主题：中华文明起源辨（上） -- 黄金狮子

现代汉语中的“文明”来自英文中的civilization一词，通常指人类社会的进步状态，与“野蛮”、“蒙昧”相对而言。

Civilization (Standard American) (Standard British, civilisation) is a kind of human society or culture; specifically, a civilization is usually understood to be a complex society characterized by the practice of agriculture and settlement in cities. Compared with less complex cultures, members of a civilization are organized into a diverse division of labour and an intricate social hierarchy. The term civilization is often used as a synonym for culture in both popular and academic circles.[1] Every human being participates in a culture, defined as "the arts, customs, habits... beliefs, values, behavior and material habits that constitute a people's way of life".[2] Civilizations can be distinguished from other cultures by their high level of social complexity and organization, and by their diverse economic and cultural activities.

The term civilization has been defined and understood in a number of ways different from the standard definition. Sometimes it is used synonymously with the broader term culture. Civilization can also refer to society as a whole. To nineteenth-century English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor, for example, civilization was "the total social heredity of mankind;"[3] in other words, civilization was the totality of human knowledge and culture as represented by the most "advanced" society at a given time.[4] Civilization can be used in a normative sense as well: if complex and urban cultures are assumed to be superior to other "savage" or "barbarian" cultures, then "civilization" is used as a synonym for "superiority of certain groups." In a similar sense, civilization can mean "refinement of thought, manners, or taste".[5] However, in its most widely used definition, civilization is a descriptive term for a relatively complex agricultural and urban culture.