Pyramid of the Sun

Standing more than 200 feet tall, the Pyramid of the Sun, located in central Mexico about 30 miles northeast of Mexico City, is one of the largest such structures in the world. The building, roughly 1,800 years old, likely contains about 1 million cubic yards of volcanic stone and other materials. It was the grand monument of Teotihuacan, one of the largest cities in the world in its heyday from the second to the sixth centuries.

But who built the awe-inspiring structure? And how was this massive pyramid — which would go on to inspire the Aztecs centuries later — built, and why?

While questions like these continue to perplex scholars and the general public alike, archaeological research over the past few decades has greatly increased our knowledge about this mysterious monument.

Who exactly built the Pyramid of the Sun and other monuments at Teotihuacan? We don’t entirely know, partly because little record remains of the city’s ruling class. Archaeologists haven’t even found a burial site they are certain belongs to a ruler in the traditional sense, though the layout of the city suggests a top-down hierarchical structure, says Nawa Sugiyama, an anthropologist at the University of California, Riverside.

Nawa Sugiyama, an anthropologist at the University of California, Riverside, who has excavated beneath the pyramid, says that the city’s “master design,” and the way the builders pulled it off, suggests the rulers who commissioned the structure wielded a large degree of power. “You don’t get that out of nothing.”

The Pyramid of the Sun was built somewhere in the first century in the growing city of Teotihuacan, around the same time as the nearby Pyramid of the Moon and Temple of the Feathered Serpent. The city was the capital of an empire that stretched across much of modern day Mexico and possibly into Guatemala. It traded far and wide, and excavations in Maya cities and in Oaxaca to the south also reveal military excursions led by the people of Teotihuacan.

The size of its empire was reflected in the diversity of the city’s residents. But we aren’t sure about the city’s lingua franca, or common language. In fact, the name Teotihuacan itself was given them by the Aztecs much later on, and means the birthplace of the gods. We do know that many languages were spoken there — the city had enclaves of Mayans, Zapotecs, Michoacaners, a Nahuatl-speaking group and others.

The monument was built on some sort of previous structure, although it’s still unclear what this was. It would have required a lot of hands to build, likely carrying baskets of material. “The Sun Pyramid is literally a giant heap of crushed bedrock,” Sugiyama says, adding that lots of soil was added as well. The material is very compacted — the builders may have added moisture to accomplish this, or it might have just been a consequence of the weight of the structure itself.

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