Wholesale Back Hair Removal Products

Professional quality back hair removal products at clearance prices!

Shimmer Razors

Teotihuacan, Mexico. The Magnificent Ruins of a Lost Civilization

 

Theodore P. Druch

As the Zapotecan civilization was decaying, one of its neighbors to the west was on the rise, building what would be the largest and most magnificent city in Mexico until the Aztecs founded Tenochtitlan thirteen hundred years later.

We aren't sure who the people were who built this ancient megalopolis. Recent evidence suggests the possibility that three different peoples, the Nahuatl, Otomi, and Totonac may have been united in the construction and rule of what would have been the world's first multiethnic state.

Covering an enormous 32 sq mi, the place the Aztecs named Teotihuacan was also the largest city in the world, with a population upwards of 200,000. Begun around the time of Rome's ascendancy in Europe, by 250 AD the city was well into its "Golden Age," four hundred years during which it extended its economic and cultural influence throughout central Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula.

Historians are divided as to whether Teotihuacan was ever, technically, an empire. Though it was by far the most important city in the Americas, evidence that it actually ruled over any of its neighbors is hard to find. Is it possible that we see the remains not only of the world's first multiethnic state, but of her first (and possibly last) enlightened city-state, less interested in hegemony than in trade? A corporate empire whose motto was "What's good for Teotihuacan is good for the country."

Whatever the case, there is little evidence of militarism and its attendant fortifications here, and nearly every archaeological site anywhere in central and eastern Mexico yields up connections with Teotihuacan. The city seems to have had a hand in every pot, and seems to have succeeded mostly without war and destruction, though there is some evidence that it conquered the Mayan capital of Tikal in the 3rd or 4th century AD.

We were on our way to Mexico City and we'd stopped here at Teotihuacan, only 25 miles or so northeast of the capital. Unlike many of the ancient ruins of Mexico, this one was never lost; its ghostly towers were known and regarded with superstitious awe by the central Mexican peoples. Having long ago forgotten the true builders of this metropolis, they believed that it had been home to a race of giants who transformed themselves into gods.

The Aztecs, more than a thousand years later, knew the place well. They held religious festivals here, naming it Teotihuacan, "The Place where Men became Gods," the name by which it has been known ever since. We also have the Aztecs to thank for spinning yarns about Teotihuacan to the Spanish, creating a mythology which took the first archaeologists on several wild-goose chases before they began to separate fact from fantasy.

The very size and complexity of the Teotihuacan commercial empire obviously required some form of writing, if only to keep records. Still, evidence of such is hard to come by; we have a few, albeit vigorously disputed, examples of what seems to be a script consisting of glyphs, stylized caricatures of animals or objects, which stand either for words or syllables, but none of them sheds any real light. It seems though, that the people of Teotihuacan, however they managed their bureaucracy, preferred to paint their history in colorful murals.

It had been a conviction of Mexican archaeologists that Teotihuacan was mainly a religious center. In this, they were following one of the blind alleys laid out by the Aztecs. Because, a millennium later, the city was a center of religious pilgrimage, they assumed that it always had been, and many of the mural paintings were, almost automatically, assigned religious or mythological significance.

Lately, more skeptical scholars have begun to question this assumption, claiming that maybe a butterfly is just a butterfly, and a jaguar is just a jaguar after all. Still, without written records, and dependent upon questionable cultural comparisons, we know almost nothing at all about what this incredible place was really like at the height of its power.

One thing about it though seems indisputable. Teotihuacan was laid out on a grid system, oriented according to astronomical considerations; offset exactly 15.5 degrees east of true north. This slightly cockeyed layout has given rise to many different interpretations, all having something to do with the rising and setting of the sun on certain dates, or the setting of the Pleiades, or the rising of Sirius, or some astronomical alignment or other, all of which have serious flaws.

The latest explanation is based on the Mayan calendar, the astronomical system most commonly in use in Mesoamerica and probably based on calculations first worked out by the Olmecs. According to this cosmology, the world began on August 13 by our calendar, and, on August 13, the sun sets directly west of the face of the Pyramid of the Sun.

Conclusive proof? Who knows?

The knowledge and sophistication of the astronomers and engineers of Teotihuacan didn't end there, however. Science trumped religion in the placement of the nearby Pyramid of the Moon, so accurate, that a line drawn from its center through the center of the Sun Pyramid marks the line of the meridian, allowing the exact times of noon and sunset to be determined, as well as the dates of festivals.

Arrow straight streets lead off on either side of the equally unswerving main road named The Avenue of the Dead by the Aztecs, who believed that the gigantic platforms which line it were tombs. This monumental highway runs for several miles, eventually disappearing beneath the farmland which still covers most of the ancient city and the buried treasures lying hidden below. Averaging 150 ft wide along most of its length, at one point it is crossed perpendicularly by another broad avenue, dividing the city into four quadrants.

The builders had more up their sleeves, however, and they took the nearby San Juan River, diverted and canalized it, and made it cross the Avenue at right angles so that refuse and rainwater, draining from the road, could be carried hygienically and safely away.

The size of this city and its huge buildings is difficult to grasp. Probably the best idea is to be had from the top of the Pyramid of the Sun, 200 feet above the Avenue of the Dead. Climbing the 248 difficult steps to the top brings you right up close and personal with this 3 million ton pile of mud, rock and stone, only about 3 feet smaller, in total circumference, than the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Egypt.

It's tough going, dragging yourself up the high steps - especially when you're a geezer. Younger climbers did it free style - without support; we clung tenaciously to the rope banisters strung loosely down the center of each flight, trying not to look down while our intrepid mutts leaped them with the fearlessness of mountain goats.

Built at an angle of about 32 degrees, the pyramid was constructed by stacking atop each other five successively smaller levels of mud faced with giant cut stones which were, in their turn, faced with a thick layer of lime plaster. Apparently, the top level also enclosed a foot thick sheet of mica which has now disappeared, plundered by the first archaeologists who worked here. One would hope, at least, that it was to raise money to continue funding the excavations. The significance of the mica is as unknown as everything else, but it was found in several other places, usually underlying adobe floors. Interestingly, geologists identify it as a type found only in Brazil, two thousand miles away. It seems Teotihuacan cast a wide net indeed.

Stopping for a while at each of the succeeding levels to catch our breath, we got an ever-expanding view of the surrounding landscape and the city spread out below. Finally, from the top, we saw the Avenue of the Dead stretching away to the left past the ruins of temple platforms and residential structures, past the huge plaza of the Ciudadela, the Citadel, Teotihuacan's administrative center, and continuing on until it starts to look like the cornfields. To the right, the monumental avenue continues for only a short distance until it opens into a huge square, 300 ft on each side with a large, raised platform in the center strewn with the ruined foundations of other structures. On either side of this square, standing like Brobdingnagian sentinels, are twelve stepped half-pyramids once crowned by wooden temples. The Avenue finally comes to its end (or beginning) at the northern end of the square, where the Pyramid of the Moon rises in 5 levels to a total height of 140 feet, but because it sits on higher ground, its top is nearly level with that of the Pyramid of the Sun. The twelve temples of the square and the Moon Pyramid, an obviously related grouping, add up to thirteen.

There's that number again.

The sight of ant-sized tourists creeping along the Avenue below and dwarfed by the enormous structures they pass slowly by emphasizes, like nothing else can, the truly monumental proportions of this city. It's easy to understand why the local villagers believed that giants had lived here; who but giants could have transformed unimaginable tons of rock into these huge, looming platforms, decorated with giant murals dissolving under the assault of the centuries.

Back on terra firma, safe and sound, we can marvel at these giant platforms from the ground up, as elegant as they are huge, built in a style called talud-tablero, consisting of successive horizontal levels, tableros, set upon a sloped talud, a wall angled at 45 degrees, thereby rising in steps, as each level is smaller than the one below. Talud-tablero was not invented here, though its adoption as the dominant architectural style of Teotihuacan, insured its dissemination throughout Mesoamerica, and such construction is to be found wherever the remains of its settlements have been discovered.

This cultural diffusion worked both ways though, and large neighborhoods have been excavated, occupied by communities of Mayans, Zapotecs, Mixtecs, and numerous other groups who lived and worked here, but built their homes in their own traditional styles. From the numbers of such places, it's clear that, in addition to everything else, Teotihuacan was probably the most cosmopolitan city ever to be established in ancient Mesoamerica.

Walking past the foundations of just such a complex of apartment dwellings, we can see the wide gutters, cut into the underlying stone of the ancient street, which carried waste water from the indoor plumbing of the residential blocks to the sewers running beneath the Avenue of the Dead and into the river. This was a civilization as technologically advanced as any in the world of its time and for many centuries afterwards.

Occupying a huge square 1300 ft on each side, the Ciudadela, Teotihuacan's administrative center, now consists of a large lawn surrounded by a raised terrace upon which are to be found fifteen large talud-tablero platforms. Once they would have held offices, customs houses, and all the other edifices necessary for the running of a commercial empire, today, they march around the emerald plaza like so many bare stages, crawling with tourists, devoid of the commercial enterprises which once gave them life.

That we know next to nothing certain about this place is doubly frustrating because of a great mystery uncovered here. Excavating a large pyramid in the Ciudadela, archaeologists discovered the hidden remains of an ancient temple, one of the most beautiful and mysterious in all of Mexico. What political or religious upheaval led to burying this sacred building, we'll probably never know, but what was hidden is spectacular – and chilling.

As the soil and debris were painstakingly dug away from the face of the buried temple, the remnants of a huge, seven-storied pyramid slowly re-awoke to the sunlight after a night of almost two thousand years. The original structure measured 215 ft on each side along its base and was almost 100 ft high, the third largest structure in Teotihuacan. What remains represents but a fraction of its original splendor.

Only one face of the pyramid still exists, consisting of most of its first four levels split by a monumental staircase, but the magnificence of the mysterious sculptures covering its walls takes the breath away like few other places in Mesoamerica.

Known as the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, its main motif consists of numerous large three to four-foot-long serpent heads, no two alike, which protrude from the facade through collars made of exactly eleven flower petals or feathers. Their bodies snake along the walls in bas-relief, ending in an unmistakable rattle. Is this "feathered serpent" an earlier representation of what later came to be known as Quetzalcoatl, one of the most important of Mexican deities?

Between the serpent's heads are squarish designs with large circles like slapstick vaudeville spectacles which also protrude from within the walls. Are these the eyes of a deity later called Tlaloc, the rain god, one of the most bloodthirsty in the entire Mesoamerican pantheon? Was this his progenitor? If so, this is the first temple in Mexico to house the worship of more than one deity. To further complicate the matter, some scholars now believe these to represent the "war serpent," the same as the others but embellished with a ceremonial war headdress.

The people who built this pyramid were well aware of drama, for the serpent's eyes were designed to contain large orbs of obsidian which would have gleamed brilliantly in sunlight, and eerily by torchlight and remarkably, traces of the original paint still remain, indicating that the background color of the pyramid was dark blue. Judging by what we know of Mesoamerican decoration, it's more than likely that the heads and bodies would have been painted in various bright colors.

The temple may also be the earliest example in Teotihuacan of a modified form of talud-tablero, in which the angle of the talud is somewhat less than 45 degrees and joins the next tablero only about a foot above the first, presenting an angled surface on which to incise wavy lines representing the sea. Fish, shells, and other ocean creatures are represented regularly. Does this merely indicate that the city had trading contacts with the seacoast, or is there more here, a mythology of which we are utterly ignorant?

More of the exquisitely carved serpent heads protrude from the wide skirting on either side of the stairway, and it has been estimated that the original temple would have had upwards of four hundred separate heads, all different, and all superb.

As though the serpents and Tlalocs aren't strange enough, there's an even more macabre side to this temple. So far, about 200 human bodies have been discovered in various underground crypts, obviously sacrificial victims, but for whom or for what, we will likely never know.

With its undulating serpents and goggle-eyed gods bursting forth through the walls in glorious Technicolor, this would have been the single most spectacular building in all of ancient Mesoamerica.

Notwithstanding the many theories propounded by scholars, the reason why this magnificence was made to disappear will have to remain one of the premiere mysteries of antiquity, and ultimately, though it took nearly a thousand years more, the people of Teotihuacan also disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

Like the conjectures about the temple, many reasons for this have been put forward. Political upheaval, disease, war, destruction of the environment; all have been blamed, but all we know for sure is that sometime around 900 AD, the people left and the city died. The festivals and ceremonies which once marked this place as the center of the world, dissolved into legend.

 

The Procession

Carried along by the breeze, a faint hum, reminiscent of a distant swarm of insects, fitfully resolves into vague wisps of music, evaporating as quickly as they materialize.

The sound emanates from an undulating, multi-colored mass, about a mile away and moving slowly along a broad, adobe paved avenue, lined on either side with four and five storied apartment buildings, palaces, and temples perched atop huge, stepped, pyramidal platforms. Brightly colored figures, surrealistic effigies of humans, plants, and animals, inhabit the murals painted on the plastered walls, presenting a gigantic canvas of hallucinatory images, shimmering in the brilliant light of the morning.

The sun grows hotter as the day lengthens, and the slowly moving mass draws near, resolving itself into discrete human forms, each dressed in the costume and colors of his rank: men in white loincloths, aprons, and tunics; men in multi-hued skirts and vests; men wearing the heads of animals, or masks of fearsome visage; men with feathered helmets, carrying arrows, spears, and swords of obsidian held closely against leather strips fastened together into armor.

Behind this first rank of the procession, musicians seated on large wooden platforms, decorated with myriads of flowers and borne above the crowd on the shoulders of slaves, make a "joyful noise," and loin-clothed acrobats weave around and about, leaping, twisting, turning somersaults, and otherwise assaulting gravity.  Drums and rattles beat the time, long bass notes, issuing mournfully from a dozen conch shells levitate above the crowd, and clay whistles provide a high, keening background for melodic clay flutes fashioned in the shapes of animals and birds, joined, antiphonally, by other flutes made of reeds and wood. A continuo of various stringed instruments plays harmony and counter harmony to the flutes, and rasps made of tortoise shell contribute an underlying drone, the insect sound which first hummed along on the wind.

Women, gliding wraith-like in wide rows, make up the final ranks of this parade, stiff, white tent-like tunics reaching down from their necks to swish sibilantly along the adobe beneath their feet. On their heads they carry tall baskets heaped with fruits and vegetables, wide baskets filled with razor-sharp chunks of obsidian, and urns filled with fermented pulque, destined to fuel the drunken revels which will fill the coming night with sexual abandon.

The ranks of women are joined in their center by a large, slave-borne palanquin, profusely decorated with flowers, and holding a raised carriage of brightly painted wood.  Within, a seated figure, magnificently clad in white linen and jaguar fur, looks dispassionately at the panoply whirling about him. From his huge headdress, long feathers stream outward and downward like a multi-colored fountain, and more feathers, flowing from the staffs he holds in his hands, echo the spray of color on his head.

The procession continues its march, stopping only when the king's palanquin stands before an enormous red pyramid, ascending in five huge stories to a temple on the summit, luxuriantly decorated with mysterious symbols painted in bright colors on an ochre background. Solemnly and slowly, the various ranks of the procession arrange themselves around the king's carriage, leaving a wide path between it and the steps, which climb in steep increments to the top of the Pyramid of the Sun.

Several figures detach  themselves from the crowd, identified as priests by their multi-hued clothing, eagle-feathered headdresses, long staffs surmounted by clay images of the sun painted a brilliant yellow, and colorful capes thrown over one shoulder, fastened with huge brooches of jade.

Slowly, these harlequin figures ascend the stairs, accompanied by the relentless tattoo of the drums and the sibilant hiss of the rasps, a sound which won't end until, grown tiny against the enormity of the pyramid, the men reach the summit and disappear from the sight of the onlookers below.

Above, unseen, the priests enter the temple through a narrow passageway which leads into a dark interior illuminated only by a shaft of light, given form by dust motes swirling in the air, and streaming down at an angle from a circular opening in the heavily beamed wooden roof. Directly below, a basalt altar stands in darkness until the spotlight, whose angle lessens with every passing second, finally pours straight down onto a mirror of obsidian embedded in the rock. This is the second of only two days each year when the sun should be directly overhead at noon, and the fiery reflection of the solar orb is proof that the calendar is correct, the universe is in order, and the precise timing for the celebration of the city's festivals and thus, the proper worship of the gods, is assured for another year.

Below, the people wait silently, anxiously, until the priests re-appear above and raise their staffs triumphantly to the sky.

A huge cheer shatters the silence.

The Midsummer festival has begun.

 

(This artlcle is excerpted from my book, Footprints on a Small Planet, avalable at Amazon.com)

 

About the Author

Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 1939 on the eve of WWII, Theodore P. Druch, Ted to his friends, has misspent his life in various vain pursuits including an MA in Near Eastern Studies, several years as a resident at Timothy Leary's League for Spiritual Discovery in Millbrook, New York and later in an Ashram in Benson, Arizona; in San Francisco as a general contractor remodeling old Victorians (only their houses); as a neophyte computer geek helping his wife Maria in her fledgling software business; and finally, as a windblown vagabond, traipsing around the planet from one hemisphere to the other with Maria and their beloved Miniature Schnauzers Sherman and Schatzie.

Today, ensconced in a lovely house with an open atrium in the heart of Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, Ted has embarked upon a new incarnation as a writer, hoping to get all the above down on paper before his ultimate eviction from the world writes an unwelcome finis to his adventures.

 

blue pink and purple shimmer

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 27th, 2010 at 7:18 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.