Teotihuacan

c. 150 CE — Mesoamerica, Teotihuacan

Today: Central Mexico, near Mexico City

Teotihuacan grew into one of the largest cities in the world — perhaps 125,000 people — laid out on a rigid grid around a three-mile avenue and pyramids visible for miles. Its residents lived in multi-family apartment compounds, unusual anywhere in the ancient world, and neighborhoods housed foreign merchants from Oaxaca and the Maya lands. It burned around 550 CE, its temples deliberately destroyed, possibly from within. We do not know what its people called themselves or what language they spoke.

Worth knowing: The Aztecs found the ruins abandoned centuries later, were so awed they assumed gods had built it, and gave it the name we still use: Teotihuacan, 'the place where the gods were created.' Its real name is lost.

Pattern: State formation & institutional founding — A durable new order — a state, an institution, a system of rule — is deliberately built and consolidated, outlasting the people who founded it.

Entry 75 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.