Without Mesopotamia there would be no wheel, no cars, no bikes, no trains, and you disappoint your European forefathers, Europe's a proper noun, capitalise its adjective form too.
I suppose you are talking about the cradle of civilisation, but I'm going to mention Indus and China anyway because they were certainly prior to Renaissance Europe not primitive, Indus had little probably no evidence of war and had plumbing, later Indians and the Chinese discovered Pascal's triangle 2 centuries prior to Blaise Pascal's birth and one of the most revered civilisation of all time; Egypt was not European (before Alexander the Great and the later Romans at least).