Day 35ish

On Wednesday I took a break from harassing Fedex and visited Teotictuan, the ancient city of pyramides outside Mexico City. This ancient city was believed to be populated from about 200 BC to about 700 AD and has the huge Pyramids of the Sun and the Moon as well as the Avenue of the Dead. The name avenue of the dead was given by the Aztecs who found this city long destroyed by the time their civilization rose and believed that the pyramids were tombs of ancient kings. Apparently Cortez passed by the ruined city on one of his Mexican campains and did not notice the ruins (supposedly they were completely overgrown) The pyramid of the sun is the third biggest pyramid in the world, nd the largest one that authorities still let people climb. Here are some pictures. The civilization that was founded in this city shared many similarities with the prehispanic civilizations that followed it: high population density that was the result of farming, a specialized society with farmers, warriors and priests, and a religion that involved human sacrifice. No one seems to have a good explanination why a city rose in this particular location, or why it totally collapsed several hundred years later. It seem strange to me that an area that could support tens of thousands of people could be abandoned and overgrown 1000 years later.


Me standing infront of the Pyramid of the Sun. This is a really big pyramid and those little specs that you see going up and down the stairs are people. After climbing up and down the thing once I thought I was glad I wasn´t one of the pyramid priests that had to do this every day. Image the arguments they must have had about who would have to go down to get the tools, if someone discovered they forgot something important at the bottom!


This is another picture of the Pyramid of the Sun taken from the smaller (but built on top of a hill and thus about as tall) Pyramid of the Moon. The street to the right of the picture is The Avenue of the Dead. Besides the fact that the avenue is over two kilometers long, the interesting thing about it is that it is not flat. There are multiple raised and lowered sections along the avenue, indicating that everyone walked along it passing up and down stairs. Of course this would not be a practicle design for any sort of wheeled vehicle. Its amazing to think that as sophisticated as these ancient civilizations were, they didn´t have the use of any type of cart pulling animal, and thus had no need for the wheel.


The Pyramid of the Moon. We can see smaller temple or dwelling complexes off to the lower left.


Carvings from yet another complex, the temple of the jaguar, I believe.


A close up view of a carving from the Temple of the Jaguar. This head was removed and installed in a small museam in the Teotictuan complex. Its interesting that extensive and huge as these temple complexes were, there are relatively few carvings or frescos that remain. Maybe there were lots of carvings and frescos at the time the civilization existed, but they didn´t hold up as well over time as the larger structures.