I wouldn’t put rule that out, at all. But from a archeology perspective, when you stumble on to ruins in Rome, it is natural to think that they were the achievers. It’s only when you can start accurately dating and sequencing stuff that the perspective me start to change.
Outside of Italy a lot of ruins dating from the period of the Roman Empire are described as “Roman Ruins”, when in fact the Romans may have had little or nothing to do with them. I was just presenting a different point of view that reinforces the point of this post.
The Romans should get credit, at least, for popularizing the Estrucan Arch, one of the real milestones in engineering, comparable to the invention of the wheel. They were also very skillful builders, and may well have spread their technique around the Mediterrian. Whether or not they were superior to the Carthaginians or Greeks is doubtful.
The real lesson of the Roman Empire is that no matter how advanced a civilization is intellectually, it will not survive if it becomes number two militarily.