Reading Plato one is amazed how intelligent were th0se Athenians. There was no precedents for anything the did, they invented everything. How they appeared suddenly from the nowhere?
I think one the keys is the fact that Athens was established in one of the driest places of Greece. Simply, they had to be extremely clever to solve their water supply problems in that rocky hill, in the fickle Eastern Mediterranean climate. The Athenians built the Peisistratean aqueduct (6th century BC), which transferred water from the Hymettos Mountain to the city center, an underground pipe. Athenians built bathrooms, latrines and other sanitary facilities, both public and private. Finally, an extended wastewater network connected every single building of the Athenian Agora to the so-called Great Drain. I think their engineering was more advanced than the contemporary Jerusalem.
The pic shows the Peisastratean Aqueduct made from tubes inserted one into the other and sealed with liquid metal (Pb). The modules had oval openings for cleaning. All Greek cities had water and sewage works, and the City of Pergamon had a pressure pipe (a siphon), something very sophisticated.
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This is somewhat related, but here in the Salt River Valley there used to be a tribe called the Hohokams that dug an entire system of irrigation canals to irrigate their fields. In New Mexico there was a tribe called the Anasazi that built elaborate cliff dwellings above their fields, complete with cisterns for storing rainwater for their crops. Both tribes vanished 100 years before the first White contact with the area. When American settlers came to the area they recognized the disused canals for what they were and used them as a basis for what became SRP.
Nowadays, if you drive across the reservations these tribes live on you would never guess that they had been capable of building canals.
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