What makes civilization?

In his latest book What Makes Civilization? , Dr David Wengrow (UCL Archaeology) provides a new account of the start of civilization in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia (modern-day Iraq). Here, he discusses how Hollywood gives us an inaccurate view of ancient civilisations and how the fundamental daily practices and desires experienced thousands of years ago in the Near East are not so different from today?s.  ?To talk of civilizations is not just to describe the past. It is also to reflect on what is different about the societies we live in, how they relate to one another, and the extent to which their futures are bound up with traditions inherited from previous ages. The ancient Near East occupies a uniquely paradoxical place in our understanding of civilization. We freely acknowledge that many foundations of modern civilization were laid there, along the banks of the Euphrates, the Tigris, and the Nile. Yet those same societies have come to symbolise the remote and the exotic; a world of walking mummies, possessive demons, unfathomable gods and tyrannical kings. Most people today, I would have thought, are more likely to encounter the ancient Near East through the lens of Hollywood than through the biblical and Greco-Roman literature that informed the views of earlier generations.