once more to the axes of scholastic researchers, I have a question or two to pose, Demetrios.

Do researchers consider the possibility that what they are viewing as discrete cultures may not have been anything of the kind? That, like modern-day peoples, they may have been so intermingled with each other that such classifications would have seemed totally out of left field to them? (For example: someone from another planet researching say, an extinct Russia, would find enormous differences between an inhabitant of a city like Moscow, and one from Siberia; yet both belong to the same nation.) And language and/or religion may not be a reliable indicator. People throughout the Middle East, by and large, speak Arabic and follow Islam; but I venture to say that if one were to lump Iranians in the same category as Saudis, or lump Egyptians together with Turks, the individuals involved would have a lot to say about it, and none of it very nice!

It is all too easy to view long dead and vanished peoples in a static, immobile sort of way: as if nothing in their world ever changed, or mutated. But the one thing our own lives should teach us is that change is inevitable, and mutation is normal; and what is true for us was true in the past as well. What do researchers do to avoid looking at an ancient people as if they were merely specimens under a microscope? Or do they even attempt to avoid it?