Teotihuacan: Rise of the City of the Gods in Ancient Mexico

Teotihuacan was the largest city of the ancient Americas, a planned metropolis in the Basin of Mexico that grew from about 100 BC and reached its height between about AD 350 and 550. At its peak it covered some 20 square kilometres and housed perhaps 100,000 people around great pyramids and a monumental central avenue. Its art, trade goods and political influence spread from central Mexico to the Maya lowlands, and long after its fall the Aztecs revered its ruins as the place where the gods had created the world.

Background: the Basin of Mexico before the city

In the last centuries BC the Basin of Mexico, a high valley ringed by volcanoes, was home to several competing towns. The largest was Cuicuilco in the southwest, with a circular stepped pyramid. Teotihuacan, in a side valley to the northeast, was at first one of many farming communities.

The valley had real advantages. Permanent springs allowed irrigation, the soil was fertile, and nearby deposits of obsidian, the volcanic glass used for blades and tools, were among the richest in Mesoamerica. The site also lay on natural routes between the Basin of Mexico and the lowlands of the Gulf Coast.

Natural disasters may have helped Teotihuacan pull ahead. Eruptions of Popocatépetl in the 1st century AD devastated parts of the Puebla region to the southeast. Later, the eruption of Xitle covered Cuicuilco’s surroundings in lava. Many archaeologists think displaced people moved to Teotihuacan, adding to its rapid growth.

Building a planned city

From around the 1st century AD the people of Teotihuacan began building on an enormous scale. The city was laid out on a grid oriented about 15.5 degrees east of true north, an alignment followed by streets, buildings and even the canalised San Juan River. The reason for this orientation is debated, but it may relate to the movement of the sun and to sacred features of the landscape.

The central axis was the avenue later called the Avenue of the Dead, about 4 km long according to most estimates. At its northern end stands the Pyramid of the Moon, framed by the mountain Cerro Gordo behind it. Along its eastern side rises the Pyramid of the Sun, built mainly between about AD 100 and 250, roughly 225 metres along each side of its base and about 65 metres high today.

Further south lies the Ciudadela, a vast sunken enclosure about 400 metres on each side, large enough to hold tens of thousands of people. Inside it stands the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, built around AD 200–250 and decorated with sculpted heads of feathered serpents. More than 130 human burials, probably sacrificial victims, have been found in and around it, and estimates of the original total exceed 200.

Life in the city

Most people did not live in simple huts. From about AD 200–250, Teotihuacan’s population moved into some 2,000 walled apartment compounds built of stone and plastered adobe. Each compound housed perhaps 60 to 100 people, often related families sharing courtyards, altars and drainage. This kind of permanent multi-family housing was unusual in the ancient world.

Craft production was a major part of the economy. Hundreds of workshops made obsidian blades and tools, using green obsidian from the Pachuca area and grey obsidian from Otumba. Others produced pottery, figurines, textiles and objects of shell and stone. Farmers lived in the city and walked out to their fields each day.

Teotihuacan was also cosmopolitan. Archaeologists have identified an enclave of people from Oaxaca, sometimes called the Oaxaca Barrio, whose tombs and pottery follow Zapotec traditions linked to Monte Albán, the Zapotec capital. Another district, the Merchants’ Barrio, contained pottery from the Gulf Coast and the Maya region. These communities kept their own customs for generations.

Art, religion and government

The walls of temples and apartment compounds were covered in brightly coloured murals. They show deities, priests, animals such as jaguars and coyotes, and lush scenes of water and plants. One famous mural from the Tepantitla compound shows a figure often called the Great Goddess, with streams of water and small human figures playing and swimming.

Teotihuacan’s gods included a storm and rain deity related to the later Aztec Tlaloc and the feathered serpent later known as Quetzalcoatl. The city had a system of signs and symbols, but no long written texts like those of the Maya have been found, and its language is unknown.

One of the great mysteries is how Teotihuacan was ruled. Unlike Maya cities, it has no monuments showing named kings, and no royal tomb has been securely identified. Some scholars think the city was governed by powerful rulers in its early centuries and later by a council or a collective arrangement. Others argue that kings existed but were not celebrated in art. The question remains open.

Influence across Mesoamerica

At its height Teotihuacan was the dominant power in central Mexico, and its influence reached far beyond. Its distinctive talud-tablero architecture, which combines sloping and vertical panels, appears at sites such as Kaminaljuyu in highland Guatemala. Teotihuacan obsidian, pottery and imagery spread widely through trade and imitation.

The clearest evidence of political reach comes from the Maya city of Tikal. Maya inscriptions record the arrival there of a man named Siyaj K’ak’ in January AD 378 (the exact day depends on the calendar correlation used), the same day the local king died. A new ruler, linked to a lord with Teotihuacan imagery, was installed soon after. Historians debate whether this Teotihuacan entrada at Tikal was a military conquest or a political alliance, but it changed Maya politics for generations.

Fire and decline

Around AD 550 the temples and elite residences along the Avenue of the Dead were burned. Sculptures were smashed and buildings deliberately destroyed. The targets suggest an internal uprising against the city’s rulers, although an outside attack cannot be completely ruled out.

The burning was not the end of life at Teotihuacan, but the city never recovered its power. Its population fell sharply over the following century, and by around AD 650 it was a much smaller town. Long-term problems such as drought, deforestation, social inequality and the loss of trade may have weakened the city before the destruction.

Rediscovery and research

The Aztecs, who came to power in the Basin of Mexico in the 15th century, visited the ruins as a sacred site. They gave the city the Nahuatl name Teotihuacan and told how the sun and moon had been created there. They also named the Avenue of the Dead, believing the platforms along it were tombs.

Modern excavation began with Leopoldo Batres, who rebuilt the Pyramid of the Sun between 1905 and 1910 for the centenary of Mexican independence, removing a great deal of original material. Manuel Gamio led more careful work in the 1910s and 1920s, including the excavation of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. From 1962 René Millon’s Teotihuacan Mapping Project recorded the entire city, showing its full extent for the first time. In 2003 a tunnel was discovered beneath the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, and its excavation from 2009 yielded tens of thousands of offerings.

Myths and facts

Myth: the Aztecs built Teotihuacan. The city was abandoned as a major centre roughly 700 years before the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan was founded in the 14th century. The Aztecs admired and reused its ruins, but did not build them.

Myth: the pyramid names are original. The Pyramid of the Sun, the Pyramid of the Moon and the Avenue of the Dead are Aztec or later names. We do not know what the builders called them.

Fact: the city’s real name may survive. Some Maya inscriptions refer to a distant place written with a sign for reeds, read by many scholars as Puh. This may have been a Maya name for Teotihuacan, but the reading is not certain.

By the numbers

Timeline

• c. 100 BC: Teotihuacan grows from a village into a significant town.
• 1st century AD: Rapid growth; large-scale construction begins.
• c. AD 100–250: Main construction of the Pyramid of the Sun.
• c. AD 200–250: Temple of the Feathered Serpent built in the Ciudadela; apartment compounds spread.
• January AD 378: Siyaj K’ak’ arrives at Tikal, marking Teotihuacan’s intervention in Maya politics.
• c. AD 350–550: Peak population and influence.
• c. AD 550: Central temples and palaces are burned; the city declines.
• 1905–1910: Leopoldo Batres reconstructs the Pyramid of the Sun.
• 1962: René Millon begins the Teotihuacan Mapping Project.
• 1987: UNESCO inscribes the Pre-Hispanic City of Teotihuacan as a World Heritage Site.

Why it matters

Teotihuacan showed that a city of around 100,000 people could be planned and sustained in the Americas, making it one of the largest cities anywhere in the world at the time. Its grid, housing and multi-ethnic neighbourhoods offer a rare picture of early urban life, and its influence shaped Mesoamerica for centuries. Even in ruins it remained a sacred landscape, and today it is one of the most visited archaeological sites in the world.