III · THE WORK · ART HISTORY
The Murals of Teotihuacan
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Teotihuacan was among the largest cities in the world during its height. Its murals show priests, warriors, animals and gods — but no individual rulers.
At a glance
- Culture
- Teotihuacan civilization
- Site
- Teotihuacán de Arista, State of Mexico
- Period
- Approximately 1–550 CE
- Medium
- Fresco on lime plaster
Look closer
Figures without faces
Many of the painted figures are shown in strict profile, walking in procession. They wear elaborate costumes — feathered headdresses, jade ornaments, sandals with ties — but their faces are often stylised to the point of anonymity. Eyes are rendered as simple curves, noses as straight lines. There are no portraits here in the sense that a Maya stela carries a portrait: no individual physiognomy, no naming glyphs, no records of birth or accession. The repetition is the point. These are types, not persons.
Speech made visible
Scrolls issue from the mouths of figures and from the beaks of birds. The convention is widespread in Mesoamerican art, but Teotihuacan murals use it with particular frequency. The scrolls are painted in curling, stylised forms, sometimes containing small glyphs or symbols. They mark the act of speaking or singing, but we cannot read what is being said. The writing system of Teotihuacan, if there was one beyond these pictorial markers, has not been deciphered. The murals show us that speech mattered, but not what was spoken.
A city painted red
The background of most murals is a deep red, made from hematite. It appears in residential compounds across the city, in temples, in administrative buildings. The consistency suggests centralised production or at least shared aesthetic standards. Red is the ground against which processions move, against which gods are outlined, against which the green of jade and the blue of water stand out. It is the colour of Teotihuacan itself, repeated so often that it becomes a kind of civic signature.
The story
Teotihuacan was, for several centuries, one of the largest cities on earth. Estimates of its population at its height, perhaps in the first half of the first millennium, cluster around 100,000 people. The city covered eight square miles. Eighty to ninety percent of the valley's population lived within it. It was a place of pyramids — the Pyramid of the Sun, the Pyramid of the Moon — and of a long ceremonial avenue now called the Avenue of the Dead. It was also a place of murals.
The frescoes survive in fragments, on the interior walls of multi-family residential compounds, on the walls of temples, on the facades of platforms. They were painted on lime plaster while it was still wet, so that the pigment bonded with the surface. The palette is limited but strong: red from hematite, green from malachite, blue from azurite, yellow from limonite, black from charcoal. The subjects are processions, rituals, animals, deities, and scenes that may be mythological or may record ceremonies we no longer understand.
What the murals do not show is as striking as what they do. There are no named kings. There are no dynastic records. There are no portraits of individual rulers with their dates of accession, their conquests, their genealogies — the apparatus that fills Maya stelae or Zapotec tomb paintings. The figures in Teotihuacan murals are often richly dressed, clearly important, but they are not identified. They appear in groups, in procession, in repetition. The emphasis is on the role, not the person.
This absence is not an accident of preservation. Teotihuacan was a literate society in some sense — glyphs appear in the murals, and there are signs that suggest a system of notation — but it did not use that literacy to record the names of its leaders in the way that other Mesoamerican cultures did. Whether this reflects a political system without kings, a system with kings whose power was not expressed through portraiture, or a deliberate ideological choice to foreground the collective over the individual is unresolved. What is clear is that the city's visual culture was organised differently from that of its neighbours.
The city was sacked and burned around 550 CE. The major monuments were systematically destroyed. What caused the collapse is disputed — extreme weather events in the 530s, internal unrest, external invasion, or some combination — but the murals that survive come from the centuries before that end. They show a city at the height of its power, decorating its walls with images of order, ritual, and procession. They show a society that chose to paint its gods and its ceremonies, but not its kings.
Why it mattered then
Teotihuacan was not an isolated city. Its influence extended across Mesoamerica. Fine obsidian tools made in Teotihuacan workshops have been found throughout the region. Evidence of Teotihuacano presence — in architecture, in pottery styles, in murals — appears in sites in Veracruz and the Maya region. Whether this was the influence of a state empire or of a dominant cultural and trading centre is debated, but the reach is not. The murals were part of how the city presented itself, both to its own residents and to visitors. They decorated not only temples but residential compounds, suggesting that access to painted walls was relatively widespread, at least among the city's elite and middle strata. The repetition of certain motifs — the processions, the speech scrolls, the red ground — across different buildings suggests shared visual language, shared rituals, shared identity. In a city of 100,000 people, drawn from multiple ethnic groups, that shared language may have been politically important. The decision not to name rulers in the murals, if it was a decision, set Teotihuacan apart from other Mesoamerican powers. It may have reflected a different kind of political organisation, one in which power was more collective or more fluid. It may have reflected a religious ideology that subordinated individual rulers to the gods or to the city itself. Or it may simply have reflected a different set of priorities about what was worth recording. Whatever the reason, the effect was a visual culture that emphasised the continuity of ritual and the authority of the collective over the glory of the individual.
Why it matters now
The murals of Teotihuacan survive as fragments on the walls of a ruined city, but they raise questions that are not archaeological curiosities. They ask what a society looks like when it chooses not to glorify its leaders. They ask what happens to the historical record when a culture does not write down the names of its kings. They ask how power can be expressed visually without portraiture. These are not abstract questions. Most of what we know about ancient societies comes from the monuments their rulers left behind. We know the names of Egyptian pharaohs because they carved them into stone. We know the genealogies of Maya kings because they recorded them on stelae. When a society does not do this, it becomes harder to reconstruct its political history, but it also becomes a different kind of evidence. The absence of ruler portraits in Teotihuacan tells us something about how that society understood authority, or at least about how it chose to represent it. The murals also survive as a reminder that the largest city in the Americas during its time — a city that influenced cultures across Mesoamerica, that built pyramids still standing today, that organised the labour of 100,000 people — can vanish almost completely from the historical record. We do not know what language its inhabitants spoke. We do not know what they called their city. We do not know the names of their leaders. The Aztecs, arriving centuries later, looked at the ruins and invented a name: Teotihuacan, 'the place where the gods were created'. It is the name we still use, because we have no other.
The surprising detail
The later Aztecs, who encountered Teotihuacan as a ruin, claimed a common ancestry with its builders and adopted aspects of its culture. They gave the city its name — Teotihuacan, meaning 'the place where the gods were created' in Nahuatl — and they gave names to its monuments: the Pyramid of the Sun, the Pyramid of the Moon, the Avenue of the Dead. These are not the original names. We do not know what the city's inhabitants called these structures, or what they called the city itself. The Aztec names are inventions, but they are the only names we have, and they have stuck. The result is that one of the most influential cities in the ancient Americas is known to us entirely through the lens of a culture that arrived seven centuries after its collapse.
What is disputed
The ethnicity of Teotihuacan's inhabitants is unresolved. Candidates include the Nahuas, Otomi, and Totonac, but many scholars argue the city was multi-ethnic, with evidence of Maya and Oto-Pamean cultural presence. The cause of the city's collapse around 550 CE is likewise disputed, with proposals including extreme weather events of 535–536, internal unrest, and external invasion. Whether Teotihuacan was the centre of a state empire or a dominant cultural and trading hub without centralised political control over distant regions remains debated. The writing system, if there was one beyond pictorial glyphs, has not been deciphered.
Remember this
A city of 100,000 people chose to paint processions and gods, but not the faces or names of its rulers. The absence is the record.
Test yourself
If Teotihuacan had a writing system capable of recording names and dates, why might its murals still have omitted ruler portraits?
Because the choice not to depict named rulers may have been ideological rather than technical. Many societies with full writing systems — including some Maya cities and Zapotec centres — used murals and stelae to record the deeds of individual kings. Teotihuacan had glyphs, had a complex visual culture, and had the technical ability to paint detailed figures. The absence of ruler portraits is therefore likely a deliberate choice about what was worth commemorating. This could reflect a political system in which individual rulers were less central, a religious ideology that subordinated human leaders to gods or to the city itself, or a cultural preference for depicting roles and rituals rather than persons. The murals show that Teotihuacan had the means to glorify its leaders in paint. It chose not to.
Go deeper
Image: Hdlrosa, CC BY-SA 4.0. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source.