What Makes Civilization?
World Civilizations
Civilization is most often described as something advanced, the literal dictionary definition — “the stage of human social and cultural development and organization that is considered most advanced” — as though humanity at its apex is somehow better in some moral, intellectual, or ethical sense. From our perspective, that seems to be how many view ancient civilizations.
But I want to look at things from a different angle, one that strips away the judgmental language, and that digs into what the emergence of civilization means — a sustained survival, the ability for humans to group, reproduce, feed, and protect themselves from outsiders, coordinate under shared values and symbols over long, sustained periods of time. It is apparent from this angle that progress is a byproduct of civilization, but what that progress really means is adaptive survival. To break our bias toward our modern world, I want to analyze what makes a civilization.
One. Reproduction. This one is quite simple and, in many ways, is a topic we hear in modern civilizational narratives. Without reproduction, human groups (societies, cultures, and civilizations) would simply disappear. Disease. Accident. Environmental hazards. War. Starvation. External enemies. There are so many avenues where civilization can collapse, threats from all angles. One defense against this is a constant renewal (even expansion) through biological life — sustaining numbers, which helps to sustain social order and continuity across generations — life making more life. That is biological, social, spiritual, cultural, and an endless list of every aspect of a civilization.
Two. Food. This one is obvious — food and water sustain life and provide energy; without food, no person lives, and without a reliable food surplus, communities cannot settle in one place long enough to develop social complexity. There are many elements that go into a civilization, moral or not, from today’s perspective: social hierarchy, patriarchy, bureaucracy, laborers and elites, spiritual leaders, slaves — each is still present in our civilizations today (no matter how hard we try).
Three. Protection. This is what our Founding Fathers would consider another “natural right” — the protection of self, family, and community, all part of the bridge toward sustained civilization. A group cannot have a civilization if it cannot protect its food or reproductive sources (women) — and it is only when protection is secure that the distribution of labor can occur, which allows some in that civilization to specialize and organize beyond the immediate needs of food and labor created through reproduction.
Four. Communication. Civilizations are required to coordinate, share ideas, negotiate roles of labor, leadership, and spiritual guidance, transmit knowledge through history (oral, artistic, and written), celebrate meanings, and express a cultural glue that keeps a society intact. Communication is what turns a band of survivors into a society capable of enduring over years, decades, centuries, and if they are lucky, millennia.
None of these pillars is an abstract virtue, but merely a condition to allow for sustained human organization to emerge and persist in the face of a predatory world. The philosophical debates over what is right and wrong, and what is virtuous or not, only emerge after the four pillars of civilization are met. And in order for these pillars to be established, the steps between the philosophical debates and the pillars of human civilization are hierarchies — of gender, class, race, and slavery — that emerge after civilization accumulates structure and security, and before the ideas of a moral, intellectual, or ethical sense.
Pre-civilizational groups meant there was little differentiation between men and women, and generally little formalized patriarchal authority. In these societies, women and men both contributed to subsistence in meaningful ways. In California’s native societies, women gathered plant foods and often contributed to hunting, challenging the simplistic myth that prehistoric life consisted of men who hunted and women who only gathered. In fact, for most of human history, our ancestors lived in relatively egalitarian groups of small mobile bands of hunter-gatherers — but the trade-off was that they lived lives of great uncertainty and vulnerability.
This dynamic changes — dramatically — with the shift to agriculture, settlement, and the accumulation of surplus. Once communities settle, labor begins to be divided not only by physical capacity but also by social function. Food surpluses must be stored and defended. Lineage and inheritance become matters of survival. In this context, women’s biological roles in reproduction — carrying, birthing, nursing, and teaching young children — suddenly take on systemic economic significance. Women are no longer just contributors to daily subsistence — they become the biological basis of a community’s future — and I would argue that even in hunter-gatherer societies, this was true, as seen in tribal groups, the patriarchal structure still faintly exists.
My theory on where institutional rights for women emerge — when and where they exist in the ancient world — appears only within societies that had already developed significant central authority, property systems, codified law, and military strength. In ancient civilizations, only when a group developed significant central authority, property systems, codified law, and military strength did women have the opportunity to enjoy broader civilizational rights. Before a society has largely solved those problems and built structures that protect its accumulation and enforcement, do pathways open for women’s rights? Again, these pillars are not about abstract virtues, but merely conditions.
In Mesopotamia, some women could own businesses, enter into contracts, and live independently — rights that existed within a broader patriarchal framework in which husbands and male relatives nonetheless held legal authority. In ancient Greece, women were largely excluded from political participation, could not own land freely, and were confined to domestic roles, unable to vote or inherit in most city-states. In the Byzantine Empire, legal reforms allowed women to inherit, manage property, and engage in business, reflecting the influence of Roman legal traditions — yet even these rights operated within a society that increasingly enforced gender segregation and confined women’s public roles.
And here is the uncomfortable conclusion I have arrived at this paradox — that women gain rights most visibly in societies where patriarchy is strongest. When a society has strong military protection, secure food supplies, and stable bureaucratic institutions, it can afford legal categories, contracts, inheritance law, and property rights that apply to all citizens. These frameworks can — at least on paper — grant women agency within the larger patriarchal order precisely because the community’s survival is no longer in immediate jeopardy.
In contrast, where survival is daily and precarious in hunter-gatherer societies, formal legal structures are rare, and authority is exercised through personal negotiation and cooperation rather than through codified control. Only when societies build strong defenses, centralized power, and complex legal systems do explicit rights for women appear — not because patriarchy disappears, but because civilization as a whole has evolved enough to formalize roles and relations that were previously adaptive and flexible.
Thus, civilization’s emergence reveals a deeper truth: civilization is not simply the accumulation of goods, art, or bureaucracies — it is the transformation of raw survival into organized hierarchy, and the gender order that we call patriarchy is one of its most durable outcomes.
Bibliography | Notes
Berger, Eugene, George L. Israel, and Charlotte Miller. World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500. Dahlonega, GA: University Press of North Georgia, 2016.
Cartwright, Mark. “Women in Ancient Greece.” World History Encyclopedia, July 27, 2016. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/927/women-in-ancient-greece/.
Cartwright, Mark. “Women in the Byzantine Empire.” World History Encyclopedia, April 06, 2018. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1212/women-in-the-byzantine-empire/.
Mark, Joshua J.. “Women in Ancient Mesopotamia.” World History Encyclopedia, October 07, 2022. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/2081/women-in-ancient-mesopotamia/.
Rawls, James J., and Walton Bean. California: An Interpretive History. 10th ed. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2003.