Math created civilization, but to be fair, it was the recording of numbers in written or hardcopy form that started it, so you could call that literacy if you wanted.
At best, the consolidation of populations together could have been described as a good thing, as it increased the power and the safety of those living there from their neighboring populations. There are safety in numbers. But there is also power. Territory. Exchange of goods. Taxes. Interest. Censuses. It’s not necessarily specialization or division of labor that created civilization, it’s the accounting that indentured them.
Everywhere else, when people gathered in extended family groups or tribes, there was history, and sometimes even writing, although oral tradition was far more conducive to the medium. There may have even been some reward to working in even larger groups. But what they didn’t was math. They didn’t need to tax their own tribe. They didn’t need to account for systems of payment. Reward was wasn’t purely material before “civilization”
I’m not saying that slavery is intrinsic to civilization. Surely even tribes kept slaves from among those they defeated. But keeping books on the services of people, from agriculture to military, is the singular organizing principle, in my opinion.
... and I’m not sure we are better for it, as individuals anyway.
And agriculture created math.
In about 8000 BC the chance hybridization of wild wheats with goat grasses (around the Jericho oasis) produced the first two (fertile) cereal grains, emmer wheat and barley. Civilization sprang up around the cultivation of these two crops, and mathematics was created both as a means of documenting the ownership of crop lands and for quantifying the volume of grains sold.
It was agriculture created civilization. In fact no great civilization has ever existed without a cereal grain and domesticated (meat) livestock.