much wider circles of cultural developments into its view, not just history, and thus it manages a quite different interpretation than that which appears to the historian as primary and, therefore, original. To the anthropologist, the same object appears in a continuity which reaches much deeper in time. This wider and deeper circle allows for much broader material, gained from cultural comparisons, to be brought into the discussion.
Anthropology works with the whole cultural history of two million years or more.
Architectural anthropology, with its focus on building, space and settlement structures, manages to uncover developments which question our historical view. Evidently, the image of the Egyptian temple is quite different if viewed from the anthropological perspective. With its monumentalised forms, it supports the power of early theocracies of the first empires. It is a semantic system of nuclear demarcation. This is important for the security of spatial existence in the transitional field of sedentary agrarian and cattle breeder societies and the first empires which superseded them.