Species 4427-F

Despite appearances, humanity has long known that it was not the first sentient species in the universe. The Covenant attack on Harvest was the first encounter between humanity and a living extraterrestrial species, but there has been evidence for decades that other lifeforms have risen. Middangeard is one such piece of evidence - though immediately classified by the Office of Naval Intelligence after the outbreak of war, it is the first well-known example among the civilian scientific community of an extraterrestrial civilisation.

Discovery
During the Great Age of Colonisation, when vast fleets of colony ships transported colonists offworld in the thousands, survey ships were used to locate star systems with potential exoplanets, investigate these star systems to search for suitable targets for colonisation, and investigate these planets. For the most part, space is a very empty place, part of the reason why humanity had to disperse itself so far. Most star systems have few potential candidates beyond possible asteroid mining colonies, and the few that possess fully habitable planets are few and far between. The discovery of Middangeard came as a total shock to the Colonial Military Authority - to not only find a planet nearly perfect for colonisation, but to find that this planet was already inhabited, with sprawling cities and towns dotted across the surface of the planet, visible even from space. At first confused as to whether they had jumped to a human colony, the ships crew gathered valuable intelligence, mapping the surface of the planet before returning to Reach.

A follow-up team was immediately dispatched. In the best case scenario, this could be humanity's first encounter with an alien civilisation, and they wanted to make a good impression, sending expert xenobiologists and diplomats. In the worst case, it might be a potential threat, and so the team was carried by the UNSC Frigate Thermopylae, carrying enough nuclear weapons to cripple any potential threat. Upon the teams arrival in the system, though, they met no resistance - no hostile fighters or ships in space, no anti-air flak when they descended to the planet, and no infantry or armoured units when they disembarked. Preliminary aerial reconnaissance units revealed that while extensive, the evidence of civilisation that had so alarmed the CMA was totally abandoned. Venturing into the settlements in a Gremlin support vehicle, with an armed Warthog patrol escort, the team explored a number of the larger cities and some of the towns, finding no evidence that they were currently inhabited. The Thermopylae itself landed on the city outskirts, ready to provide indirect fire support with its MAC if need be, but such measures were unneccessary. Even an early search showed only that the planet was devoid of any visible sentient lifeforms.

Curious, the UNSC Security Council's Scientific Committee permitted the construction of a xenoarchaeological base on the planet to support research and analysis teams. The public aim of this was to gather knowledge on the planets former inhabitants for scientific advancement - less well known was the Office of Naval Intelligence's support, in order to ascertain whether the civilisation had been technologically advanced, and if any advanced technology was able to be studied or salvaged to benefit the UNSC. Research Outpost Wells was established on the northern continent, provided with the Thermopylae as a protective escort and transport, as well as a battalion from the 7th Marine Rifle Regiment and an Office of Naval Intelligence liason/attache.

Description
Exact details about Species4427-F are hard to pin down, given the extremely poor state of preservation of the majority of their civilisation. No evidence exists at all that the species practiced ritual burial, and some structures seem to have been built to facilitate ritual cremation instead. Very little pre-disaster biological material exists for analysis. Given their culture's funerary practices, this is not surprising. No monuments depicting the species have been discovered, though they seem to have erected a great many. Exactly what these objects commemorate remains a mystery.

What is surprising is that, so far, no evidence of them post-disaster has been found. None of the settlement hold any remains, and so far no fossils of them have been discovered, despite extensive seismic scanning on the part of the upgraded Thermopylae. It is almost as if the species simply disappeared. There are a number of factors that must be taken into account, however. Firstly, the extreme age of the species' collapse means that any exposed remains would likely have attracted scavengers, or otherwise decomposed rapidly with little chance of preservation. Secondly, the relatively intact nature of the settlements indicates that whatever catastrophy occurred did so in an extremely short timeframe, and was planet-wide. If there were any survivors, they would have been few and far between, likely unable to restore their species to a functional state at all. Thirdly, the cities also indicate that the species was at a roughly post-Industrial Revolution technological state, and would have had little experience with the challenges posed by being reduced to such a primitive state.

For now, the best evidence for the species' habits and physiology are the personal items that are common throughout the cities, far more common than would be thought. The type and ergonomics of furniture, for example, reveals that the planet's inhabitants were bipedal, and averaged 1.7 meters in height. Other details reveal subtle indications of everyday life - crops grown in the countryside fed a growing industrial population in the cities, while the cities themselves were home to a tiered caste system, perhaps analogous to Industrial Revolution society - an aristocratic nobility lived lives of relative ease and splendour; a middle class lived well off, but fulfilled important jobs within the workforce; and a downtrodden underclass served as much of the civilisation's labour, and lived lives of comparative poverty. Unusually, Species 4427-F seem to have used a duodecimal counting system, though there are indications that its adoption was not universal, with ruins in the southern continent showing octal and quinary systems still in use parallel to the duodecimal system, though not as common. Religious details are hard to find - while they seem to have practiced at ornately adorned temples, and murals depict what appear to be religious processions and mythologies, no surviving texts exist, and if they did, translation would be difficult. Their method of writing appears to be highly contextual, with a variety of glyphs possessing different interpretations based on the context, syntax, and structure of the sentence. A number of structures appear to have been libraries, though most of their contents have since rotted away - the civilisation appears to have developed the use of plant-pased writing materials, and used them extensively, though some carved stone reliefs and tablets have been found. UNSC AI's have had little success in full translations of Species 4427-F's writing system, though some advances have been made.

Quotes

 * "Its earie. You drive through the city in a warthog, and it's probably the first artificial noise the place has had in more than two hundred millenia. It's a sobering thought. All we can say about their builders for sure is that they were roughly humaniod. That in itself doesn't count for much - most of the Covenant species are "roughly humanoid" in the same way."
 * "A whole planet abandoned, with no signs of war or environmental disaster. Its the most perplexing thing you could hope to find. The Earth-bound archaeologists argue about why the Mayan civilisation collapsed - comparing the Mayans to Species 4427-F is like comparing Benitto Musoline to Adolf Hitler - they're roughly similar situations, but the latter are another level entirely."
 * "After the Great War, a Sangheili delegation arrived to make an inspection. Part of our technological exchange initiative - in exchange for providing us with ships and weapons to reverse-engineer, they get to tour some of our top secret research labs. One of them seemed to recognise the architecture - I asked him about it, and he said it reminded him of Pre-Exodus Keltashan. Whatever the hell that means."