We are terribly preoccupied with tool use and physical artefacts as a defining factor of intelligence - anthropocentrism is of course pretty much inevitable, even when we talk of cephalopods.
In the context of civilisation, intelligence isn’t enough. Nomadic tribes are sapient, intelligent and have rich cultures, but they aren’t strictly civilisations.
The urban distinction is important because of economies of scale: pastoral societies are energy constrained. That doesn’t make them less interesting, again strictly speaking, personally it sort of does, but it does make them less powerful.
Within the Silurian context, the urban distinction is almost demanding: if humans stopped at Neolithic pastoralism, there is a good chance all evidence of our tool use would have disappeared within a few millennia, let alone millions of years.
Some pastoral societies have taken serious issue with this view
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_Empire#/media/File:Mong...
Where is the evidence the Mongols took issue with this view? They certainly seemed to recognise the value of cities.
To my knowledge, the practice of falsely conflating intelligence and civilisation to be offended that not every society formed a civilisation is a modern occupation.
I think if you eat all neighbouring civilizations in a few decades, you're definitely a civilization.
If you run the cities, yes. If you only raid them, no.
(The Mongols built roads and founded a Chinese dynasty. They were a civilisation.)
Whether pastoralists are a 'civilization' (or even more fraught, 'civilized') seems like a completely arbitrary distinction to try to make, especially on the basis of something like 'cities'. The ability to organize, direct, coordinate, supply and project military power over great distances is a hallmark of plenty of things we think of as 'civilizations' and the Mongols were easily the world heavyweight champion of that, in their day. A great number of people found out the fact a stone wall is much harder to move than a yurt is not the tremendous civilizational advantage they thought it was.
Going back to the top comment: “Within the Silurian context, the urban distinction is almost demanding: if humans stopped at Neolithic pastoralism, there is a good chance all evidence of our tool use would have disappeared within a few millennia, let alone millions of years.”
Maybe but it's also because these things are evidence of cultural transmission - a thing for which there hasn't been strong evidence of in other species and people do look for it in other ways.
if the five senses can only percieve a fraction of that which they have been honed for over millennia, it's not unreasonable to wonder if there is much more to the world/earth than meets the eye, inaccessible and unintelligible to physical ape life or existing in ways we aren't equipped to percieve.
That is not really the etymology of "civilisation" though. City and civilisation share etymological roots, but city is not the etymological origin of the world civilisation.
And of course then we just ask the question: what are cities? Do gopher, or prairie dog colonies count? (or are those just towns? :)) How about ant colonies or bee hives?
Clearly all of the above share some similarities with some human settlements. They also have important differences of course. So if we want to decide if there are other "civilisations" on Earth parallel with us, we have to be more precise with our definitions.
Civilisations are a subset of societies [1]. Urbanisation is commonly held as a divider between complex societies and full-blown civilisations.
> then we just ask the question: what are cities?
This is valid. I’d say the defining attribute is economies of scale. Ant colonies and bee hives demonstrate elements of this; the sum is greater than the whole.
Whether ants and bees form complex societies is less debatable, unless we reduce the terms to mean intricate where we begin enveloping colonies of trees and every social animal, potentially even just multicellular life, which while poetically pleasing isn’t useful.
You could even argue that lichen is a city, inhabited by multiple species.
I mean, I'm not sure I'd go so far as to argue than either of those really are a civilization. But if "city" is your sole criterion...
If you look at the problem of "bee decline" from the viewpoint of the beekeeper where you are responsible for it you are responsible for a "city" of 50,000 insects that faces all kinds of threats from the inside and outside.
No matter what the other civilization looks like, that's how we've always reacted. It's almost a defining characteristic of our civilization.