Knowing the cultural historical process, it is essential to provide students with the appropriate analytical tools so that they can critically study the conditions of cultural production, its formalization as changing ideological foundations and the mechanisms of selection, transmission and reception throughout the different historical stages. In the western world, classical culture has become the repository of knowledge essential for the formation of the oligarchies and the cadres necessary for administration. Thus, the cultural history of the West becomes a sequence of re-readings of the classical world that adapt to the needs, aesthetic and political, in a permanent dialectical relationship between past and present. Consequently, it is necessary in a degree of Cultural Studies not so much the erudite knowledge of the contents of a history of culture, but the foundations of the relationship between the past and the present to reveal the mechanisms of justification of inequalities from the formalization of a supposedly unalterable culture. CONTENTS: 1.- Cultural foundations of Mesopotamian civilizations: Myths, monarchs, libraries and sanctuaries. The transmission of culture in the Near East empires. 2.- Tombs, mummies, papyrus and political legitimation in Egypt. Egyptomania and Chaldean wisdom: imaginary references of classical culture. 3.- Greek culture under construction. From Winckelmann to the actual Héllas. Graecia capta. The reception of Greek culture in Rome. 4.- The Roman Empire, a model of cultural construction. Rome's legacy and cultural selection. 5.- The transmission and reception of classical culture in medieval Europe and the Renaissance. The role of monasteries in cultural creation. The origin of universities. 6.- The Renaissance reinterpretation of the classical past. The triumph of anthropocentrism. 7.- Baroque, Illustration and Classicism. The origins of individualism. The 19th century: the break with the classical world and the construction of new references of legitimacy. 8.- The supports of culture: material production, agents, media, promotion, diffusion and consumption. Organic intellectuality, cultural references and power. Culture as an instrument of prestige and domination: elite culture and popular culture, art and crafts.