>>4533569The presence of cities, roads, art, and trade are not indications of civilization. Even neolithic humans had those things. It's a public trust that keeps people peaceful far in proportion to the military force that it would take to subjugate them.
There's not really a clear point that marks the transition from crude despotisms to civilization, but they roughly begin forming in the aftermath of the Bronze age collapse, starting with the Neo-Assyrians who were the first culture with an actual state, and culminating with the Greeks and Romans, who were the first to really sit down and write about their societies as alphabets made writing simpler, and start to question the ways that they were arranging their societies and having built-in processes for evoking change that didn't involve backing the right members of the royal family.
There were older cultures which could be considered primitive or early civilizations. Indus Valley and Phaoronic Egypt can be considered early civilizations as the ruling family controlled the river and functioned as a hydraulic despotism that effectively ruled society as a state, enforcing the peace on account of how much more powerful it was than every other family. Even China got its start this way, and why even from the beginning China had a strong concept of a government and central bureaucracy which managed the economy and kept the peace. In Sumeria they were really confederations of pastoralist elders and eventually city conquerors maintaining the peace by naked force, but the first true nation-state was arguably the Persian Empire.
