English
Barcelona’s CaixaForum is holding an exhibition entitled Teotihuacan la Ciudad de los Dioses (Teotihuacan, City of Gods). It is composed of around 400 pieces of pre-Hispanic Mexican art selected from some of the most important museums in Mexico. The exhibition, open until 19 June, aims to reveal the wealth of this legendary civilisation that is famous for its remarkable political system, its incredible architecture and art, as well as its mysterious disappearance.
The city of Teotihuacan is located just 45 kilometres from Mexico City. In 1987 it was declared a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. Its name comes from the náhuatl tongue and means ‘the place where gods are born’. At its height, The City of Gods extended to over 20 square kilometres and contained a population of around 100, 000. Its culture spanned almost eight decades, beginning 200 years before Christ and coming to an end sometime after 700 AD.
The city was organized around great monuments: the pyramids of the sun and the moon, and the magnificent Temple of Quetzalcoatl, with over 366 serpent heads representing the water goddess depicted on its four facades. Like any great city, Teotihuacan was built using urban planning. The Avenue of the Dead was designed to connect the two most important focal points for their culture: the pyramids.
Teotihuacan was an incredible city: the most well constructed of any on the Mesoamerican continent, its remains reveal to us a culture with a huge political capacity for creating social cohesion on the basis of control and fear. Its vastness, standing tall in the middle of a wide valley, must have inspired admiration and dread in the local populace. Nonetheless, the objects that have been recovered from Teotihuacan are beautiful and highly sophisticated. The masks, made from black basalt or jade, with pearl or obsidian inlays are true works of art, as are the vases with decorative motifs resembling Chinese ceramics. The artistry of these objects reveals a highly developed aesthetic sensibility.
Teotihuacan’s influence extended widely over Central America and it dominated the other cultures both economically and culturally. The city’s reign did not last forever, however, and the reason for its fall is still not really known. One theory is that the fall of the city was due to overpopulation and overexploitation of the land which led to a crisis in the leading caste. The theory suggests that this crisis was then exploited by an invading culture from the north which burned the city and took control of the declining empire for another 200 years.
The exact truth about what happened to this amazing culture may remain a mystery, but many aspects of their way of life can be examined thanks to these marvellous objects and the still magnificent remains of this city dedicated to the gods.
More information: http://obrasocial.lacaixa.es/nuestroscentros/caixaforumbarcelona/teotihuacan_es.html
Nancy Guzman
If you´d like to get to know a little more about the civilisation that existed in America when Europe was still in the dark ages, then pay a visit to CaixaForum. All you have to do is rent Barcelona accommodation
Translated by: Ben Palmer