Teotihuacan: The (Other) Largest City in Mesoamerica

In Central America, The Valley of Mexico, the site of present-day Mexico City, was once one of the most densely populated regions in the entire American continent. In fact, it still.

#LargestCityinMesoamerica #sideprojects

[Opus]

Fun fact: This script was written specifically to hear Simon say 'Teotihuacan' as much as possible...

[MajoraZ]

I do writups and help history and archeology channels with content on Mesoamerica, so I wanted to give some additional information, there's a lot more that can be said! Firstly, I don't think enough was said about Teotihuacan as an urban center, exactly, as it's got some very unusual traits: Most Mesoamerican cities had a urban core with rich painted temples, palaces, ball courts, and other administrative, ceremonial, and communal structures and spaces, organized around plazas with structures placed to enable ritualistic alignments or for communal flow/viewing, and then suburbs of commoner residences interspersed with agricultural land radiating out from the core, gradually decreasing in density the further out you go... Teotihuacan doesn't follow that model, for a few reasons:

At Teotihuaan, the city as a whole was organized around a central road. Ball courts, which were ubiquitous throughout Mesoamerican cities, only show up very early in Teotihuacan's history and then no more were built and the few there were buried. Most unusually, the city had an absolutely massive planned urban grid covering between 18 and 22 square kilometers (keep in mind even Rome's walls only encompassed 13.5 square kilometers), with basically that entire expanse being nothing but large palace compounds and temples: the radiating suburbs so many other Mesoamerican cities had only covered a relatively meager amount of space around the edge of that sprawling urban grid, wheras in most large Mesoamerican cities it was the suburbs that sprawled out to dozens (or in some cases hundreds) of square kilometers. And what were all those hundreds of palace compounds for? Almost the entire city's population!

In Teotihuacan, almost all of the city's ~100, 000 denizens (this is the figure more recent research from Dr. Smith at the ASU Teotihuacan lab supports, though depending on if I am reading the paper, "Apartment Compounds, Households, And Population In The Ancient City of Teotihuacan Mexico", right, that may not be for the whole city) lived in these complexes, which had dozens of rooms, toilets, painted frescos, and other fine art: With the exception of the few househoulds in "normal" sized residences in the suburbs, most of Teotihuacan's population was living in residences and with goods that only nobles or royalty enjoyed in most other Ancient and Medieval societies (There is evidence of fairly egalitarian homes and goods in some other Mesoamerican cities, like Tlaxcala or early on in Monte Alban's history, but not to the extent seen at Teotihuacan). This, alongside the multi-ethnic nature of the city (Beyond the cultures mentioned in the video, there were also Gulf Coast and West Mexican neighborhoods) and the lack of royal tombs is part of why a more democractic goverment seems like a possibility, though I must say Teotihuacan would not be unique for that: Tlaxcala was a republic where a senate of both nobles and commoners held most of the political power, and to an extent other Nahua/Aztec cities had some similar practices even if in most cities, the councils were not open to commoners and most power was vested in a autocratic ruler, I talk more about this in my comment on Stefan Milo's video on Tlaxcala.

As the video mentions, various aspects of Teotihuacano art and architecture, most famously the Talud-Tabero architectural style for pyramid construction/facades, were widely adopted by other Mesoamerican civilizations, but it's urban layout generally was not, with the caveat that the Aztec captial of Tenochtitlan did have a sort of intentional revival of some Teotihuacano urbanism and artistic trends, such as a planned grid for some of it's central structures and city precincts, though only within those areas, roads that split the city into quadrants, etc, as well as of some specific artistic motifs in murals and paintings. The video also does mention that the Aztec worked the site into their creation myths, but the Aztec also did excavations at Teotihuacan, bringing ceremonial goods back into Tenochtitlan (There's even 1 example of a Teotihuacano mask that the Aztec furnished with shell/obsidian eyes, which was then taken to Europe and came into the position of Leopoldo de’ Medici (yes, THOSE medicis) in Florence, where it was further modified to be mounted onto displays/walls) and renovating some of the city's shrines.

On the note of that, beyond Obsidian craft, which as was mentioned, was a major industry in Teotihuacan (it is thought they leveraged their control over a few Obsidian deposits to have a monopoly on specific kinds of it, such as a Green obsidian, which aided in their political and economic influence throughout the region), the city is also famous for it's rich painted frescos (again, these were in most homes, and many of them survive today, though sadly often in looted fragments), distinctive masks and tripod ceramic pots and jars and bowls, with polychrome paint, large, impressive ceramic braziers in the shape of sculptures of people in ornate regalia, to name a few examples.

The city may have also had a key role in further spreading a few key diety archtypes found throughout different Mesoamerican civilizations: While Feathered Serpent and Goggled/Fanged rain gods predate Teotihuacan (there are avian-serpent hybrid creatures found in depictions in sites in the Olmec region, Oaxaca, etc as far back as 1000ish BC, likewise the archtypical Mesoamerican rain god was thought to come from Olmec were jaguar sculptures from that period too, where their teeth, curved snarling lips, and slanted eyes eventually developed into the fangs, hooked/upturned lips and noses, and the "goggles" around the eyes of later Mesoamerican rain gods), Teotihuacan has some of the most notable depictions of these diety archtypes during the Classic period, with obviously the Temple of the Feathered Serpent having massive sculptures of that diety, and Teotihuacan's storm god perhaps being the most important diety in the city, and still retaining the war associations and a bit more traces of the feline aspects of those Olmec were jaguars then what we see in the later Aztec tlaloc, which likely developed from the Teotihuacano version. It's also interesting to note that in Teotihuacan, the Feathered Serpent was seemingly primarily tied to water, which isn't an association that's that critical in earlier or later incarnations of the diety: The Temple of the Feathered Serpent, in addition to it's Serpent heads, also had large sculptures of either a crocodile or the storm god, and smaller reliefs of shells and other marine motifs. A tunnel underneath the Feathered Serpent pyramid and the CIudadela compound it was a part of was fashioned after a water underworld and had many aquatic ceremonial deposits, the Ciudadela's plaza could actually be flooded like the Roman coliseum (the city had a number of other complex plumbing and resevoir systems), and ariver was also canalized to appear as if it was coming out of the Ciudadela, perpendicular to one of the city's major roads, when viewed from specific angles.

I could go on for quite a bit, and post quite a bit of images and maps demonstrating all of this, but Youtube tends to get iffy when I leave super long comments and with links, and I don';t want the comment removed, so I will leave it there for now. Suffice it to say that we DO in fact know a lot about the city, it's onf of the most intensively studied archeological sites in the world. I highly reccomend Ancient America's video on Teotihuacan after you watch this one, it's fairly comprehensive and there's a pinned comment there from me with diagrams and photographs I've taken of specimens from the site.

[joshorion]

I went there last October (2021) and I had a bit of a "spiritual moment." Unfortunately we couldn't climb the pyramids do to covid restrictions but we could still go on a few platforms and quite honestly walking the "avenue of the dead" was pretty heavy. (& though the Pyramid of the sun was bigger, I was drawn a bit more to the pyramid of the moon) ...I have since gone to Uxmal & Chichen Itza and both were pretty amazing but neither stuck me quite the same way. Teotihuacan is a pretty special place and I'd highly recommend everyone seeing it in person.

[ValosiTiamata]

My former mythology professor actually worked at the excavations of Teotihuacan when they discovered the glyphs. Her doctoral thesis (which is available online) catalogued those glyphs, which are now believed to be the oldest known writing system in the world. Her stories of the excavations were fascinating, to say the least.

[nickrhees]

Simon you have my dream job ❤ Thank you for being a great orator with your amazing team!

[kylecramer]

I visited a few months ago. The size of these buildings is hard to overstate.

[lingthegreat]

Went to Teotihuacán last year. The place is incredible. If you clap your hands near different buildings they echo with different bird sounds. Ancient buildings making bird sounds 1, 800 years later…what!?

[patrickkelly]

This was cool, and informative, to watch. I visited Teotihuacan in 2001, climbed one (or both) pyramids, and purchased a mythological figure carved from obsidian. I knew not so much about the history of the ancient city until watching this video. Thank you!

[bixmcgoo]

This absolutely was not the right way to use "correlation does not equal causation" and instead was a matter of "absence of evidence does not equal evidence of absence"

[tomwhite]

So happy this was made! I'm going to Mexico to see this in October. Its so interesting

[hamzaferoz]

Man Mesoamerican History is a lost treasure trove

[BaronessErsatz]

Please consider a segment on the Moog Synthesizer. Pronounced "mohg", it started out as a huge instrument to create sounds other than what was normally available on a piano or organ. As time has passed, technology has whittled it down substantially. Now its soul is everywhere.
Thank you.

[ignitionfrn]

1:10 - Chapter 1 - Birthplace of the gods
4:45 - Chapter 2 - The land of opportunity
9:45 - Chapter 3 - Ghost of the dead
- Chapter 4 -
- Chapter 5 -
- Chapter 6 -

[ayiza]

I love learning about history, and your videos are some my favourite channel.

[tommythetoe]

Great video thank you. Have you thought about doing a video on the
Inca terrace farming. They were used for heating the plants as well
as water and were very sophisticated.

[syzygyygyzys]

Simon brought up names of places and variations. Is there enough of such things for a Side Projects? Best example of such is the cartographer’s mistake of exchanging the name of the island of San Juan with its port of Puerto Rico.

[Aedar]

So here I am, just back from vacation to Mexico, and what do I find when scrolling through the videos I missed? Cool to see a video on a place I just visited like a week ago :D

[JoshStLouis]

The Incas, Mayas, and Aztecs are my favorite area of study (outside my field)

[kamrenwalker]

i visited here back in june 🤤 it is outstanding in person, and the temple of the sun and the temple of the moon are at the same height due to the moon being placed higher on the hill 😩 i loved it! THEN 🤣 as you get closer to the temple of the moon, the mountain behind it disappears 😱😆 also the stairways to the top are closed due to covid 🥲

[aresaurelian]

Living your entire life in the Amazon rainforest growing crops in small quadratic fields, it must have been quite a divine experience to enter a huge bustling city of immense proportions.