Comment by AlotOfReading

The formal name for this kind of argument is "ethnographic analogy". It's widespread in archaeology and institutional history, but doesn't always show up so overtly because

1. It's not very interesting to say "they're just like us" and

2. "like us" is a huge statement hiding a lot of assumptions.

Analogy is also considered a fairly weak argument on its own. There are vanishingly few accepted "cultural universals" despite decades of argument on the subject (which I'll let the wiki article [0] summarize), so justifying them usually follows an argument like "X is related/similar to Y, and X has behavior Z, so Y's behavior is an evolution of Z". That's fine if you're talking Roman->Byzantines, maybe, but it's a bit of a stretch when your analogy is "modern US->Old Kingdom Egypt". It's also very, very easy to get wrong and make a bad analogies. Take basically the entire first couple centuries of American anthropology as an example.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_universal