Lifestyle and culture sharply distinguished the upper classes from commoners in early civilizations. The upper classes lived in larger, more imposing, and often cleaner houses, were waited on by servants who attended to their comforts, ate more nutritious food, wore costlier and showier clothing and jewellery, were more fastidious about their personal appearance and hygiene, and cultivated more refined manners. Behavioural stereotypes were dramatically displayed in the upper-class tomb art of Old Kingdom Egypt, where the calm, dignity, and physical perfection of the upper classes were contrasted with the quarrelsomeness, rustic manners, dishevelled appearance, and occasionally malnutrition and physical deformities of the lower classes.

The upper classes often spoke either a more refined version of the national language or a completely different language from most of their subjects. The Aztecs contrasted macehuallatolli, the form of Nahuatl spoken by commoners, with tecpillatolli, the form spoken by the nobility and at the royal palace (Davies 1980: 216; León-Portilla 1963: 140; Marcus 1992a: 528). While the Classic Maya spoke Cholan Mayan in the southern lowlands and Yucatec Mayan farther north, their writing recorded a prestige version of Cholan that developed in the Peten and appears to have been adopted by the upper classes throughout the Maya region (Henderson 1981: 50–52; Houston, Robertson, and Stuart 2000). It is now agreed that emesal was a refined, not a women's, dialect of Sumerian (Oppenheim 1964: 371).