Declarations of primacy, English-speaking children these days call it "virtue-signalling". So let's play The Best Cradle of Western Civilization.
Democracy in Ancient Iraq

... Although there can be no doubt that the assemblies held at Uruk during the time of Gilgamesh were less advanced than those held in later Greece or Rome, the situation that brought about the convening of Uruk's bicameral assemblies is not dissimilar to the one that ancient Greece faced some 2400 years later. Sumer, like Greece, was made up of a number of independent city-states, each of them vying for power and supremacy over the region and its people. In a reversal of the veto power that the assembly of the arms-bearing men had over the elders in Uruk, the Spartan* elders (a council of twenty-eight men, all over sixty years of age) had the power to overrule any `crooked decree' that was passed by the popular assembly. ...

(*)Note that the origin of "Spartans" in the Peloponnese is contested among professional classicsts. Some say they were not "Greek"-speakers but "Indo-Iranian" speaking colonizers from Eurasia, contemporaneously associated with "Sea People", Hurrian or Hittite cultures and conquests, 2nd millenium BCE.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.