Day 349: Teotihuacan

Today I made a day trip to the last pre-hispanic city ruins on my schedule for Mexico: Teotihuacan. While the ruins of Tenochtitlan - the ones Mexico City is built upon - are quite new, Teotihuacan is much older. Construction started about 100 AD, and the city was abandoned around 700 AD. But since later pre-hispanic civilizations still seemed to regard the site as sacred, there wasn't as much pillaging and looting going on, so that the major buildings at least are quite well preserved.

According to some theories, the city was built to represent the creation of the universe: two big avenues dividing the city into four sectors corresponding to the four corners of the world. Aztecs in later days also thought of Teotihuacan as a sacred place, treating it as the place where the fifth sun was born.

Teotihuacan is another site with more than one layer on some of the buildings. One example is the temple of the feathered serpent, or Quetzalcoatl. The temple walls are beautifully decorated, and I'm guessing that the reason why the decorations are so well preserved is that there used to be another layer on top of it.

The two biggest buildings in Teotihuacan are the temple of the sun and the temple of the moon. The temple of the sun is the third-largest pyramid in the world, with a base that is more than 200 meters long. Since the pyramid isn't very high compared to the size of its base, it does look a little clumsy. The top level was being worked on when I visited, so I had to stop climbing a little below; but even so, there were enough steps to climb to get out of breath.

But there was a very nice reward: a beautiful overview of the entire city, and especially the temple of the moon. The temple of the moon is much better proportioned, and thus looks much more graceful:

The temple of the moon was also open to climb, with the topmost part roped off again. Still, the view, looking down along the Avenue of the Dead, was amazing:

In some of the smaller palaces in Teotihuacan, wall paintings have been conserved that show what a colorful city Teotihuacan must have been. This, for example, is the inner courtyard in the palace of Quetzalpapalotl:

The carvings on the columns depict hummingbirds and owls. Next door, in the patio of jaguars, there are murals that show - surprise - jaguars:

And a little further still are paintings of birds, water and flowers:

There was also a museum on site that exhibited a collection of things found among the ruins: mostly pottery, jewelry, and skeletons of people that were sacrificed when the construction of a new building was started. One of the stranger exhibits was a selection of jewelry that was modeled after human teeth: