Surely, the highest form of civilisation, and the envy of the world.
Why, he wanted to know, had the societies of Greece and Rome failed to ensure an unbroken continuity into the present day for their distinctively urban form of civilisation?
As the only form of civilisation for miles around, the camp naturally attracted passersby, prompting Mahmoud to build a permanent settlement in 1995.
I think we're at a point now where we can make that choice, to say maybe we can harness the positives that we've developed with industrial civilisation and develop something new, a post-growth, post-industrial form of civilisation that doesn't reject science and technology but recognises that ultimately you have to be living within the limits of your environmental systems.
It's time that governments, corporations and the public alike woke up to the fact that we are fast entering a new post-carbon era, and that the quicker we adapt to it, the far better our chances of successfully redefining a new form of civilisation - a new form of prosperity - that is capable of living in harmony with the Earth system.
And to accompany my trips into those haunted red spaces, I've been reading, again and again, Nicolas Rothwell's brilliant, dark and sublime accounts of his drives into the places where one form of civilisation ends and another begins to make itself felt.
Centred on cities such as Mohenjo-daro, Harappa, Dholavira, and Kalibangan, and relying on varied forms of subsistence, the civilisation engaged robustly in crafts production and wide-ranging trade.
This is the region where the three Abrahamic religions were formed and divided, the so-called cradle of civilisation.
"And this also," he wrote in Heart of Darkness, "has been one of the dark places of the earth," as he embarked on that book's journey into forms of savagery that lay beneath a veil of civilisation.
In the early 1990s he described himself as an "advocate of civilisation, definer of civilisation, teacher of the rules of civilisation…leader (possibly) of the civilising forces".
