>>41811693>>41803834>>41803914>>41803965cont:
Granted, as a result of housing it's population in these large complexes rather then cramped apartment compounds you see in say Rome, the population was smaller even if the city's expanse was larger then Rome itself; but the city's 150,000 large population would have still put it in the top 20 to top 10 most populated cities in the world at the time. The city also had toilets, canalized rivers re-directed through the city's grid layout (pic is a map of the city), interconnected drainage and resvoir systems; it's plazas could flood with water for ceremonial displays, etc
Teotihuacan is pretty exceptional in it's egaltarian housing, but it's size and population and it's water mangement systems aren't that much so: Plenty of other Mesoamerican cities from this period 1000 years or so before the Aztec existed had populations in the high tens to slightly above 100,000. (Hell, some megapolitic Maya sprawls which covered and connected the space between multiple city-cores, such as Tikal's; may have had over 1 million people and covered over 100 square kilometers), and many of them, likewise had interconnected aquaduct, canal, resvoir, and drainage systems, sometimes with toilets and shit like pressurized fountains. (
>>41805070 is going too far though in saying better plumbing and aquaducts then the romans, but better sanitation is true, see
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1805201/)
Tikal, Calakmul, Copan, Caracol, and a number of others all had these populations, water systems, etc; and all of them existed before Bronze metallurgy became a thing, some before even smelting of soft metals like gold. It's hard to say how complex the goverments of this period were due to a lack of written sources (thank spain for burning every book they could find), but we know from what we have that they had formal royal lines, political marriages, coups, & some degree of bureaucratic organization to manage such large urban centers
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