A soapstone vessel with the face of Teotihuacan’s Storm God
Storm God vessel, 1–150 CE
Marked The Avenue of the Dead

SubjectIn outline · lessons being written

Teotihuacan

North-east of modern Mexico City stood one of the largest cities in the world in the 400s, with perhaps 100,000 people, laid out on a grid around the Avenue of the Dead and the Pyramids of the Sun and Moon.

Place
The Avenue of the Dead · The Pyramid of the Sun · The Pyramid of the MoonThe Americas
Laid out as
A cityOne city, district by district, from its centre outwards.
Lessons
6 planned, none written yet

The lessons we plan

Titles may change as they are written

  1. IA city on a grid
  2. IIThe Pyramid of the Sun
  3. IIIThe Feathered Serpent temple
  4. IVNeighbourhoods of migrants
  5. VTeotihuacan and the Maya
  6. VIFire and decline

Still to come

The people and objects these lessons will cover

People

  • Spearthrower Owl (a ruler named in Maya texts)
  • Sergio Gómez Chávez

Objects

  • Masks of greenstone
  • Murals of the “Great Goddess”

Where it sits

All of human history, era by era

Early human ancestryOur species and the Old Stone AgeFarming and the New Stone AgeFirst cities and the Bronze AgeThe Iron Age and growing statesThe classical worldAfter the empiresMedieval networks and empiresOceans crossedRevolutions and the first factoriesIndustry, empire and world warThe world since 1945

100 BC to AD 550. Each era is drawn the same width, so the earliest are squeezed: era II alone is over 300,000 years.

Nearby in time and place

This page is an outline. The summary above is a starting point; each lesson, when it is written, will give its sources, its pictures and where historians disagree. Spotted a mistake?