Chapter 1 — No Name, No Language, No Script
Begin with the silence.
Most of the great cities of the ancient world left their names behind. Babylon means "Gate of God" in Akkadian. Athens is named for its patron goddess. Rome's origin story -- Romulus, the wolf, the seven hills -- is one of the most famous tales in Western civilization. Even cities whose scripts remain undeciphered left records in the scripts of their neighbors: the Etruscans are named in Greek and Latin sources; the Harappan cities appear in Mesopotamian trade records.
Teotihuacan left nothing. No inscription in any language names the city or its people. No neighboring civilization recorded their name in a way that scholars can confidently link to the archaeological site. The Maya, who interacted with Teotihuacan extensively, referred to it with a glyph that scholars read as puh -- "Place of Reeds" -- a term that may be a proper name or may be a generic title used for any great city. The Aztecs, who arrived in central Mexico roughly seven centuries after Teotihuacan's fall, gave it the Nahuatl name we use today, but the Aztecs had no more direct knowledge of the city's builders than a modern tourist does.
The result is one of the strangest situations in the study of the ancient world. We are dealing with a city that, at its peak around 450 CE, was among the six or seven largest on the planet. Its influence extended across Mesoamerica. Its art, architecture, and religious symbols appeared at sites over a thousand kilometers away. Foreign communities built neighborhoods within its walls. Its military or diplomatic agents intervened in the politics of the Maya lowlands. It was, by any measure, one of the most important places in the Western Hemisphere for over five centuries.
And we do not know its name.
View down the Avenue of the Dead toward the Pyramid of the Moon
The language question is equally frustrating. Teotihuacan's population of 125,000 to 200,000 people certainly spoke a language -- probably more than one, given the multi-ethnic character of the city. Scholars have proposed several candidates. Nahuatl, the language of the later Aztecs and one of the most widely spoken language families in Mesoamerica, is one possibility, though the linguistic evidence for Nahuatl speakers in central Mexico this early is debated. Totonac (toh-toh-NAHK), a language family spoken in the Gulf Coast region of Veracruz, has been proposed by some scholars based on phonological clues in place names. Otomí (oh-toh-MEE), a language family still spoken in central Mexico, is another candidate. Mixe-Zoquean (MEE-heh soh-KEH-an), the language family associated with the Olmec, has been proposed for the city's earlier phases. The honest answer is: we do not know, and without a deciphered writing system or clear linguistic evidence, we may never know.
The writing question is the most tantalizing. Did the Teotihuacanos have a writing system? The answer is: probably, but the evidence is ambiguous and hotly debated.
The city's art is rich in symbols. Murals, pottery, stone carvings, and other objects carry what appear to be glyphs -- small, standardized symbols that recur across the site and across media. Karl Taube, one of the leading scholars of Teotihuacan iconography, has identified a set of signs that appear to function as a notation system: symbols for place names, personal names, calendrical dates, and possibly speech or sound. Some of these signs resemble elements of later Mesoamerican writing systems, particularly the Aztec system, which was partially logographic (using pictures to represent words or concepts).
The problem is scale. The Maya had a fully developed writing system -- capable of recording historical narratives, royal genealogies, astronomical observations, and mythological texts in complete sentences. The Zapotecs of Monte Albán had a writing system that recorded dates, names, and conquered places. Even the Olmec may have had an early writing system (the Cascajal Block, discussed in Volume 3). Teotihuacan's notational system, if it exists, appears to be more limited -- or perhaps less well preserved. The city's primary medium of visual communication was the mural, and Teotihuacan's murals are among the richest in the ancient Americas. But murals are pictorial, not necessarily textual. A mural depicting a ritual scene can communicate meaning without using writing in the technical sense.
Some scholars argue that the absence of confirmed writing at Teotihuacan reflects a genuine cultural choice -- that the city's leaders deliberately avoided the kind of personalized inscriptions that characterized the Maya world, where rulers proclaimed their names, their victories, and their genealogies in carved stone. Teotihuacan's art is notably impersonal: it depicts gods, rituals, and symbols, but almost never depicts an identifiable individual human being. If Teotihuacan's political system was collective rather than individual -- if the city was governed by a council or a corporate group rather than a single king -- then the absence of personal inscriptions would be consistent with the political structure. You do not carve your name in stone if the system does not permit individual glorification.
Others argue that Teotihuacan almost certainly had writing and that the evidence simply has not survived. The city's buildings were plastered and painted -- ideal surfaces for writing -- but plaster deteriorates over 1,500 years. Bark-paper codices, the standard medium for Mesoamerican books, are perishable and would not survive in the Valley of Mexico's climate. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
The population of Teotihuacan is itself worth pausing over. The estimates range from 125,000 to 200,000 at the city's peak, around 450 CE. Even the conservative end of this range places Teotihuacan among the largest cities in the world at that time. Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, had perhaps 400,000 to 500,000. Alexandria in Egypt was comparable. The great cities of the Gupta Empire in India -- Pataliputra, Ujjain -- may have been of similar size. In the Americas, nothing else was close. The Classic Maya cities, impressive as they were, typically housed populations in the tens of thousands. Teotihuacan was an order of magnitude larger than its nearest Mesoamerican rival.
The location mattered. The city sits in a high, semi-arid valley -- the northeast arm of the Basin of Mexico, at an altitude of 2,300 meters. The valley is not obviously destined for a great city. It receives modest rainfall. The soil is volcanic, well-drained but not naturally rich. The nearest major body of water, Lake Texcoco, lies thirty kilometers to the southwest. What the valley does have is springs -- natural water sources fed by the volcanic geology of the region -- and obsidian. The Pachuca obsidian deposits, one of the richest sources of high-quality obsidian in Mesoamerica, lie northeast of the valley. Control of this resource may have been one of the economic foundations of the city's rise.
The anonymity of Teotihuacan is not merely an academic puzzle. It shapes everything we can and cannot say about the city. We cannot tell its history in the way we tell the history of Rome or the Maya kingdoms -- as a sequence of named rulers, documented wars, and recorded events. We tell it instead through architecture, art, archaeology, and analogy -- building a picture of the city from the physical evidence it left behind, filling the gaps with cautious inference from better-documented civilizations nearby. The story of Teotihuacan is a story told in objects and buildings rather than words.