Teotihuacan

TEOTIHUACAN
City of the Gods

Chapter Three: Tiahuanaco

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This was a city that dominated the lands surrounding. Teotihuacan (pronounced tay-oh-tee-wah-con) is situated in the central section of the Valley of Teotihuacan. The valley is in the northeastern part of the Basin of Mexico. During the two hundred years after Christ, it went through a massive expansion, and by the fourth century, unmistakable influences of Teotihuacan were felt throughout most parts of Mesoamerica.

The city seems to have functioned for centuries as a well-developed urban centre until its rather sudden collapse in the seventh century.The place was called Teotihuacan by Nahuatl speakers several centuries after the city's fall, but its original name, the language or languages spoken there, and the ethnic groups who built the city is still unknown. Teotihuacan in Nahuatl meant "City of the Gods", or "Where Men became Gods".

The city's main feature is the Pyramid of the Sun. The largest single construction, the Sun Pyramid stands in the middle of the northern section of the Avenue of the Dead as the principal pyramid of the city, while the second largest pyramid, the Moon Pyramid, is located at the northern end of the Avenue of the Dead. The Avenue of the Dead was the "main street" of Teotihuacan. It ran for more than 2.5 km, beginning at the Moon Plaza to the north and extending beyond the Ciudadela and the Great Compound complexes to the south. The avenue continued even further south, terminating near the edge of the mountains that can be seen in the background of the photo to the right. This picture is taken from the top of the Pyramid of the Moon,
at the northern end of the Avenue.

The third and final major pyramid in this enigmatic city is the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl,
also known as the Feathered Serpent Pyramid (the historical figure Quetzalcoatl was
often represented as a feathered serpent, much the same way the Egyptian deity Anubis
was represented by a humanoid with the head of a dog) is located further south of the Pyramid of the Sun. Although significantly smaller in size than both the Pyamids of the Sun and Moon, it was one of the most elaborate monuments in the city. It is the principal pyramid at the Ciudadela, one of the largest enclosed precincts in Mesoamerica.

Now, although the city was inhabited and added to during the time of Christ, up until it's sudden and mysterious demise, it is still a mystery as to who was responsible for its construction originally, before the occupation that was contemporary with Christ. Where are they now? Who were they, that could plan and construct these massive edifices?

A comprehensive mathematical survey carried out by Hugh Harleston Jr., in October 1974 had shown that a complex mathematical relationship appeared to exist among the principal structures lined up along the Avenue of the Dead, and, indeed, beyond it. This relationship indicated something extraordinary, namely that Teotihuacan may originally have been a precise scale model of the solar system. At any rate, if the centre line of the Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl were taken as denoting the position of the Sun, markers laid out northwards from it along the axis of the Avenue of the Dead seemed to indicate the correct orbital distances of the inner planets, the asteroid belt, Jupiter, Saturn (represented by the Pyramid of the Sun), Uranus (represented by the Pyramid of the Moon), and Neptune and Pluto, by as yet unexcavated mounds some kilometres farther north (Tompkins 1987).

If these correlations are more than coincidental, then, at the very least, they indicated the presence at Teotihuacan of an advanced observational astronomy, one not surpassed by modern science until a relatively late date. Uranus remained unknown to our own astronomers until 1787, Neptune until 1846, and Pluto until 1930.

No known civilisation of that epoch, either in the Old World or the New, is supposed to have had any knowledge at all of the outer planets - let alone to have possessed accurate information concerning their orbital distances from the Sun, OR from each other. Soon an image of this correlation of earth to sky will be developed to accurately demonstrate which structures correlate with which celestial bodies.

For information on the origin of these monuments, go to the Current Theories section. Otherwise, continue on to Tiahuanaco.

REFERENCES:

Tompkins, P.; (1987) Mysteries of the Pyramids, Thames and Hudson, London, p286.