An eye-opener about whether Europe was at civilisation’s origins
WHEN Prof James Small, a pan-African activist scholar and speaker, stated that Europe never built a civilisation, he was not indulging in exaggeration. He was dismantling a carefully constructed historical illusion — one that presents Europe as the natural source of human progress and the rest of the world as late, grateful recipients. That illusion collapses the moment history is allowed to speak honestly. Small argues that Empire is not Civilisation. War cultures are not true civilisations. Conquest, extraction, and domination — hallmarks of Europe’s imperial past — are death projects, not human ones. When a system is built on supremacy, equality becomes its greatest threat.
Parity exposes the myth of superiority — and that is what terrifies supremacists.
Civilisation did not begin in Europe. Long before Europe emerged from scattered tribes and feudal loyalties, ancient civilisations had already laid the foundations of organised human life. Along the Nile, the civilisation of Kemet — misnamed “Ancient Egypt”- developed mathematics, geometry, astronomy, medicine, engineering, moral philosophy, and monumental architecture more than three thousand years before Europe’s rise. The pyramids were not acts of primitive labour; they were products of advanced knowledge systems that Europe would only encounter much later.
The statement “Europe did not build civilisation” is a core tenet of critical, post-colonial, and revisionist history that seeks to dismantle Eurocentrism. It argues that modern civilisation is a global, cumulative achievement, not a singular product of European genius. If one were to conduct a breakdown of the historical, cultural, and political arguments supporting this perspective, the following dimensions would be what we arrive at within the scope of understanding inherited parts of civilisation. Several crucial affirmations follow:
Inherited Parts of Civilisation
The “Cradle” Was Not European: The earliest civilisations — Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, the Indus Valley, and China —arose in North Africa and Asia between 4000 and 3000 BC. These cultures developed writing, metallurgy, urban planning, and organised religion long before advanced complex societies formed in Europe.
Middle Eastern Roots: Western civilisation traces its roots to the Middle East, not Greece. The foundations of urban life, scientific inquiry, astronomy, engineering, and the “religions of the book” originated in Sumeria and Egypt.
Borrowed Greco-Roman Foundation: Greek and Roman civilisations, the supposed “cradle of Europe,” were heavily influenced by, and borrowed from, the older civilisations of Egypt and the Levant.
Borrowed Much of It
The Islamic Golden Age Transmission: During the European “Dark Ages” (roughly 5th–10th century AD), knowledge was preserved and expanded in the Islamic World, Persia, and China.
Scientific and Mathematical Contributions: Essential technologies and knowledge — including the compass, gunpowder, paper, the decimal system, and advanced medicine — were brought from China and the Islamic World to Europe.
Translation and Anonymisation: In the 12th and 13th centuries, Arabic texts were translated into Latin in Toledo. Often, the original Muslim and Persian authors (like Avicenna/Ibn Sina) were anonymised or misrepresented in later European tradition, casting them merely as “transmitters” rather than innovators.
Dominated Others and Erased Origins
“Civilising Mission” as Justification: During the 19th-century “New Imperialism,” European powers justified their global dominance by framing it as a “civilising mission” to bring progress to “savage” peoples.
Cultural Erasure: European colonisation often aimed to eradicate indigenous languages, religions, and knowledge systems, replacing them with European models.
Rewriting History: Eurocentric narratives, such as the “Ancient Greece to Dark Ages to Renaissance” model, often ignore or downplay the contributions of non-European cultures, presenting Western culture as the pinnacle of human development.
Cartographic Distortion: Traditional maps (like the Mercator projection) visually distort the world to make Europe and North America appear much larger and more central than they actually are.
Civilisation Belongs to Humanity, Not Empire
Decolonising Knowledge: Modern scholarship increasingly recognises that global progress is a collaborative, cross-cultural process.
Post-Colonial Perspective: Acknowledging this perspective is not a rejection of European achievements, but a call to restore historical truth — recognising that the “modern world” was built through global interactions, including, but not limited to, European imperialism.
In essence, this viewpoint emphasises that civilisation was built by humanity over thousands of years, with many cultures contributing before, during, and after Europe’s rise to power.
In Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates, the Sumerians, Akkadians, Babylonians, and Assyrians created writing, legal codes, irrigation systems, and city-states. The Code of Hammurabi articulated principles of justice when Europe had none. In the Indus Valley — Harappa and Mohenjo-daro — urban planning, sanitation, standardised measurement, and trade networks flourished around 2600 BCE. These cities had drainage systems that European capitals would lack for millennia.
China developed one of the world’s longest continuous civilisations. It gave humanity paper, printing, the compass, gunpowder, silk production, advanced metallurgy, agricultural innovation, state bureaucracy, and ethical philosophy rooted in Confucianism and Daoism. India produced profound philosophical traditions, advanced mathematics including zero and the decimal system, astronomy, medical science through Ayurveda, and universities such as Takshashila and Nalanda when Europe was still intellectually dormant.
In Africa beyond Kemet, Nubia, Axum, Mali, Songhai, and Great Zimbabwe built trading empires, centres of learning, architecture, and governance. Timbuktu housed universities and libraries when Europe’s literacy was confined to monasteries. In the Americas, the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, and Inca civilisations developed astronomy, mathematics, agricultural science, architecture, and governance independent of European influence. The Maya charted celestial movements with extraordinary precision; the Inca engineered roads, terraces, and water systems across the Andes.
At the time these civilisations were thriving, Europe was peripheral to human advancement. Its later intellectual awakening did not occur in isolation. Greece, often declared the cradle of Western civilisation, openly borrowed from Egypt and Phoenicia. Greek thinkers studied African knowledge systems, absorbed them, and rearticulated them. Rome followed Greece, mastering administration and conquest, not original civilisational thought. Roman science, philosophy, medicine, and religion were largely inherited.
After Rome’s collapse, Europe entered centuries of stagnation. Meanwhile, Islamic civilisation preserved and expanded global knowledge. From Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, and Cordoba came algebra, optics, chemistry, medicine, cartography, hospitals, universities, and the scientific method. Europe’s Renaissance was not a spontaneous rebirth; it was the return of knowledge Europe had previously lost, transmitted through Arab and Muslim scholars.
Europe’s later dominance was not the result of civilisational superiority but of militarised expansion, colonisation, and extraction. Wealth accumulated through the enslavement of Africans, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, and the systematic plunder of Asia and Africa. Entire civilisations were dismantled, their histories erased, their achievements rebranded as “Western.”
Colonialism did not civilise; it de-civilised. It destroyed local economies, languages, governance systems, and educational traditions. India’s impoverishment, Africa’s fragmentation, and the Americas’ devastation were not signs of native failure but of European violence.
Even today, modern life rests on ancient, non-European foundations. Mathematics uses Indian numerals transmitted through Arab scholars. Medicine draws from African, Indian, and Chinese knowledge. Agriculture depends on crops domesticated outside Europe. Navigation, engineering, and philosophy all trace their roots beyond the European continent.
What Prof James Small confronts is not Europe’s participation in civilisation, but Europe’s false claim to authorship. Civilisation is not white, Western, or European. It is human —built over thousands of years by African, Asian, Indigenous, and Middle Eastern peoples long before Europe claimed the title.
Europe did not build civilisation. It inherited parts of it, borrowed much of it, dominated others, and erased origins to justify power. To acknowledge this is not to reject Europe, but to restore truth—and to remind the world that civilisation belongs to humanity, not to empire.
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Ranjan Solomon is a writer, researcher and activist based in Goa. He has worked in social movements since he was 19 years of age. The views expressed here are the author’s own and Clarion India does not necessarily share or subscribe to them. He can be contacted at ranjan.solomon@gmail.com
