Civilization developed not inevitably, but through human creativity. Paleolithic humans worked toward civilization by fashioning simple tools, gathering into cooperative hunting bands, controlling fire, and communicating through spoken language. They also developed mythic-religious beliefs, expressing those through images such as female fertility figures and animal cave painting employed in rites of sympathetic magic. Neolithic people revolutionized human society by practicing agriculture and domesticating animals. These developments encouraged settlement of villages in which distinct social classes evolved. Neolithic humans also fashioned new technologies including pottery, the wheel and sail, and metal-working. Religion formalized and a priestly class emerged to lead communal worship and accept offerings to the gods.

The first true civilizations rose from Neolithic communities in the river valleys of the Near and Far East. As people worked creatively upon these environments, villages grew into social complex cities where the invention of writing enabled the preservation and expansion of knowledge. The earliest civilization was the Sumerian city-states of Mesopotamia, whose cuneiform writing and other cultural achievements laid the foundation of subsequent civilizations in the region. Mesopotamian civilization was based on religion. The temple, built atop a ziggurat, was the cultural and economic heart of the city. The gods were responsible for the workings of nature, and the uncertainty of life in Mesopotamia explains the capriciousness of those gods and the general pessimism of the culture's religious outlook. Although kingship derived from the gods, kings were not themselves divine, but specially appointed mortals who may or may not correctly perceive the will of the gods. Kings ruled through laws which were thought to reflect the divine order. Kings and priests regulated trade, but free enterprise was permitted, allowing the rise of a merchant that fostered lively international trade. The Mesopotamians made advances in mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, but these remained subservient to the religious world-view and never rose to the level of systematic theory.

As Mesopotamian civilization emerged, Egyptian civilization rose in the Nile valley. With the foundation of the Old Kingdom, the basic forms of Egyptian culture began to evolve. The most important of these was a religious outlook that resembled the Mesopotamian in its comprehensiveness. However, reflecting the relative ease of life along the Nile, that outlook was more optimistic, stressing an afterlife that featured all the pleasures of earthly existence. Central to the Egyptian world-view was the concept of divine kingship, in which the immortal pharaohs, governed justly every sector of society. The Egyptians also contributed to mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, often outstripping the Mesopotamians but, like them, never theorizing their observations. After periods of unrest before and after the Middle Kingdom, the New Kingdom rose as an imperial power. Except for a period of semi-monotheistic reform under Amenhotep IV, traditional religious culture persisted through the New Kingdom and subsequent centuries.

The New Kingdom contributed to a larger trend of empire-building, in which migrating Indo-Europeans played an important role. One of these, the Hittites, built a strong state in Anatolia. Later the smaller Phoenician and Aramaean nations that built commercial empires based in Syria and Palestine. The Assyrians ruled their large empire through efficient administration and terror. The Neo-Babylonians conquered Assyria, establishing a state that fell to the Persians less than a century later. The huge Persian Empire was the culmination of Near Eastern civilization, achieving political and cultural universalism through several unifying forces including Zoroastrianism and a uniform administration.

Near Eastern civilizations shared a mythmaking world-view through which they explained the universe and ordered their societies. Rather than cultivate the rational scientific mind, these civilizations adhered to myths that offered emotionally satisfying accounts of the world. These civilizations made important cultural advances, but those remained bound by the myth-making view until the Greeks and Hebrews transformed them into important building blocks of Western civilization.