The history of Teotihuacan is an elegant showcase in the strategic benefit of burying your neighbors
under a volcano.
Let me explain: a couple centuries before the BC-AD switcheroo, ancient Mesoamericans
in the Valley of Mexico were building themselves a city.
We’re not exactly sure who, as the city received waves of migrating people, particularly
after the nearby metropolis of Cuicuilco got utterly slathered in lava, and thus a hefty
handful of folks hopped over to the ever-growing city of Teotihuacan.
Following centuries saw their influence expand across Mesoamerica and even engage with the
classical Maya.
And that imperial feat was matched by the splendor of the city.
Teotihuacan was meticulously gridded, with even the river reshaped to fit.
The central avenue was lined with the Pyramid of the Moon, and later the Pyramids of the
Feathered Serpent and of the Sun.
These colossal monuments were originally painted maroon, but now they compensate by giving
a sunburn to tourists who climb it, just ask Red.
The sculpturework on the temples is absolutely exquisite, and Teotihuacan became a center
of culture in addition to a political and mercantile capital.
In an impressive boast, the city had no fortifications, and it’s good they saved on stonework, because
their collapse in the mid-millennium was caused by internal upheaval.
Bit of bad luck, but otherwise a pretty great run.
Meanwhile, the influence of Teotihuacan might be best observed somewhere entirely different:
several hundred miles to the east, in the Maya heartland of the Yucatan Peninsula.
For the Maya, city-building was as competitive a sport as their iconic ballgame.
While they had been in the urbanization business since the 6 or 700s BC, the Maya hit their
stride after the second century AD, with the growth of cities like Tikal.
Despite centuries of constant contest with their neighbors in Calakmul, Tikal’s biggest
geopolitical swerve came from far-off Teotihuacan, who deposed the Maya rulers in 378 and installed
their own.
While this had every reason to go quite badly, Tikal gained immensely from their new ties
to Mesoamerica’s grandest city, with new art and architecture styles imported from
the west.
Tikal’s own dominions also expanded, but it meant even fiercer and more constant conflict
with Calakmul.
They took turns trashing each other in battle, while, in the middle of all that, Tikal propped
up some gorgeous temples.
The stepped pyramid is just such a look.
Unfortunately for Tikal, droughts, crop failure, and overpopulation forced the Maya to head
north for the coast and abandon their inland cities, leaving the jungle as Tikal’s only
company.
A few centuries later, back in the Valley of Mexico, a local lake is about to become
a very big deal.
Legend has it that in 1325, the wandering Mexica people saw a divine omen commanding
them to build their new city right in the middle of Lake Texcoco.
So with no time to lose they got to making islands to live on and wrestling the swampland
into a tidy canal-system to water the city’s gardens.
In the following decades, the Mexica created the Aztec empire and expanded across Mesoamerica
from their sparkling capital of Tenochtitlan.
The only way to build a city in a lake is carefully, so the Aztec metropolis grew in
stages (usually in response to flooding) over the 13 and 1400s, and in 1473 they absorbed
the neighboring merchant city of Tlatelolco.
So by the end of their second century, they had mondo pyramids and palaces plus sprawling
building complexes housing all manner of tradesmen and local artisans.
The city was so magnificent that the Spanish Conquistadors almost felt bad about destroying
it.
Yet, in 1520 they overstayed their warm welcome from the Aztec King Motecuzoma by killing
him, burning his city, and overthrowing his empire.
Stay classy, Cortes.
Unfortunately, this was a trend, as Señor Pizarro had a similar experience in conquering
the Inca.
But first let’s rewind: 2 miles high in the mountains of south America around the
twelfth century, the Inca people founded the city of Cusco.
Originally a quiet city state in the middle of the Andes, the Inca grew into a vast and
extremely mountainous empire during the 1400s, with Cusco fixed in the center of not just
the Inca, but of the entire universe, and they brought the math to back it up.
The city was symbolically built in the shape of a sacred puma, at the heart of which lay
the central temple complex that divided the empire into its four quadrants.
From that central temple, 42 ritual pathways fanned out and passed through over 300 natural
shrines in the surrounding mountains.
Sacred springs, caves, and rocks all aligned with the center of Cusco, and might’ve served
as an astronomical clock superimposed into the landscape itself.
The buildings were no slouch either, as Inca architects cut their stones geometrically
to fit together without mortar, often inventing some pretty bonkers polygons to make it happen.
Although the empire was toppled and the city got sacked by Spaniards in 1535, some Inca
stonework mercifully remains as the foundations of colonial buildings and the city’s Spanish
Cathedral.
Geometricians WISH they have what Cusco had.
Though indigenous American cultures are tragically underrepresented in World History thanks in
part to some liberal interpretations of what materials are best to kindle a fire — Hint:
it was not the royal library of Tenochtitlan — their cities tell an extraordinary story
all by themselves.
The temples and palaces and surprising number of grid plans are already masterful feats
of engineering, but what I find most dazzling about them is the almost deliberately-baffling
choices of landscaping.
Teotihuacan in a valley ringed by volcanos, Tikal is on an exposed limestone peninsula
in the jungle, Tenochtitlan was built in the middle of a lake for funsies, and Cusco is
up in the mountains with an astronomical front-row seat to all of space.
Each of these places pushes the boundaries for where cities can thrive, what they can
become, and, in the case of the last two, how tragically they can be cut short.
God those Conquistadors, just “gold gold gold”, no taste in urban design.
Thank you so much for watching.
For all my incredibly well-documented love of the cities of the Eastern Hemisphere, it’s
borderline criminal to overlook the absolute A-Game happening in Native American cities,
so I hope this video showed you something you might not have expected.
This video was made in celebration of Indigenous People’s Day, and if you would like to learn
more about pre-Columbian myths and history, we’ve got links to our other videos in the
description below.