Teotihuacan was one of the largest cities of the ancient world, laid out with monumental order, and yet the identity of its builders and the names of its gods are largely unknown.
A planned metropolis
At its height, in the first several centuries CE, Teotihuacan in the Valley of Mexico covered some 20 square kilometres and may have held over a hundred thousand people, making it one of the largest cities anywhere at the time. It was rigorously planned around a central axis, the so-called Avenue of the Dead, aligned slightly off the cardinal points, along which stand the colossal Pyramid of the Sun and Pyramid of the Moon and the temple of the Feathered Serpent. Most of the population lived in multi-family apartment compounds, an unusual arrangement for the ancient Americas.
Gods without names
The city fell and was largely abandoned by around the seventh or eighth century, for reasons still debated, including internal upheaval and burning of the ceremonial centre. Because its writing is minimal and undeciphered, the names its people used for themselves and their deities are lost. The names now used are later impositions: the Aztecs, arriving centuries afterward, found the ruins and named them Teotihuacan, "the place where the gods were made" or "the place of becoming a god", believing it the site where the current world age and its sun had begun. The murals show deities of storm, water and the feathered serpent, and beneath the pyramids excavation has found offerings and sacrificial burials.
The sacred ruin
Teotihuacan was thus a sacred site twice over: a functioning religious capital in its own age, and, after its fall, a place of pilgrimage and origin-myth for the Aztecs and other later peoples who revered its ruins. It is a World Heritage site and Mexico's most visited archaeological zone; on the spring equinox large numbers climb the Pyramid of the Sun in a modern observance layered over the ancient one.