The first civilizations were intent upon monumentality: massive architecture, the accumulation of wealth, and geographical expansion. The world which emerges in the chronicles of the time is very different from the world of prehistory we can envision from the residue of ritual forms. Nomadic life was a memory for the groups of people who founded and populated the cultures which have left powerful and flamboyant impressions on history. Unfortunately, history is always the story of dominant peoples and rarely makes reference to minorities except in taking- note of them as "barbarian invaders" who occasionally press upon the boundaries of "civilization."
It is important, however, to recognize a fact that does not make any appearance in history books: primal activities, including dance, always continued to exist beyond the borders of civilizations, untouched and largely unchanged by the surrounding concentration of mechanical progress and technology. Considering the many centuries humanity has been able to assert influence on a worldwide basis, it is astounding how aloof and isolated primal groups have remained from the so-called mainstream of human development. These "barbarians" unwittingly retained much of the fundamental character of ritual and dance. Meanwhile, civilization transformed dance into a ceremonial form focused upon literal ideas.
Egypt, Greece, and, later, Rome were concerned with the organization of a social-political structure in which divinity served humanity rather than the reverse. Spiritual life had become a conscious form of political action. Animism and pantheism with their innumerable fetishes and totems were considered primitive and crude. Power was no longer praised in nature but in a hierarchy of priests, priest-kings, and god-kings.
Human sensibility had undergone a peculiar change: as language had grown more and more to embrace abstractions the mentality of humans had become increasingly logical and positivist. As the speciality of language increased so did verbal exactitude. Ideas were now contained within the framework of a limited and fixed series of signs. But language not only permits us to communicate; it also limits what we can think and what we can convey to each other. The "poetic" ambiguity of primal people was therefore exchanged for an orderly occultism.
When the high priest of Egypt danced the role of the god Osiris in a great religious drama connected with the flooding of the Nile Valley, we easily recognize the sympathetic magic of primal people in his activity.