(The Latin Etymology of “Civilization” — The Term “Civilization” Originally Referring Simply to a Society with Cities as Its Derivation from Latin Civis Mean…

(The Latin Etymology of “Civilization” — The Term “Civilization” Originally Referring Simply to a Society with Cities as Its Derivation from Latin Civis Meaning “Town” or “City” Tells Us, the Word Having Subsequently Accreted Layers of Value Judgment That Transformed a Neutral Descriptor of Urban Settlement into a Hierarchical Category That Sorted Humanity into the Civilized and the Savage — a Transformation of Meaning That Ehret Insists Must Be Recognized and Rejected if History Is to Be Written Honestly): The term “civilization” originally referred simply to a society with cities, as its derivation from Latin *civis*, meaning “town” or “city,” tells us. The note is brief but its implications are far-reaching. The word that has been used for centuries to sort humanity into hierarchical categories — civilized and uncivilized, civilized and barbarous, civilized and savage — began its life as nothing more than a descriptor of urban settlement. A “civilization” was a society that had cities. That was all. The subsequent accretion of value judgments — the idea that city-dwelling peoples were inherently superior to rural peoples, that monument-building societies were inherently more accomplished than non-monument-building societies, that literate cultures were inherently more valuable than oral cultures — was not built into the word’s original meaning. It was layered on afterward, by European scholars who needed a vocabulary to justify colonial domination. The Latin etymology demolishes the pretension. *Civis* means “city.” It does not mean “superior.” It does not mean “more intelligent.” It does not mean “more deserving of historical attention.” And the societies that Ehret has spent an entire book documenting — the Nilo-Saharan inventors of cattle herding, the West African inventors of agriculture, the Central African inventors of iron smelting — were every bit as consequential in the human story as the city-builders, even if they chose not to pile stone upon stone for the glorification of kings.