Teotihuacan: The City of the Gods — Sleep Podcast

Teotihuacan — the great planned city of the Valley of Mexico — was at its height the largest city in the ancient Americas, contemporary with imperial Rome, holding perhaps a hundred thousand people in some two thousand walled apartment compounds. We cannot name a single ruler of this city. They left no royal tombs, no dynastic inscriptions, no readable texts — only streets, pyramids, murals, and bones, and for two centuries archaeologists have read them like a book. This episode walks the whole arc: the grid-plan of the city and the river they moved to lay the Avenue of the Dead; the Pyramid of the Sun built over a made cave and the Pyramid of the Moon at the avenue's end, with its sacrificial offerings of dozens of people and golden eagles; the Feathered Serpent temple in the Ciudadela, where nearly two hundred warriors were laid with their trophy-jaws, and the sealed tunnel with its river of mercury; the immigrant neighbourhoods — Oaxacan, Maya, Gulf Coast — who lived as Teotihuacanos; the green glass trade that ran to the Maya lowlands; and January 16, 378, the day "Fire Is Born" arrived at Tikal and a king died the same day — a date we know only because the Maya wrote it down. Then: the Great Fire of the sixth century, the fire that burned the city's public face and mostly spared its homes, and the long argument over why — drought, the neighbours' revolt, the year without summer. And at last, four centuries of afterlife: the Mexica pilgrimages, the relics buried beneath the Templo Mayor, the name they gave — the place where the gods were made. A slow, unhurried reading, for the edge of sleep. About sixty-three minutes. Sources (a selection): George Cowgill, Ancient Teotihuacan (Cambridge UP, 2015); René Millon et al., Urbanization at Teotihuacan: The Teotihuacan Map (UT Press, 1973); Michael E. Smith et al., "Apartment Compounds, Households, and Population" (Ancient Mesoamerica, 2019); Linda Manzanilla, "Cooperation and Tensions in Multiethnic Corporate Societies" (PNAS, 2015); Saburo Sugiyama, Human Sacrifice, Militarism, and Rulership (Cambridge UP, 2005); David Stuart, Spearthrower Owl: A Teotihuacan Ruler in Maya History (Dumbarton Oaks/Harvard, 2025); Matthew Lachniet et al., "A 2,400-Year Mesoamerican Rainfall Reconstruction" (Geology, 2012); Leonardo López Luján & Monica De Anda Rogel, "Teotihuacan in Mexico-Tenochtitlan" (PARI Journal, 2019); UNESCO World Heritage listing, no. 414.