Teotihuacán Sentence Examples
The question as to whether copper really was first used in Egypt is not yet resolved, and many arguments can be brought against the theory of Egyptian origin and in favour of one in Syria or further north.26 Egypt has also recently been credited with being the inceptor of the whole " megalithic (or heliolithic, as the fashionable word now is) culture " of mankind, from Britain to China and (literally) Peru or at any rate Mexico via the Pacific Isles.27 The theory is that the achievements of the Egyptians in great stone architecture at the time of the pyramid-builders so impressed their contemporaries that they were imitated in the surrounding lands, by the Libyans and Syrians, that the fame of them was carried by the Phoenicians further afield, and that early Arab and Indian traders passed on the megalithic idea to Farther India, and thence to Polynesia and so on so that both the teocalli of Teotihuacan and Stonehenge are ultimately derived through cromlechs and dolmens innumerable from the stone pyramid of Saqqara, built by Imhotep, the architect of King Zoser, about 3100 B.C. (afterwards deified as the patron of science and architecture).
They were the builders of the pyramids of Cholula and Teotihuacan, near the city of Mexico, and of Papantla, Huatusco and Tuzapan, in Vera Cruz.
These deities are not easily ' One of the most important sources for the ancient Mexican traditions and myths is the so-called " Codex Chimalpopoca," a manuscript in the Mexican language discovered by the Abbe analysed, but on the other hand Tonatiuh and Metztli, the sun and moon, stand out distinctly as nature gods, and the traveller still sees in the huge adobe pyramids of Teotihuacan, with their sides oriented to the four quarters, an evidence of the importance of their worship. The war-god Huitzilopochtli was the real head of the Aztec pantheon; his idol remains in Mexico, a huge block of basalt on which is sculptured on the one side his hideous personage, adorned with the humming-bird feathers on the left hand which signify his name, while the not less frightful war-goddess Teoyaomiqui, or " divine wardeath," occupies the other side.
The explorations made by Dr Lehmann in 1909 in the famous ruins of Teotihuacan, near Mexico city throw new light upon certain chronological problems. Like the excavations made by Dr Max Uhle in Peru, they tend to determine the relative antiquity of the different periods of the ancient civilization.
At a considerable depth below the foundations of a temple-palace at Teotihuacan, Dr Lehmann discovered certain ceramic fragments of a type quite different from any hitherto classed as Mexican.