In the course of analyzing history, there are some competing frameworks and concepts that pose apparent conflicts and contradictions, which we are trying to clear up and reconcile here.
In particular, we have on one hand a cyclical account of history, in which civilizations rise and fall with a somewhat dependable and regular occurrence. On the other hand, there is the linear conception of history, in which there is a discernable arc of historical changes going in a certain direction.
If you read Spengler for example, you can see a fine example of the cyclical account at work. He likes to posit each great Culture and Civilization as distinct and bounded organisms, with too much intermingling and dependency seen as a corruption, and which rise in fall in dependable rhythms and patterns in specific regions of geographic space and across specific stretches of time.
This is a useful conception that is developed to have a certain character, useful for explanatory purposes, and it contains important lessons that our linear progress-minded culture repeatedly ignores. But it is also only part of the picture. I'd also posit that there is far more interpenetration and interconnection between great powers across space and even time, and this too has important explanatory power and contains lessons of its own.
There does seem to be a cumulative path of development, in which technological, economic, political, and social change builds on itself, with some lost in the course of various collapses, and then some of it retained and carried away from the detritus.
Nothing new about this, but a spiral can be synthesized out of the cycle and the directional arrow, which has its own particular uses in the course of analysis.
