Around 1600 BCE, on a small island in the Aegean Sea, a boy wakes in a three story house and uses a bathroom that flushes, piped to a stone sewer running under the street.
Hot and cold water reaches his rooms through clay pipes.
The hot supply is warmed underground.
His town acrotiri has drainage and sanitation that Europe will not build again for over 3,000 years.
Akrotiria is a port, and its wealth moves by ship.
It sits right in the middle of Mediterranean bronze trade networks, where people exchanged goods.
The walls of its houses are painted floor to ceiling, leaping dolphins, a fisherman holding two strings of fish, boys boxing in gloves, women picking saffron crocuses to offer a seated goddess.
One fresco shows blue monkeys climbing rocks.
Remember them, because the island did not have any monkeys.
The island is rich.
