Not exactly. Those were just earlier stages on the road to progress. We would not now consider Romans or first century Israelites to be "civilized" by modern standards.
That's the nature of progress. You preserve what is good and move on from what is childish or actively bad.
That's what progress means. Going from lesser to greater things. Those lesser things were greater than what they came from. It doesn't make them right, just better than what came before them.