they did, often repeatedly, we only have decent art in Egypt and Greece for so long because they kept taking each other over and reteaching each other to do art, there's big stretches in both sides where they clearly lost the ability, and the Romans just kept copying the Greek art forever they didn't make huge leaps you don't see that until much later when someone in Europe decided statutes could look good from every angle and not just one, which is a very hard line in the temporal understanding of art history. but it's REALLY hard to get your society to have the labor distribution to allow people to make scientific progress and digest other civilizations works while also being stable for a long time which requires wealth disparity, which clearly requires culture and religion that justifies that, and you need military stability for centuries, and you need to also have the internal will to make progress and not simply declare yourself the master race of men and devolve into eating each other over which pig is MORE equal to which other pig in terms of power, or simply not get taken out by an earthquake, volcano, or, storm, it's VERY difficult.