The article is a polemic with the main provisions of the cultural-historical theory of the Indologist and philosopher of culture V.N. Romanov. According to this theory, culture has a dual character, being simultaneously the result of human activity and a set of concepts that require each other. Romanov speaks of the potential text of culture, consisting of its main categories, and believes that any culture of the ancient world went through two stages in its development – sympractical and theoretical. It is shown that the failure to take into account the works of M.K. Petrov, J. Piaget, P. Damerow and G. Selz on the subject of the theory led the researcher’s constructions to a number of problems. Thus, a potential text of culture is possible from within a natural language, but at the same time it is impossible as a collection of categories that are subordinate to each other. In such an interpretation, the connection of categories is nothing more than a heterostereotype of a foreign culture. The theoretical stage does not directly follow from the sympractical stage in the development of culture, since cultures go from primitiveness by alternative paths. Thus, the culture of ancient Mesopotamia knew only the accounting-operational stage after the sympractical. The article provides some of its characteristics. The intellectual work of the Mesopotamian peoples was not to know the world as it is, but to forsee, by appropriating the names of things, all possible cases of interaction with these things, while avoiding empathy with them. Arguments from Indian and Sumerian-Akkadian disputes are considered as examples. It is shown that the cultural-historical theory of V.N. Romanov is applicable to those cultures of the “axial age” in which either the transition from material practice to writing did not occur, or the spoken word was preferred to the written word even after the appearance of signs for writing. However, it is hardly applicable to the study of earlier cultures of the ancient world, in which ritual was built into the written tradition and operations with material objects were preferred to relations between concepts.