Lakes of mercury and human sacrifices after 1,800 years, Teotihuacan reveals its treasures

[nitpicker]

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/sep/24/teotihuacan-pyramids-treasures-secret-de-young-museum-san-francisco

Lakes of mercury and human sacrifices – after 1,800 years, Teotihuacan reveals its treasures

Paul Laity

Sunday 24 September 2017 18.52 BST


In 2003, a tunnel was discovered beneath the Feathered Serpent pyramid in the ruins of Teotihuacan, the ancient city in Mexico. Undisturbed for 1,800 years, the sealed-off passage was found to contain thousands of extraordinary treasures lying exactly where they had first been placed as ritual offerings to the gods. Items unearthed included greenstone crocodile teeth, crystals shaped into eyes, and sculptures of jaguars ready to pounce. Even more remarkable was a miniature mountainous landscape, 17 metres underground, with tiny pools of liquid mercury representing lakes. The walls of the tunnel were found to have been carefully impregnated with powdered pyrite, or fool’s gold, to give the effect in firelight of standing under a galaxy of stars.

The archaeological site, near Mexico City, is one of the largest and most important in the world, with millions of visitors every year. This was its most exciting development for decades – and the significance of these new discoveries is explored in a major exhibition opening this month at the de Young Museum in San Francisco.
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The tunnel was chanced upon by Mexican archaeologist Sergio Gómez Chávez, who, after days of heavy rain, noticed that a sinkhole – a danger to tourists – had opened up near the foot of the Feathered Serpent pyramid. He shone a torch in but could see only darkness, so tied a rope round his waist and was lowered by workers down the hole, which with surprise he realised was a perfectly cylindrical shaft.

There was, he recalls, a sharp stench that was nearly unbearable, but at the bottom he peered through a gap in the rubble to see an underground passage, evidently an ancient construction. Work proceeded cautiously: before a dig began, his team used a robot with a video camera to explore the tunnel, which turned out to be as long as a football field, passing below the nearby great plaza as well as the pyramid. “We were amazed by what no one had seen for at least 1,500 years,” says Gómez Chávez in the show’s catalogue. At one end, the passage opened out into three chambers containing riches worthy of a quest by Indiana Jones.

The vast Pyramids of the Sun and Moon are different from those of ancient Egypt, being temples rather than tombs. They are connected by the Street of the Dead as part of an urban grid, the whole pattern oriented to the movement of the sun. The city’s very design contains the idea of it being “the birthplace of the gods” – where the universe was thought to have begun. Watermarks along the walls of Gómez Chávez’s passage have proved that the huge plaza above it was deliberately flooded to create a kind of primordial sea, with pyramids as metaphorical mountains emerging from the water as at the beginning of time. Thousands of people would have witnessed ceremonies re-enacting the creation myth.


The inhabitants of the city, along with those from similar civilisations, believed the universe had three levels, connected by an axis: the celestial plane, the earthly plane and the underworld, which wasn’t the Biblical place of fiery punishment but a dark, watery realm of creation, with lakes and mountains – it signified riches and rebirth as well as death. The rich array of objects Gómez Chávez has brought up from the passage – large spiral shells, beetle wings arranged in a box, hundreds of metal spheres – was left there as treasure to appease the gods. But it also seems that the tunnel, with its pyrite galaxy and liquid mercury lakes, was itself a re-creation of the underworld.
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