The Seeming First Civilization

History is a subject that, while mostly unimportant in an ultimate sense, can stir people to care about or think about more crucial matters.  The subjective awe it can inspire has the power to motivate people to look to truths, proofs, possibilities, and concepts themselves rather than fixate on the entirely secondary matter of which people believe/believed what ideas, all as those who fixate on history almost inevitably make the asinine assumption that historical civilizations can even be known to have existed--texts, buildings, and oral traditions prove nothing except that one is perceiving texts and other evidences that could be misleading and illusory.  History might make some dwell on the nature of humanity, the ramifications of our origins and of our unknown future, and thus about necessary truths, morality, epistemology, and other core truths or concepts.

As far as historical evidences suggest, the seeming first human civilization was that of the Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia in approximately 4500 BC.  This is seemingly the first for two reasons: all mere evidences that fall short of logical proof could be illusory perceptions, and it is possible that some form of evidence of a prior civilization will eventually be discovered.  This is the very nature of historical epistemology for non-omniscient beings.  However, since Sumer is the supposed first civilization formed by humans, some people credit it with logically impossible things or pretend like simply coming first elevates the Sumerians above later people in intelligence.  The most asinine of these attributions to Sumer are the creation of things that cannot be created because they are true by necessity or because they are for some other reason already in place.

The Sumerians cannot have created the laws of logic or scientific laws (as long as causal idealism is not true regarding the material world in the case of the latter, that is, though that cannot be proven), nor would their legal systems ground whatever moral obligations exist or would their measurements of time have created time.  When people say they "invented" things like mathematics or science, they could at most have began formally thinking about mathematical truths and ideas or systematically exploring nature and its various correlations between events; mathematical truths cannot be invented because they reduce down to the necessary truths of reason, and science as a method can only be invented in the sense that it is contrived, unlike reason, which is intrinsically true by default regardless of perception, to aid the observation of the perceived material world, the perceptions of which are already there at the least.

In neither case is this the same as inventing a wheel or a telephone or a piece of furniture.  Likewise, if there really are moral obligations, Sumerian legal systems and social norms cannot have created morality because certain things would be morally obligatory or wrong regardless of their legal systems.  Sumerian legal codes are just as irrelevant even if moral obligations do not exist, for there is no such thing as morality in that case no matter what their beliefs or practices were.  Then there are things like time.  Time is not its arbitrary units of measurement or the mechanical or electronic devices used to record it elapsing (just like distance is not feet or meters, but the actual geographical stretch or the gap between points in space).  Thus, neither Sumer nor any other Mesopotamian or otherwise early civilization could have "invented" time itself.  Only something like a new combination of materials or language could be created by them, as language is a construct used to assign terms or symbols to things that are already true or that could be separately thought of.

The first human civilization in recorded history, which is still just the seeming first civilization as far as epistemology goes, cannot be responsible for creating anything more than social constructs.  Like any other group of individual beings, it cannot have invented or changed logical truths because they are true irrespective of all other things, nor can it have created moral obligations, the existence or nonexistence of which is not a matter of perception or preference, nor can it have brought metaphysical time into existence by creating units of measurement for it or brought laws of nature into existence simply by observing them (again, unless matter does not exist apart from conscious perception).  The society of Sumer can at most have been the first in a longer chain of human cultures which cannot alter the core nature of reality and which no one must look to to understand these utmost core philosophical truths.