The God of Blood and Stone / Eric Vines

The Teutuokan culture, which was shrouded in mystery for many years, finally reveals its secrets to us

In the 14th century, the first Mexicans arrived in the Teotihuacan Valley. The Mexica (who nowadays are often mistakenly called "Aztecs") were new to the region. They were an aggressive and ambitious people who came from the north and went and quickly became a ruling power in the highlands of Mexico. They conquered territories and built the powerful city of Tenochtitlan, today's Mexico City, from which they ruled a large empire in a short time. Imagine the first, daring tour expedition, arriving in a lush green space, with gentle hills around it. These warriors, imbued with a sense of invincibility, a sense of a superpower in the making, follow stories they heard from the Toltec tribes about a place in the mountains, only 40 kilometers from their new home, a place where the gods once lived. When the house of the gods appears before them beyond the bend, courage is replaced by awe. Rows of pyramids 20 stories high are revealed to their eyes on both sides of a huge road. The pyramids are so large that at first the members of the expedition thought they were hills. Scattered everywhere are crumbling temples, market squares and relics of a culture that died a long time ago, without a name, without a record, without a history. Only a vast city, which was once magnificent beyond imagination, and today it is abandoned.

The Pyramid of the Moon - marks the end of the "Avenue of the Dead" at the Teotihuacan archaeological site not far from Mexico City.

The Mexicans eventually built Tenochtitlan in the image of this ghost town, and turned the ruins into a sort of summer residence used by the elites. The ancient road was called the "Avenue of the Dead" and the two largest pyramids were called the "Pyramid of the Sun" and the "Pyramid of the Moon". The old city was called Teotihuacan: "Birthplace of the Gods".

About 200 years later, in 1521, the Spanish conquistadors overthrew the Mexican Empire, and in the centuries that followed, Teotihuacan slowly disintegrated. At the beginning of the 20th century, when archaeologists began to investigate the site in an orderly and serious manner, they did not know who built it any more than the Mexicans did. Many of them thought that it was a secondary settlement established by scattered tribes, and later annexed by the invaders. Today, researchers know that Tautehuacan was actually an ancient and much more important city than the first researchers thought. The city was the center of a major empire, predating all the civilizations of the region, which extended as far as 1,125 kilometers away. It was a city comparable to the Mayan kingdoms in Guatemala and Honduras and may even have ruled over them.

But, without the helpful evidence of written texts, for a long time archaeologists were left with open questions about the lives of the people of Teotihuacan. By excavating the remains and carefully exposing nearby, smaller buildings, they were able to draw general outlines of the socio-economic character of its inhabitants. Today they describe a bustling, multi-layered and ethnically mixed society. It had social strata that included, among other things, peddlers, merchants, and artisans from all over Mexico.

The political picture of Teotihuacan is less clear. Opinions are divided between two main hypotheses: one hypothesis holds that Tauteuakan was a city-state where a warrior-king reigned unquestionably and with absolute tyranny. Another hypothesis holds that it was a state based on trade in which several powerful families competed with each other for power, but none of them reached absolute control, and therefore the struggle was conducted as a careful political game. Today, two competing projects seek to decide the issue and solve the riddle. But everyone agrees on one thing: in the end, Teotihuacan was not a place where the gods were born but a place where people built the gods with blood and stone, and after that, they destroyed it to the ground.

A king hides himself in the dishes

Reconstructing the politics of a culture from the past is not simple at all. Imagine landing in Washington, the capital of the USA, 1,400 years after it was destroyed, and trying to understand the people who lived there. Did they worship Abraham Lincoln? Was the regime military? Were elaborate ceremonies held at the Lincoln Memorial pool? Which ruler or priest lived at the top of the monument? Such questions have been asked for 35 years by Saburo Sugiyama from Aichi University in Japan regarding Teotihuacan.

Three main buildings on the site: the Pyramid of the Sun, which is the tallest of them all; The Pyramid of the Moon, which is the second highest and marks the end of the "Avenue of the Dead"; And the smallest of them, on the side of the Pyramid of the Sun, the "Temple of the Winged Serpent". (sometimes referred to as "Quetzalcoatl", after the Mexican idol resembling this winged serpent, who apparently provided inspiration for his character). Although the structure of the winged serpent is smaller than the others, many believe that it was the most important and where the kings or the highly influential priests lived. The building is located right in the center of the old city, and it consists of two pyramids surrounded by a low walled building.

In 1989, Sugiyama and archaeologist Ruben Cabrera Castro of the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico discovered a new and crucial clue regarding the history of Teotihuacan: 18 skeletons of human sacrifices killed in a ritual and placed near the temple. A short time later, the pair of researchers found more similar human remains, and then, digging a tunnel under the temple, several more skeletons. A total of 100 skeletons were found. The victims found, most of them male, appear to have been fighters from other countries, which suggests a military society where power is enforced by corrosive threats.

Sugiyama began to embroider a very detailed outline of the character of Teotihuacan in its heyday. He imagined a king with an iron fist who ruled the city undisputedly. "This city was created and formed by force. You can't suggest ideas by reading like, 'Hey guys, let's build some buildings,'” says Sugiyama. "You have to convince the people by force."

In a small town, very close to Teotihuacan, Sugiyama sits in a laboratory. The building has more than two million artifacts collected in decades of archaeological excavation on the site. His demeanor is quiet, thoughtful, and it is not difficult to imagine his days as a traveling hippie, as he was in the 70s, when he left his native Japan to travel the world. But when it comes to research, there aren't many archaeologists as determined and ambitious as him.

In 1998, out of frustration at not finding any tombs or other direct evidence of the existence of those tyrants, Sugiyama decided to dig and look for them under the huge Pyramid of the Moon. It was an ambitious operation, but there was no better way to understand the structure of forces in the society under study, and the chance that graves would be found there was reasonable. Like any great city, Teotihuacan was not built in a day. Anthropologists speculate that around 150 years BC several tribes gathered in this place, in the heart of the abundant valley, and united in a sort of alliance. They built their city for wholesale; First here, then there. Sugiyama's research tunnel revealed that the Pyramid of the Moon was one of the first large structures built, about 100 years BC.

But they didn't build it all at once. From 1998 to 2004, the Sugiyama tunnel passed through seven earlier versions, built on top of each other like a matryoshka, a Russian doll. The fourth version, which according to carbon dating was built at the beginning of the third century AD, was a real upgrade of the version before it. It was a period of growth and perhaps also of the birth of the empire.

Sugiyama has yet to locate its kings, but his discoveries fit nicely with the emerging picture of how powerful Teotihuacan was. While the Teotihuacans were building their city, whether under the king's banner or not, they began to send out vassals. About 725 kilometers southeast of Teotihuacan, in today's state of Chiapas, there are the ruins of a small city called Los Horcones, which was built around the same time. Claudia Garcia-de Loria from the California Polytechnic University, who conducted excavations at the site, sees, despite the great distance from Teotihuacan, its distinct mark: "The very fact that the area of ​​the main square of the entire community is located in such a way as to remind as an echo of the way you walk down the Avenue of the Dead and arrive at a large open square - It makes a very strong impression. They tried to conjure [Tauteuakan] in their minds.”

The similarities are subtle, but obvious to the trained eye, says Garcia-de Loria. Based on the layout of the buildings and the style of the pottery, Los Horcones seems to have been a military outpost of Teotihuacan or a close trading partner. It is interesting to note that the road that Garcia-de Loria suspects is an imitation of the "Avenue of the Dead" leads nowhere. It suddenly ends with a big rock. But this impasse makes sense, if people who visited the original city (Tauteaucan) tried to create a scaled-down version of it. "Actually, it's really like Mecca for Muslim societies," Sugiyama says of Tauteaukan, "they would certainly make a pilgrimage to it."

Similar cities have been discovered in recent years throughout Mexico. Scientists now believe that Tauteahuacan was weak over a much larger area than they thought before these remains were discovered, which span much of present-day southern Mexico and reach as far as Honduras. As the kingdom expanded, goods such as limestone and feathers flowed into the city from all over Central America. In the jungle to the east, which was under the control of the legendary Mayan kings, scientists discovered references to a mysterious mountain city in the west, where the people are crowded like nests in a swamp. Many speculate that this city in the west is Teotihuacan, which apparently had some control over even Tikal - the Mayan mega-city in Guatemala. Evidence from another Mayan city, Copan in Honduras, shows that a man from Teotihuacan assassinated their king and established his own kingdom.

Such an empire, says Sugiyama, needed a strong and charismatic king. He imagines that such a leader lived around 219 AD, oversaw the monumental construction projects, and founded an empire that lasted 500 years.

Inside the fourth version of the Pyramid of the Moon, Sugiyama eventually found the seal of the empire: the remains of 12 humans (probably captives) and more than 50 animals, including wolves, jaguars, and eagles, arranged in a complex configuration. The arrangement is seen today as a representation of the creation myth. In its center is a pile of knives that resembles the hand of a sundial pointing north. "Once again, we found very convincing evidence of the existence of a state: beheadings, knives," he says. "And again, we didn't find a skeleton of a ruler."

In the ancient Mayan cities, in almost every important building there is a mummified king under the front steps, or inside the building itself, and next to it are jars of precious spices and precious stones. So far, not a single king has been found in Teotihuacan.

A monarchy or a cooperative society?

Despite the absence of a king, Sugiyama is still convinced that Tauteuakan was a monarchy, similar to ancient Egypt, with all that entails, including a head of state considered a god and military measures focused on maintaining the obedience of the citizens of the multinational kingdom. But other experts disagree. "One person cannot control a multinational company. In such a situation there were frequent coup d'états," asserts archeologist Linda R. Manzania from the National Autonomous University of Mexico. "Society in Teotihuacan was cooperative, the complete opposite of the Mayan society."

Manzania claims, according to the scandalous findings she made, that Tautiaokan was not ruled by a supreme ruler, but by four powerful families, who fought each other for power like in the "Game of Thrones" series. If, according to Sugiyama, Tauteuakan resembled ancient Egypt, then according to Manzania, it resembles the Roman Republic: a power governed by a council. Teotihuacan kings were puppets of the ruling class, whose members were four houses old, and are represented in Teutihuacan iconography: coyote, winged snake, jaguar, and eagle. Each house controlled a district of the city, and had representatives in the central government building that had administrative departments for each family. The strong houses were the House of the Winged Serpent and the House of the Jaguar; Therefore the most ornate temples, the Temple of the Winged Serpent and the Pyramid of the Sun, lie on their side of the Avenue of the Dead.

Both the Sugiyama camp and the Manzania camp say that the second camp's claims are baseless. How is it that two people research the same site for decades and come to such different conclusions? This may be due, in part, to the fact that Manzania's perspective on Tauteaukan is very different from Sugiyama's. His career has been dedicated to finding the equivalent of the Washington Monument, while Manzania says she's looking for Georgetown: the picture she paints emerges from her work over the past 20 years examining the ordinary homes of the city's residents. In the 90s, Manzania revealed Ottoyahualco, an artisans' apartment in a complex in the northwest of the city, an area that she believed was under the control of Beit Ayit. Unlike the Mayan dwellings, which have only one ritual area, this complex had many different areas belonging to different traditions. To Manzania, this multi-national characteristic defines Teotihuacan. In her view, this is a place that could only have prospered because wealthy landowners outside the country controlled the trade routes and goods and fueled the rapid growth of the community. With such a division into several centers of power, it must have been very difficult for a single dictator to impose his wrath on the population. When the city was formed, 150 years BC, Manzania says, it is likely that there was no group that had a monopoly on resources like some of the Mayan rulers had. She concludes that the Teotihuacan rulers built their empire based on taxes collected from the provinces. And because of this, every contributor to the city's growth had an impact on the use of this power. Those ruling the wealthiest areas, such as the founders of the Winged Serpent Temple, enjoyed the greatest influence over decision-making.

This kind of forced division of power was a rare sight in the ancient world, but not entirely unfounded. Rome and Greece were, of course, republics for many years. Mohenjo Daro, an ancient city in the Indus Valley in Pakistan, probably shared its power with a nearby settlement called Harapa two thousand years BC, and likewise Tiwanaku in Bolivia with the Wari to its north, until 1000 AD.

However, cooperating with another city, which you cannot beat, is different from cooperating within your own city. Manzania admits that most ancient cultures were ruled by a single tyrant, and the state of affairs she describes is a little strange. However, she believes that anywhere in the world, it is likely that several cultures will try the common rule. However, the most solid confirmation of her theory is not what she discovered, but what she did not discover. What no one found out.

"Where is there a description or a picture of this mighty king? where is he buried where is his palace Can you imagine a place like Teotihuacan, for its 125,000 inhabitants, ruled by one man? There is no doubt that his residence and burial site should have been exceptional. And we don't see these things here," she says. "We would see him in his vessels, on the throne, in tombstones, in the palaces themselves."

What she does see is a flower with four petals, whose image is etched all over the city. Historian Alfredo López Austin of the National Autonomous University of Mexico says this symbol may represent the four houses that ruled the city. Such a place, like Rome, must have been full of intrigue and power struggles. As Teotihuacan grew and its influence spread, the elites gained more and more power. Market squares were paved, and expensive limestone began to appear throughout the city. The elites, from all four families, became greedy and competitive.

The data supports, to some extent, this scenario. Accumulating scientific findings show that people from all over Mexico came to live in the city, but maintained the traditions of their ethnic group for centuries. Like Spanish Harlem and Chinatown in New York, Teotihuacán had neighborhoods for the people of Oaxaca in the south of the city, for the Mayans, and for residents who came from the strip of land between the city and the Gulf of Mexico. Teopancatsco, the neighborhood adjacent to the Temple of the Winged Serpent to the south is an example of this. At the beginning of this century, Manzania excavated in this area, which was a stronghold of the elites who came from the provinces along the trade route that led to the land where the state of Veracruz lies today, east of Mexico City, and whose symbol she believed was the winged serpent. The holders of such a valuable area must have laid their hands on considerable wealth and may have used it to finance the construction of the temple next to the feathered idol.

Manzania's research shows that those elites of the winged snake feasted their hearts on 12 different species of fish that came, salted and smoked, from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, their country of origin, 210 kilometers from the city, and that they decorated their clothes with shells from the Gulf. "There was a competition between the elites who would flaunt the best makeup, colors, skins, cotton clothes, costumes and headdresses," she says.

This competition was most blatant in burial. Since 2005, Manzania has meticulously analyzed some very interesting graves of young elites in Teopankatzko. The children were decorated, a work of thought, with gems, cinnabar, jade, and mica, which were brought from the ends of the kingdom, and also with many materials brought from the regions of their homeland.

The rich lived in increasing luxury for centuries. They built palaces and paved them with stones brought from afar. But the good life could not last forever. In 350 AD something went wrong. It seems that they cut off the heads of 29 members of the elite, and their heads were decorated in a way that is only found in the Veracruz region. Manzania speculates that it was an "elimination" ceremony, marking some sort of cultural exchange. At the same time, the temple of the winged snake was replaced by the one in front of it, on which jaguars are perched, as if a painter came and redrew the sketch. And more specifically, after that time, almost no winged snakes are found in the city, which shows that the people of Varacruz lost their power, according to Manzania.

But they didn't disappear. A new dynasty of elites seems to have arisen afterwards, and they seem to have continued to prosper in Taufenkatzko for another two centuries. Then, in 550 AD, Teotihuacan burned down. We don't know why. Manzania says there are no signs of an invasion by foreign forces. The findings show large gaps between the poor and the rich. Analysis of the remains of the bodies from the site shows that many of the rich were healthy, while the poor suffered from malnutrition and back problems due to carrying heavy loads, and some of them even suffered from diseases related to insufficient exposure to sunlight, perhaps due to hard work in workshops. "I guess the middle classes rebelled against the ruling elites," she says. "The upper echelons tried to curb this trend too late. These people already had many interests and many allies in the corridors of power, and they rebelled."

Then, Manzania hypothesizes, the remorseful leadership concentrated its efforts on building residences all over Teotihuacan, rather than grand temples. Another hundred years passed, and the city sank for good. In her opinion, the chain of events simply forced the elites to rise up and return to their countries of origin throughout the empire.

Taupenkatzko discovers a sector of Tauteuakan life that is separate from the great temples. The city was diverse, but it was not a melting pot, but a patchwork in which each culture maintains its identity and competes bitterly with its neighbors for honor and power. This act of patchwork may explain why there was no uniform script and no images of kings, as the Mayans had. If they had, it would have meant that the scales had tipped too much in favor of one of the groups.

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Teotihuacan archeology is the possibility that both Sugiyama and Manzania are right. George Cogwill, professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, has hypothesized that Tautioquan oscillated between the two forms of government, alternating from time to time as a suitable leader seized power. But this compromise is not liked by either Manzania or Sugiyama.

Chamber of Secrets

Archaeologists may never know for sure who invented Teotihuacan. But very soon, maybe Sergio Gomez Chavez will discover a central part of the puzzle. Gomez Chavez, an archaeologist from the National Institute of Anthropology and History, has been excavating in Teotihuacan for decades, including in the homes of common people, such as in the Wahacan neighborhood of the city, and also in the large temples. In his work, he uncovered the drainage system of the Winged Serpent Temple in an attempt to restore it to protect the structure from rainwater damage during storms. It turns out that the ancient drainage system works well. But Gómez Chávez discovered that 50 mutilated corpses had been deliberately crammed into it. Who builds a drainage system only to plug it in a ritual ceremony? Gomez Chavez knew that the blocking of the canal was done around the time they built the fourth version of the Pyramid of the Moon. But maybe it was on purpose? Maybe the townspeople wanted to flood this place every year, like the pool at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington? (The people of Teotihuacan are known to have engaged in river diversion and other waterworks.) In such a flood, one fateful Thursday in October 2003, Gomez made his most amazing discovery.

"I came to work like any normal day, and I was informed that a large pit had opened near the temple," says Gomez. He hurried there, and indeed the rain that fell during the night opened a vertical, round shaft, the bottom of which was pitched in darkness. He did not hesitate and asked one of the workers to bring a rope. Although Gomez is not a mountain climber, he managed to tie himself with a rope, and several workers lowered him down the shaft, slowly. The depth of the hole, whose diameter is about half a meter larger than Gomez's shoulder blade, was about 15 meters. It was very much like a well, but when Gomez Chavez reached the bottom, he found that the soil on both sides was loose, as if they had filled it with a horizontal tunnel that extended on both sides of the pit. At the top end of this filling was a slit that he could almost see through. "I couldn't sleep for a week, because I didn't know what was there," he recalled.

It seems that a long time ago there was a horizontal tunnel, perpendicular to the shaft, which was filled with stones and dirt to seal it forever. One side led to the entrance to the ceremonial area behind it, which was covered and hidden from view for a long time. And the other side, it soon became clear to Gomez, continued far away, to the center of the Temple of the Winged Serpent. The shaft he discovered might have been a ventilation or lighting opening or a stargazing opening. Without him, the tunnel might never have been discovered. Thus began a 10-year operation to clear the tunnel and discover its north. It closed around the time of the decisive growth that was in the third century. Using radar and sonar, Gomez Chavez found that it led to a series of three chambers below the center of the pyramid. That's why he dug his way to them, meter by meter. Today is already close to the end.

A few months ago Gomez Chavez invited me to see the tunnel. I arrived at his excavation site, at the foot of the Temple of the Winged Serpent, in the large square that he believed was allowed to flood every year. I went down into the tunnel, and the coolness surprised me. It was a warm autumn day outside, but it was damp and cool downstairs. Gomez Chavez says that when the Teotihuacan people used this tunnel, the groundwater level was right at their feet. He speculates that this is why they dug it exactly this deep. A cold, dark place with a wet bottom may represent the underworld. Here and there I saw remnants of a special clay that was used to plaster the tunnel. The clay, mixed with sparkling pyrite, looks almost like twinkling stars. "It is no longer a temple to Latzelcoatl, but a temple commemorating the beginning of the mythical age," he says.

So far, Gomez Chavez and his colleagues have removed almost a thousand tons of filling material from the tunnel. By the way, they found, one by one, sealed sections. They opened the sections and discovered more treasures, including masks, weapons and carpets that may have been used as royal chairs. "The concentration of materials is simply amazing. The things he finds are unbelievable," says Sugiyama. The sections, now empty, look like pits scattered along the tunnel floor. I have to be careful not to fall in when crossing the plank bridges across them.

In the spring of 2013, Gómez Chávez, with the help of a robotic probe, peeked into two of the three main rooms at the end of the tunnel. One contains dozens of quartz balls, the other mirrors made of pyrite. No one knows what they are up to, and no one has seen the likes of them since his days. I stand by these rooms, kneel down and try to peer forward into the last, still sealed room. He's a foot or two shorter than where I'm standing. "It's very wet there," says Gomez Chavez. "We had to move slowly here with all the mud and water."

In Gómez Chávez's mind, the place was a sophisticated site of worship, where people left this world for a moment and returned as kings. Sugiyama, who is a little surprised that he himself did not discover the tunnel in his investigations, says that it is not suitable for a royal burial site. Even Manzania admits that the discovery of a royal tomb is a very big deal in Teotihuacan. She claims that this will not detract from her theory, but it depends on what will be found there.

Meanwhile, Manzania digs at her own site, a place called Xala, in search of conclusive proof. Next to the pyramid of the sun there are five buildings arranged in a rhombus, a shape similar to a flower with four petals, with a temple in the center. In her opinion, this was the administrative center of the city, to which each of the four houses sent messengers to take care of their affairs.

Either way, if Manzania proves her theory of the division of power and if Gomez Chavez discovers an all-powerful king buried at the end of the tunnel, Teotihuacan will never be the same again. Like ships emerging from a fog, finally, the lives of its inhabitants emerge from the shroud of mystery that surrounded them for 1,300 years.

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About the author

Eric Vance is a science reporter living in Mexico City. The last article he wrote for Scientific American dealt with Mexico's struggle to make the pursuit of science worthwhile.

in brief

Archaeologists have been wondering about the cancana of the ancient Mexican city of Teotihuacan for decades, but the society that lived in it has eluded them.

Recent discoveries provide new clues as to the lifestyle of the city's residents and the size of their empire. And as a result, the dispute regarding the political nature of the place was exacerbated.

One theory holds that Tauteuakan was ruled by a single king with unlimited authority; And another theory describes an elite of several families who competed among themselves for control.

city ​​of the gods

Today we know that the ancient city of Teotihuacan, previously considered a secondary settlement, was the heart of a great empire, whose influence reached as far west as Honduras. Excavations under the large buildings on the site and smaller buildings next to them, including residences of the city's residents, began to shed light on the mysterious society that lived there. The findings show a diverse community whose members lived in distinct neighborhoods, according to their ethnic origin. This arrangement ignited a debate about the control of the city.

A tunnel to the underworld

Excavation of a secret tunnel discovered beneath the Temple of the Winged Serpent revealed a series of compartments and chambers containing a variety of ritual offerings including masks, weapons and mysterious pyrite mirrors. Archaeologist Sergio Gómez Chávez from the National Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico, who discovered the shaft leading to the tunnel, is about to open the last large room, which is located under the heart of the temple. This room is the best candidate, found so far at Teotihuacan, for the burial site of the city's kings. If it turns out that this is indeed the case, it will decide the debate about the political nature of this great civilization.

More on the subject

Human Sacrifice, Militarism, and Rulership: Materialization of State Ideology at the Feathered Serpent Pyramid, Teotihuacan. Saburo Sugiyama. Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Corporate Life in Apartment and Barrio Compounds at Teotihuacan, Central Mexico. Linda R. Manzanilla in Domestic Life in Prehispanic Capitals: A Study of Specialization, Hierarchy, and Ethnicity. Edited by Linda R. Manzanilla and Claude Chapdelaine. University of Michigan Museum of Anthropology, 2009.

 

The article was published with the permission of Scientific American Israel

More of the topic in Hayadan:

• The Aztecs from the sun spear to broken spears
• The Aztecs and the Maya offered human sacrifices