The city’s towering pyramids reopened to visitors earlier this month as pandemic restrictions eased. But perhaps its most interesting and extensively-excavated neighbourhood, featuring a patio floor with rare painted symbols, or glyphs, remains off-limits to tourists.
Yet much is unknown about the civilisation that inhabited it, including what language its native inhabitants spoke and whether they developed a system of writing akin to that of the Aztecs, who dominated the area some eight centuries later and revered its ruins. Art historian Tatiana Valdez, author of a book published this year on the glyphs of Teotihuacan, says the patio’s 42 glyphs, many in linear sequences, amount to the longest text ever found at the city’s ruins.Countless ancient Mexican codices – accordion-style folded paper books covered in hieroglyphics – were ordered burned in colonial times by Catholic authorities. Only about a dozen still exist.
Valdez said the sheer number of figurines found with glyphs on tiny headdresses or on their foreheads could mean some access to writing was available to commoners. It is the kind of find expected by Joyce Marcus, an archaeologist at the University of Michigan who has argued that writing was absent in the city.“Writing is rare at Teotihuacan when its ‘texts’ are compared/contrasted with those at Maya sites, ” she added, pointing to the Mayan city of Tikal, a contemporary of Teotihuacan in present-day Guatemala. Tikal is home to monuments with columns of glyphs that in recent decades have been largely deciphered.