Straight roads, bathhouses, sewers and plumbing, fresh-water readily available, underfloor heating, city-planning, and public works. If those all sound like the trappings of modernity, or at the very earliest the Roman Empire, you’d be right at first glance. But what if an apparently pacifist society had all these things thousands of years before Rome was a gleam in the eye of Romulus? And that all of this had disappeared, with no explanation, centuries before Augustus left his brick city one of marble?

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