Ancient

When people praise a region, a country being "ancient", "had civilization" what they mean is that region had contact with agriculture the longest, because only then you can have a mafia (empire) who can tax (peasant is tied to land, can't run away), raise armies, kill others and build arenas, roads which later generations as tourist can gape at like morons.

However, and in the light of agriculture being the root ill of many of the later predicaments as we now know, one could guess countries who were at the center of these "ancient" developments would clearly be worse off. And they are. The Han, Ottocuck, Egypt, Sassanid, Rome... agro-centric centralized mafia empires, through their peasant/tax/opress cycle created a toxic culture that still lingers in these regions, like a bad fart, which is impeding the progress of their descendants. Lets's look at data.

We compare China, Italy, so-called Turkey, Greece, Egypt, Iran vs others.

GDP per capita, them vs others (data from World Bank, GDP, Population,CSV)

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv('gdpw.csv')
df['gdpw'] = df.gdpcap * df.population
anc = ['China','Italy','Turkey','Greece','Egypt','Iran']
dfc1 = df[df.country.isin(anc)]
dfc2 = df[df.country.isin(anc) == False ]
print ('Mafia', np.round(dfc1.gdpw.sum() / dfc1.population.sum(),2))
print ('Others', np.round(dfc2.gdpw.sum() / dfc2.population.sum(),2))

Mafia 10069.93
Others 11739.59

Significant difference.