Which empire did the most to push civilization further?

Your question specifically asked which empire spread civilization. The Mongols conquered a lot of territory but they did not spread civilization. They tended to conquer civilizations that already existed. The Mongols actually conquered China and India, two of the earth's original six civilizations. For barbarians to vandalize cities is not exactly spreading civilization!

Same problem. About the only people in the Ottoman Empire who were not already civilized were the Ottomans themselves, who were nothing more than one more tribe of Mongols when they started out from central Asia. They intermarried with everyone they met so by the time they got to Turkey they had morphed into a new ethnic group.

Now you're talking. You have to go further back into history, when the civilizations of the day were still surrounded by Neolithic tribes. The Persians spread civilization. Still, the Phoenicians, Indians and Mesopotamians were doing the same thing, so there weren't really all that many Neolithic people left in the Middle East by the time Persia came into its golden age.

They get my vote. Europe was the last continent to be settled by Homo sapiens so when the Romans arrived most of it was still Neolithic, except for the little bit in the southeast that the Greeks had already taken care of, and the modest region of the Etruscans. The Roman empire spread civilization to the pre-civilized tribes of Italy, Iberia, France, much of Romania and the British Isles. Depending on what you define as the "Roman Empire" and what period you choose, you could also include the German lands.

Our British members will surely vote for that. I strongly disagree because the British colonization was a dismal failure in terms of spreading civilization. They drew arbitrary lines on the map and grouped fragments of disparate tribes together into administrative areas for the convenience of their own people with no thought to the culture and politics of the natives. When the Empire finally collapsed those fictitious "nations" dissolved into strife that is still there, from Iraq to Zimbabwe and a dozen other African states. Yes they have built cities so strictly speaking they have "civilizations," but many observers and many Africans themselves insist they'd be better off today if they'd been left to find their own way out of the Neolithic. I give Britain very low marks in spreading civilization. Its only successes are North America and the Antipodes, which are bittersweet because they came at the expense of marginalizing the native peoples and replacing their cultures with "civilizations" comprised of occupying forces.

The Greeks did the same thing the Romans did, but they did it first. They covered less ground, but considering that the Romans basically helped themselves to the abstraction of Greek civilization and built upon it, a good case can be made for giving the Greeks more credit than the Romans. Actually today we call the whole shebang "Greco-Roman civilization" without even trying to sort it out.

Important candidates left off your list:

China. Duh? Their civilization covered the largest geographic area for a very long time, and they are still the world's oldest continuous civilization. China is easy to overlook because it hasn't spread much during the eras that we study because it had already spread to such a gigantic area. Subsequently it spread to Vietnam, Japan and Korea.

India. Another duh? Like China, it did its spreading when our ancestors were still living in tiny fishing villages so we forget about it, and like China, today it's got a huge geographical area and one-sixth of the world's population. That's hard to argue with. Its civilization has been exported throughout southeast Asia. The Buddhist philosophy that originated in India has spread throughout China and other Chinese-influenced countries. Indians invented the positional decimal numbering system that the Arabs perfected.

The Arabs. Since the birth of Islam they have used its engine of religious evangelism to spread their branch of Mesopotamian civilization to a billion people, from Indonesia and Malaysia to Bangladesh and Pakistan to North Africa and a huge swath of sub-Saharan Africa. It's difficult to separate the influence of the Arabs from that of the Ottomans who took over leadership of the world of Islam for the better part of a millennium and even gave it a European beachhead in Albania.

Iberia. Dude, like virtually all of the Western Hemisphere south of the Rio Grande? Again I personally have a problem with this because not only did they marginalize the native people but in their case they actually destroyed two existing civilizations. But they deserve to be on the list with, um, a "dishonorable mention."

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