Yes, European thought is simply colored by the fact that Rome was the first civilizing empire in Europe. For people in the fertile crescent and the Levant, it w

Yes, European thought is simply colored by the fact that Rome was the first civilizing empire in Europe. For people in the fertile crescent and the Levant, it was just another empire in a long line of empires. We shouldn't discredit how important that empire was, however. For most of the world, empires came and went with an average state of terminal stagnancy. The fall of Rome was like a springboard for the successor states to industrialize and colonize the entire world. That's impressive for a place with little previous history of civilization.