The whole process of the birth and development of human civilization and well-known historical facts give reason to believe that social processes in ancient society were accompanied not only by the accumulation of knowledge about the world around us, but also, most importantly of all - the emergence of a wider class of phenomena - the phenomenon of culture, which, with historical and modern expansive interpretation, covers both the spiritual and material spheres of society and is the result of the physical, spiritual and creative activities of people. The phenomenon of culture has become the subject of research in the totality of not only social sciences and attracts the attention of researchers of various scientific areas. The existing many theories and various definitions that reveal individual aspects, moments and sides of culture reflect the complexity and versatility of the phenomenon itself. This factor explains the lack of generally accepted cultural theory and mutually agreed definitions in science. This situation in science is also caused by subjective moments, which boil down to the fact that the concept of culture denotes a variety of phenomena and objects. Ontological aspects of culture as a systemic phenomenon lead to important conclusions. First, as any social phenomenon, culture appears as a non-equilibrium, open system in continuous information exchange with the external environment. Secondly, the culture has an immanent sign of development caused by the interaction between the components of the system and the environment. Thirdly, culture is an organic system where the components included in its composition acquire additional new qualities so that the system as a whole has more functional capabilities than a mechanistic system. Culture can be seen as a historically conditioned self-organizing system. Its components, being homogeneous, are combined into integrity around the core of the culture. This core is represented by a collection of certain basic phenomena - cultural universals. They are the essence of the ultimate foundations of culture as being in this historical era.