Teotihuacan

A city of two hundred thousand that no one named

At its peak around AD 250–550, Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico held a population of roughly 125 000 to 200 000.

Among the six largest cities in the world at the time. Comparable to imperial Rome. It was the political, religious and economic centre of Mesoamerica, and its influence reached the Maya cities of Tikal and Copán a thousand kilometres south.

But no surviving text in any language records what the inhabitants called themselves or their city. The name Teotihuacan — "place where the gods were born" — was applied centuries later by the Aztecs, who arrived in the Valley of Mexico when the city had already been abandoned for six centuries. The Aztecs found the ruins so vast and impressive that they assumed only gods could have built them.

The Avenue of the Dead is not a road of tombs

The 2.5-kilometre central boulevard that runs north–south through the city was named Miccaohtli — Avenue of the Dead — by the Aztecs because they believed the platforms flanking it were tombs.

They were not.

The platforms are temple bases, and they once supported brightly painted superstructures of wood and thatched roofing. The modern bare grey stone we see is what remained after the wooden upper architecture rotted away. In its time the avenue was lined with vivid colour: the pyramid surfaces were plastered and painted red, the temple superstructures decorated with frescoes of quetzal- feathered serpents, jaguars and ritual scenes.

Pyramids over caves

The Pyramid of the Sun is 65 metres tall, the third-largest pyramid in the world by volume.

In 1971 a stone-paved staircase was discovered descending from the centre of the pyramid's base into a cavity in the bedrock 100 metres long, ending in a four-petalled chamber. The cave had been intentionally enlarged and worked.

Recent excavations of the smaller Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent revealed a similar phenomenon: a tunnel descending 18 metres beneath the pyramid floor, ending in three small chambers containing offerings of jade, obsidian, amber and the remains of about 100 sacrificed soldiers, their hands tied behind their backs.

The pyramids were built over sacred caves, deliberately and centrally placed. The caves were the original ritual focus.

The fire from within

Around AD 550 the great temples and palaces of Teotihuacan burned.

Not in a single fire but in a systematic destruction that targeted the elite quarters and the religious buildings while leaving the common dwellings untouched. The damage suggests internal revolt rather than foreign invasion: someone inside the city, possibly the craftsmen and farmers, deliberately torched the homes and shrines of the ruling class.

The population dispersed over the following century. By AD 700 the city was empty. When the Aztecs arrived in the fourteenth century they treated Teotihuacan as a sacred ancestral site and built no new structures within its limits.