A city built on a tilted grid
Teotihuacan grew in a valley north-east of today’s Mexico City between about 100 BCE and 800 CE. Its great monuments went up first, around 100-250 CE, along a ceremonial avenue some 2.4 km long and about 40 metres wide. That avenue sets the direction of the whole city: 15.5 degrees east of north, and every street of the grid that branched from it follows the same angle.
The planners even moved a river. The course of the San Juan was altered so that it crossed the avenue, as part of the city’s design. Why the tilt? Archaeoastronomers have found that several key buildings probably line up with the sun and the planet Venus on dates that mattered for the religious and farming calendars. Whether the whole city followed one master plan, or grew by shared principles that only look planned today, is still debated.
The Pyramid of the Sun
Halfway along the avenue rises the largest monument of the city, the Pyramid of the Sun. Its base measures about 225 by 222 metres, almost as wide as the Great Pyramid of Giza. It holds about a million cubic metres of material. It is a temple platform, a stepped base whose stairway faced the avenue, so that the elite could climb it in rituals while a raised enclosure around it probably kept ordinary people away.
Many buildings along the avenue share a profile that became the trademark of the city, the talud-tablero: a sloping wall, the talud, topped by a vertical panel with a frame, the tablero, repeated level after level. Seen from the avenue, the platforms rise in neat horizontal bands.
The Moon and the Feathered Serpent
At the northern end of the avenue stands the Pyramid of the Moon, facing a large plaza that may not have been open to everyone on ordinary days. Excavations inside it found the remains of pumas, eagles, serpents and other predators, buried as dedication offerings, the same animals painted on the walls of the city.
To the south, inside a vast enclosure called the Ciudadela, lined with fifteen smaller temple platforms, is the Feathered Serpent Pyramid. Its façade is covered with elaborate carved sculpture, and like the other two great pyramids it was dedicated with rich offerings of jade, obsidian and shell and with human sacrifices, buried within it.
In 2003 the archaeologist Sergio Gómez found a tunnel beneath it, about 91 metres long, and in 2015 his team announced liquid mercury in a chamber at its end, the first ever found at Teotihuacan. Some hoped it would lead to the first royal tomb of the city. None has been found.
Where the people lived
Once the great monuments were finished, building went on, but the new work was housing. Between about 250 and 550 CE the people of Teotihuacan built apartment compounds, single-storey blocks of dozens of rooms around open courtyards, enclosed by a thick outer wall. Each was about 60 metres square and housed perhaps 60 to 100 people.
Archaeologists estimate there were between 2,000 and 2,300 of them, home to about 85% of the population, although only around thirty have been excavated. That housing was unusually durable for Mesoamerica, and most of the city’s surviving wall paintings come from these compounds: gods, priests or rulers, and predators. How many people lived here at the peak, around 400 CE, is uncertain: estimates range from at least 25,000 to between 125,000 and 200,000.
The artists of Teotihuacan also carved stone faces, often called masks, in green stone and travertine. Green mattered: it was the colour of water, and so of fertile fields. The masks may once have been fixed to wooden frames or funeral bundles that have since decayed.
What did they call it, and who ruled?
Teotihuacan is an Aztec name, in the Nahuatl language, usually translated as “the place where the gods were created”. The Aztecs found the city already in ruins and filled it with their own legends: they named the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon, and called the main avenue the Street of the Dead because they took the mounds along it for tombs. According to sixteenth-century writings, Moctezuma still offered sacrifices there every twenty days.
The city’s own name is lost. Maya inscriptions may refer to it as Puh, “Place of Reeds”, but the reading is uncertain. Its rulers are just as elusive: no royal tomb has been found. A complex along the avenue may have been an administrative centre, and a figure called Spearthrower Owl, named in the inscriptions of the Maya city of Tikal, may have been a ruler of Teotihuacan, though this is still argued over.
Fire and decline
Around 550 CE the core monuments were burned by people nobody has identified. After 600 the population fell sharply, to perhaps 30,000 or fewer, and in the seventh century the old centre was abandoned. Its influence did not end with it: Teotihuacan had traded and dealt with the Maya cities of Tikal and Copán and with the Zapotecs of Monte Albán in Oaxaca, and its memory as a sacred place lasted until the Aztecs.
Where to see it
The site is in the State of Mexico, about 50 km north-east of Mexico City. Objects from Teotihuacan, including stone masks and mural fragments, are also in museum collections, among them The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Sources
- T. D. Barnes, “Teotihuacan (ca. 100 BCE-800 CE)”, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (updated 2024).
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre, “Pre-Hispanic City of Teotihuacan” (414).
- Archaeology magazine, “Liquid Mercury Discovered Beneath Teotihuacan Pyramid” (27 April 2015).
- D. Stuart, on Teotihuacan and the Maya (Mesoweb; University of Texas, 2024); Live Science, “Teotihuacan: Ancient city of pyramids” (on the Aztec names).
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection record 1979.206.527.
