 Herder initially developed this method in the 1760s mainly in relation to poetry and language. His unpublished Attempt at a History of Lyrical Poetry (1764) contains his earliest presentation of the method and applies it to poetry. His slightly later published work, the Fragments (1767–8), refines his presentation of it and applies it to language. He then goes on to apply the method to moral (and other) values. Thus in This Too a Philosophy of History (1774) he largely focuses on moral, aesthetic, and prudential values, developing the large-scale “genetic” thesis that history has consisted of a great chain of cultures (Oriental patriarchal culture, then Egyptian, then Phoenician, then Greek, then Roman, and so on) that have built on each other cumulatively and thus eventually generated modern European culture (toward which he is strikingly ambivalent). For example, he claims that Greek culture combined antecedent Oriental and Egyptian culture’s obedience with antecedent Phoenician culture’s freedom in a new synthesis, and then passed this on to subsequent European cultures.