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 The city's towering pyramids
reopened to visitors earlier this month as
pandemic restrictions eased. But perhaps its
most interesting and extensively-excavated
neighborhood, featuring a patio floor with rare
painted symbols, or glyphs, remains off-limits
to tourists.
The discovery in the 1990s of the puzzling red
glyphs, most laid out in neat columns, has led a
growing number of scholars to question the
long-held view that writing was absent from the
city, which thrived from roughly 100 B.C. to 550
A.D.
Their ultimate ambition is to harness the steady
drip of new finds to one day mimic the success
their peers have had decoding ancient Maya or
Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Teotihuacan – which lies in a dusty plain about
30 miles (50 km) outside the modern Mexican
capital - was once the largest city in the
Americas, home to at least 100,000 people.
Yet much is unknown about the civilization that
inhabited it, including what language its native
inhabitants spoke and whether they developed a
system of writing akin to that of the Aztecs,
who dominated the area some eight centuries
later and revered its ruins.
Experts have debated several theories for the
glyphs. They say they may have been used to
represent symbols used to teach writing, or
place-names of subjugated tribute-paying cities,
or even as signs used in disease-curing rituals.
Art historian Tatiana Valdez, author of a book
published this year on the glyphs of Teotihuacan,
says the patio's 42 glyphs, many in linear
sequences, amount to the longest text ever found
at the city's ruins.
Overall, she says more than 300 Teotihuacano
hieroglyphics have been tentatively identified
so far.
Countless ancient Mexican codices -
accordion-style folded paper books covered in
hieroglyphics - were ordered burned in colonial
times by Catholic authorities. Only about a
dozen still exist.
Valdez is convinced such books were also part of
Teotihuacan's literary tradition, over a
millennium before the bonfires.
"I think Teotihuacan used hieroglyphics, and
used them well because we've found so many," she
said, pointing to thousands of mostly clay
figurines with painted or incised glyphs that
have been found on the site.
Valdez said the sheer number of figurines found
with glyphs on tiny headdresses or on their
foreheads could mean some access to writing was
available to commoners.
Walking around La Ventilla, where the glyphs
patio is located, is tantamount to exploring an
ancient neighborhood, featuring temples, artisan
workshops, intricate apartment compounds and
finely painted murals.
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 The government-run National
Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH)
said additional work is still needed to be able
to open it to tourists, but did not offer any
timeline. The neighborhood's
major excavations were completed years ago.
ELUSIVE TEXTS
Drawings and photos of the city's most recently
confirmed glyph are set to be published in a
scholarly paper next year. Found in 2016 on the
back of a miniature stone altar, it features a
triangle in a round cartouche with three dots
underneath. The single glyph likely represents
the specific year it was dedicated.
It is the kind of find expected by Joyce Marcus,
an archeologist at the University of Michigan
who has argued that writing was absent in the
city.
"So far, we have not seen the long texts," she
wrote in an email.
"Writing is rare at Teotihuacan when its 'texts'
are compared/contrasted with those at Maya
sites," she added, pointing to the Mayan city of
Tikal, a contemporary of Teotihuacan in
present-day Guatemala. Tikal is home to
monuments with columns of glyphs that in recent
decades have been largely deciphered.
A painted mural uncovered in the 1960s in
Teotihuacan shows what appears to be a priest
holding a book. It was a "hugely important"
discovery, said Christophe Helmke, a leading
scholar of the city's writing system at the
University of Copenhagen.
He cautioned against expecting texts on public
monuments or sculptures in the city, and said
writing in Teotihuacan was probably mostly
confined to its books.
He suggested future advances will likely come
from new mural or ceramic finds, but not books,
which are unlikely to turn up due to the speed
of deterioration of the paper or animal skins
used by ancient scribes.
David Stuart, a University of Texas archeologist
and epigrapher who has pioneered the
decipherment of ancient Maya writing, said the
lack of knowledge about what language was spoken
at Teotihuacan complicates efforts to read its
glyphs.
"It's true that many still say that Teotihuacan
had no writing system," he said.
"But in fact it's there."
(Reporting by David Alire Garcia; Editing by
Rosalba O'Brien)
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