What's your definition of civilization? Cities an agriculture seems to be a popular one, but not necessarily the only possibility.
I hadn't actually pinned that down. I suppose things did take off in a big way from the thirty-second century BCE, when within a short period of time writing, the wheel and bronzeworking were all invented, but I was thinking more of the fact that when the Sumerian culture emerged from the mists of protohistory, there were a lot of cities in the Middle East with a history going back thousands of years, comprising cycle upon cycle of growth, trade, conquest and rebuilding.
It's not clear exactly when the Sumerian culture started; it's possible the people in Sumeria a thousand or more years before the Jemdat Nasr period (when writing was invented) were already Sumerians, but there's other cities outside the area with long histories, too: Jericho, for example, was founded 11,000 years ago. (And there's Çatal Hüyük, as you point out.)
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I hadn't actually pinned that down. I suppose things did take off in a big way from the thirty-second century BCE, when within a short period of time writing, the wheel and bronzeworking were all invented, but I was thinking more of the fact that when the Sumerian culture emerged from the mists of protohistory, there were a lot of cities in the Middle East with a history going back thousands of years, comprising cycle upon cycle of growth, trade, conquest and rebuilding.
It's not clear exactly when the Sumerian culture started; it's possible the people in Sumeria a thousand or more years before the Jemdat Nasr period (when writing was invented) were already Sumerians, but there's other cities outside the area with long histories, too: Jericho, for example, was founded 11,000 years ago. (And there's Çatal Hüyük, as you point out.)