ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the categorisation of the universe which allowed the concept first of time and human time to emerge alongside the concept of qualities or attributes which could be given to time. In Ancient Egypt the social universe consists of a vast number of kinds of entities: humans, animals, gods, weather, stones, the sea, which co-existed in time split between the present and the eternal afterlife. Ancient Greek culture located humans in their interaction with the Gods with its own history through the ages. The chapter considered some of the ways in which this was addressed, looking at the development of imagery of the Tree of Jesse in the West, which was to be laterally applied to the family tree. The tree-like paradigm was popularised in the West by Christianity and was passed down to underpin descriptions of the systems of relatedness such as family and kinship. Thinking about the generation concept through pre-modernity is challenging yet fruitful.
