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Mesoamerican Administration: The Mexican Peninsula, 500 BCE to 900 CE

The material on city-states in the last module helps us understand a very important development in history: the rise, not only of settlements designed to support their inhabitants, but also of networks of patronage and authoritative structures designed to maintain a stable, long-lasting influence over larger regions: empires. Success in capturing the loyalty and resources of neighboring communities relied on tact, indebtedness, and sound administration. Greco-Roman cities like Athens, Sparta, Rome, and many others developed key policies concerning foreigner peoples, state religions, loyalty in spite of ethnic division, and trade. These policies encouraged the cooperation and smooth transition of multiple cultural backgrounds living under a single state.

Yet Persia, Greece, and Rome were not alone in this endeavor. As we shall see, Asian empires began to develop authority structures that would endure for thousands of years. And on the other side of the world, cultural developments on the Central American region home to modern-day Mexico began to capitalize on their resource-rich surroundings to establish a wealth of traditions, multi-ethnic civilization, and strong religious belief. The first of these civilizations was the great city of Teotihuacan. The second was the longer-lasting and more widespread Maya Empire.

 

In red, the Mayan Empire; in yellow, the Olmec civilization. On the left-hand side, 20 miles North of Mexico City, is Teotihuacan. The ancient city was the cultural center for the surrounding rural regions.

Teotihuacan was founded in the Mexican Highlands before 500 BCE and lasted well into the seventh or eighth century. The peak of influence for this enormous city occupied the fourth and fifth centuries, just as Rome was collapsing. The city and its surroundings occupy an enormous area of 20 square kilometers. Perhaps the most stunning aspect of this great city is its urban planning. Relying on incredibly strict geometric shapes and mathematical significance, the city is built on a grid that uses two enormous pyramids as bookends. One is thePyramid of the Sun. On the day of the Summer Solstice, the sun stands directly above the Pyramid, shining light into rays corresponding with art on the inside. The other is the Pyramid of the Moon. These two pyramids were the heart of religious and social life. From the Pyramid of the Moon rose a straight and wide street called the Avenue of the Dead. Functioning as the main street of the city, it stretched south from the lunar pyramid into the mountains. Along the avenue were elaborate apartments that contained special Masonic structures to prevent strangers from entering the homes. They had regular access to water through special irrigation collection systems along the avenue that could provide rainwater to the residents.

The sound and complex urban structure of the city brought immigrants from far and wide. Archeological evidence shows that the city was a multi-ethnic center, with Otomi, Mixtec, Maya, Nahua, Zapotec, and Toltec peoples coexisting. Religious, cultural, and linguistic elements of all of these peoples contributed to the unique culture of Teotihuacan itself. They developed a stunning knowledge of human anatomy and herbology. While the Greeks were balancing the four humors and bleeding people out in attempts to cure them, the Teotihuacan understood complex medicines made by plants used to treat an array of ailments. The walls of their buildings were lined with hieroglyphics similar to that of Egypt. A rather accurate calendar was based on a considerable knowledge of astronomy. Artistic development was both encouraged in this prosperous city and influential over neighboring and future empires in the Mesoamerican world.

  The stunning ruins of the ancient city of Teotihuacan

 

What we know of this culture is told through its pottery, murals, and building structures that continue to stand today. Geometric shapes were very important to building cities, temples, and houses. Close quarters were a must in order to make room for the 150,000 to 250,000 residents, making Teotihuacan one of the largest, most populated cities of the contemporary world. The city-state itself spread influence across the region, trading with neighboring farmers to feed and support the residents of the city while gaining fealty from those living in nearby villages and towns. The only limit was that of the Maya Empire, which interacted with Teotihuacan but does not seem to have taken a military approach to stamping out the competition. Scholars are unsure why this could be, and some wonder if the lack of aggression is merely a problem of sources rather than actual events.

Residents of Teotihuacan were polytheistic people who worshipped the sun and the moon. Like the Olmec who came before them, they placed great trust in the Feathered Serpent and the Rain God. Archeological projects have uncovered enormous collections of intact bones in almost all of the buildings of the city, suggesting that human and animal sacrifice played a role in this religious system. Furthermore, it seems that the building of any structure was accompanied by sacrifice; every building contains bones from sacrificial victims in the cornerstones. Those who were selected for sacrifice were probably warriors from neighboring cities rather than residents. They also contained fierce warlike animals: cougars, wolves, birds of prey, and venomous snakes. Some sacrificial victims were struck in the head or beheaded and some had their hearts cut out for ceremonial purposes, but others were buried alive.

This religious system maintained many of the beliefs from the Olmec and passed them on to future generations. The name Teotihuacan itself means the “birthplace of the gods,” a telling representation of how residents and neighbors alike thought of the grandeur of the city. The later Aztecs would maintain the remains of Teotihuacan as a holy site. They thought it was the location of Tollan, the birthplace of the sun, which was the center of their religion.

 

The preserved temple image of the Teotihuacan Feathered Serpent God

Teotihuacan was a long-standing trade center that experienced centuries of prosperity and widespread influence. The structure of the city itself was a complicated socio-economic portrayal of wealthy cities, superb urban engineering, and complex diversity in culture and population. Ultimately, the city began to decline and in the seventh or eighth century it was run over by invaders, sacked and pillaged. Yet the strong buildings persisted. Squatters and marauders lived in its ruins over the next thousand years until the area was set apart in the 1970s for scholarly exploration and archeological projects. Although it is difficult to measure what particular laws and policies were in place from this city that outlasted the influence of Rome, we can tell that it was a major cultural and economic center that encouraged the presence of peoples from multi-ethnic backgrounds. Only tolerance and fair policies would enable this situation to last for almost a thousand years.

One of six pages that survive from hundreds of Mayan books destroyed by European invaders

 

The Maya Empire was even more enduring than that of Teotihuacan, which is an impressive accomplishment. The Maya Empire was founded in the tropical lowlands of Guatemala around 250 CE and reached a peak of influence around the sixth century, about a hundred years after the Teotihuacan. The Empire spread across Central America, occupying the Yucatan Peninsula, through Belize and Mexico, even extending into El Salvador and Honduras. The widespread extension of the Maya occupation enabled them to protect the core of the Empire, while natural boundaries prevented too many external challenges to their hegemony.

The Mayan Empire was structured in a pattern similar to the Greek constellation of city-states. Over 40 Mayan cities controlled the regions surrounding them, with various cities gaining in power over the neighboring city-states and ruling the Empire during a wave-like rise and fall that can be compared to the authority of Athens or Sparta. Despite these natural peaks and valleys of governing power, none of the cities ever thoroughly disappeared, even during the Spanish invasion, colonization, and journey to modern independence. Nevertheless, the Maya Empire experienced a Classical Period between 250 and 900 CE, during which the impressive gains in scientific, engineering, mathematics, artistic, religious, and philosophical arenas built the Maya culture into something of an innovative behemoth, able to influence long-standing empires throughout the region. Even today, Mayan ideas invade pop culture; the movie 2012, explored the end of the Mayan calendar as the catalyst for the end of the world.

Maya culture explored new agricultural techniques, finding that the annual slash and burn process reinvigorated soils to produce high yields in the following year. After a harvest, farmers would destroy their harvested plants and light the remains on fire. The process of fire broke down the existing nutrients back into the soil. The downside to this process was and remains the massive destruction of rain forest, but at the time it was the best way to feed a conglomeration of large cities.

 

  The ruins of ancient Mayan cities Tikal and Ek-Balam

 

Mayan art depicts human and animal images in the three-quarter style, similar to Egyptian art, portraying leaders of the Empire alongside gods, animals, cities, and trade scenes. When scholars began to decipher the Mayan script, it was discovered the Mayan artists enjoyed celebrity enough to mark their works with their names. Architects were particularly valued, and it seems that the temples and stone buildings of Mayan cities were remodeled every 52 years, in accordance with the Maya Calendar, in order to bring the buildings into alignment with contemporary fashion and current rulers. While Teotihuacan was built with a specific urban efficiency in mind, on a grid that connected the people to temples, Mayan cities housed as few as 5000 people and as many as 50,000. Accordingly, they were built on an as-needed basis. Winding streets, disorganized buildings, and dead end communities were the mark of poor planning. It seems that the architects were more focused on stunning buildings and irrigation techniques than urban planning as a whole.

Fun Fact: The written system used throughout the Empire joins a very select group: only three written systems have been invented in the history of the world – Sumerian, Chinese, and Maya – and from those three all remaining global writing systems have evolved!

But in a great tragedy of time, much of the Maya written records have not survived. Spanish explorers who documented the invasion of the Americas noted that the Maya were very particular about recording their history and meticulous documents preserved major events of Maya history stretching back for 800 years. Books upon books were produced to ensure a long-lasting historical knowledge. However, the Spanish saw the Empire as weak and inconsequential; to the horror of scholarly onlookers, all Maya language history books were destroyed in a huge fire upon their discovery by European Conquistadors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Can you take a moment to consider how different the world would be if we had no evidence of English History? Of American history? Of the Italian Renaissance or Chinese inventions? This is the reality of Maya legacies.

We still know more about Maya culture than other Mesoamerican groups because of the deciphering of script and numbers, which were preserved in places other than those valuable books. Maya Script was organized into blocks of writing, creating a cross between Asian block scripts running up and down a page and Egyptian hieroglyphics. It is important to note that the Maya were not related to either world culture, despite similar appearances. The script on walls in set in stone show an extensive use of writing in the Maya culture.

Maya numbering system was based on the 5 and the 20, using a combination of dots and dashes to represent counting:

 

A Chart shows the Mayan system of counting that resembles an abacus or Braille system

 

Due to the destruction of the carefully preserved histories, scholars have difficulty explaining what daily life would have been like for those living in the Empire. We do not know stories of courageous battle or innovative government policies. We do not have evidence of their laws, although we do know that there were extensive legal practices. Leisure was a major part of social life; professional ball players played a game that appears to be similar to baseball, but the prominent descriptions of this game throughout pottery and murals and temple wall decorations are our only preserved knowledge of the game that once unified and divided a population. Every city had a large ball court, even the smallest towns, indicating that it was a central experience of civilians throughout the Empire.

Mayas believed strongly in the sense of a cyclical life. They documented the heavens around them with alarming accuracy through observatories built throughout the land. Their religious traditions honor this cycle through devout observations of holidays. They practiced human sacrifice through removing the heart and dedicating it to the figures of the universe. There were three planes of existence: Earth, underworld, and heavens above. The complicated approach to the crop maize – corn – which does not exist in the wild is a great example of the strong relationship between cycles, life, and death. The Maize god is a central figure to Mayan art, and subsequently scholars assume it was as central to the religious belief as the sun and lunar gods, the study of stars, the sanctity of mathematics in tracking astronomy. The Mayan Calendar has multiple cycles: a 250-day year, a 365-day solar year, and a 13-cycle lunar year. The mathematics behind their religion is astoundingly complex.

 

Images of daily life preserved on pottery (left) and murals from temple walls (right)

 

By the 900s, the Maya began to decline and many (but not all) of their cities were abandoned. Without the books of historical accounts to explain why, scholars have had difficulty measuring the cause for decline. Theories concerning everything from invading forces and revolts to overpopulation and trade collapse have been proposed, with a fair amount of evidence but no overwhelming explanation has been discovered. Some ecological explanations, such as draught or illness or even ecological disaster like an earthquake or destructive force, have sought ground but no conclusive evidence has been found. Some stone cities remained occupied for another thousand years. There were enough Maya cultural centers in existence when the Spanish arrived to warrant the wanton destruction of their temples and books, so whatever caused the fall of the Maya, it was not complete.

What can we learn from the Maya? They legislated an enormous empire of approximately two million people from about 250 CE until the 900s. The necessary government and administrative structures required for such an enormous task suggests that the Mayan focus on efficiency was key to this assimilation and preservation. However, because of the destruction of evidence, we only have buildings to go on. Even there, we can see the evidence of an overly large administration, centralized power, and cyclical preservation of religious beliefs, values, and buildings. Whatever the Spanish attempted to do in order to erase the power of this enormous Empire, it was not enough, for the buildings remain standing today, long after the Spanish were expelled from the region