This course aims to raise students' awareness of the diachronic aspect of culture. As a historical phenomenon, it is the result of a distillation process in which the intellectual operatives have exercised a selection of those issues that have proved to be appropriate for ideological and political legitimation. By analyzing culture at the service of the dominant, one acquires a critical perception of what appears to constitute an immovable block, that is, culture as the repository of everything worth knowing, disseminating and enjoying. From this perspective, it is possible to understand the reasons why the foundations of culture and its contents are some and not its opposites, or others forgotten. The knowledge of cultural references throughout history contributes to understanding why the awareness that culture has been the repository of legitimisation of the oligarchies generates a reaction of opposition to this formalised and closed baggage, giving rise to the emergence of cultural procedures that are the object of this degree. CONTENTS: 1.- The origins of cultural production: cognitive theories about thought, religion and artistic production in stateless societies. 2.- The literary production at the service of the first theocracies: cosmogonies, theogonies and annals. The Mesopotamian epics and the Greek epic. A literary genre to sing to the gods and heroes. 3.- Annals and history: you proceed for the memory and the memory of men. The creation of the historical narrative. Theatre for the democratization of epic stories. A new architectural, sculptural and literary canon. 4.- The emergence of universal empires and narrative fiction: novels, biographical stories. The pedagogical function of literary production. Alexander, model emperor. The manifestations of popular culture. 5.- Translatio Imperii. Christianized Romanity. The symbolic discourses of appropriation and rejection: good and bad emperors; a Christian ethics avant la lettre. Trafficking in relics and martyrdom stories. Classicism, Christianity and Germanism. The foundations of feudal culture. Medieval epic and troubadours. Centres of cultural production in the Middle Ages. 7.- Humanistic culture. The re-reading of the classic past in the construction of identities: family genealogies, cities and nations. Popular culture and cultural production of the elites. 8.- Court culture and absolute monarchies. Ideological foundations of imperial culture. The appropriation of the past: Museums and zoos. The creation of a new global story. A new re-reading of the past: Romanticism, nationalism, folklore. New critical perspectives on cultural heritage studies.