Civilization vs culture: culture is any society's whole way of life; civilization is the urban,literate, state-organised stage of it. The classic criteria (Gordon Childe's "urban revolution," still the teaching standard):
1. Cities — settlement size and density beyond the village (5,000+ persons);
2. Agricultural surplus — food produced beyond subsistence, extracting it to feed non-farmers;
3. Specialisation of labour — priests, scribes, artisans, soldiers, traders (not everyone farming);
4. Social stratification — ruling classes and taxed masses (the state's pyramid);
5. Writing and record-keeping — administration beyond memory (the law-student's criterion: deeds, codes, contracts);
6. State organisation — institutionalised government, law and coercion;
7. Monumental public works — temples, pyramids, walls (surplus made stone);
8. Trade networks and (often) organised religion as the integrating machine.
The pattern (the exam's opening paragraph): civilization arose independently in a handful of river valleys — the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Indus, Hwang-Ho/Yangtze (Unit 2) — where annual floods made irrigated surplus possible, around c. 3500–1500 BC. River + surplus + state + writing = the world's first law.