The Ideas and Images of Cities and Centers

Abstract

Teotihuacan’s civic center was planned and constructed in a matter of generations. The Teotihuacan Measuring Unit shows that the major buildings, and in particular the Moon Pyramid, Sun Pyramid, and Feathered Serpent Pyramid, were laid out on the north-south axis as an in-line triad. That motif, alone and with the down-turned crescent, was a symbol of the city and its realm that we see as a name of the goddess embodied in the Moon Pyramid. The city center was an axial world tree base in the north, top in the south. This cosmogram defined the grid of the city. Teotihuacan and Maya lowland polities interacted for five centuries, and beginning in the first century CE monarchs at Teotihuacan and Tikal introduced dynastic succession. In the southern Maya lowlands, dynastic rulers declared their pedigrees on carved stone stelae, shining stones that conveyed axial power of the cosmos. At Teotihuacan, dynasts designed the civic center as an axial world tree, its roots in Cerro Gordo and its effigy, the Moon Pyramid, and its crown in the Ciudadela. Teotihuacan-Tikal relations remained exceptionally strong through the fifth century CE.