An essay by Denis Keyer "Why Does the Future Lie Behind? The Myth of Cultural Studies in the Light of Linguistic Data" dismisses the view that ancient Greeks regarded the future as lying behind their back since it was invisible. The same peculiar perception of time was erroneously attributed to many other peoples on the grounds that in different languages the same word is used in the sense of ‘behind’ and ‘in the future’. In fact, this semantic model is almost universal and should be explained otherwise. Relative temporal concepts (‘earlier’ and ‘later’) develop from the spatial image of two (human) beings moving in the same direction: the one going ahead comes earlier and the one following him comes later. That is why the future or forthcoming events are described as lying ‘behind’ and the past or the previous events as lying ‘in the front’. The Homeric idiom ‘to look ahead and back (πρóσσω καὶ ὀπίσσω)’ (Il. I, 343 etc.) implies spatial circumspection rather than the insight into the future and the past.