The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Teotihuacano · the planned city as a whole, scored as one work: its grid, its avenue, its three great complexes and the compounds that housed its people · one orientation, about 15.5 degrees east of north, over some 20 km², with the San Juan river channelled to it · the Avenue of the Dead, terraced between sunken plazas, running about two kilometres north to the Pyramid of the Moon, set against Cerro Gordo; the Pyramid of the Sun on its east side, built over a cave; the Ciudadela at the crossing of the two avenues, with the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, the Adosada before it and the burials and tunnel beneath it; the three-temple complexes along the Avenue; and some 2,000 walled single-storey apartment compounds, with their patios, shrines, burials and murals · cores of rubble, earth and adobe held by stone retaining walls, faced in talud-tablero and finished in painted lime plaster, red above all; timber and earth roofs, no vault · the Teotihuacan Valley, at the north-east of the Valley of Mexico · grown from about 100 BC, its monuments built between about AD 100 and 250, its compounds from about 250, at its height around 400–500, its civic core burned around 550 · makers unnamed, a people over five centuries; no ruler portrayed, named or buried · as it stands, roofless and stripped of its plaster, most of it under fields and towns, its core cleared and reconstructed from 1905 to the 1990s, the Pyramid of the Sun re-faced by Batres in 1905–1910; a World Heritage site since 1987
Mode
Planned city as cosmogram; a state’s seat, a people’s dwelling and a place of worship on one grid, scored as the city as a whole
Mythos
Mountain over cave: the pyramid shaped to the mountain behind it, the pyramid set over the cave, serpents in the first sea at the city’s crossing; a plan held to the horizon
Phase
Grown from about 100 BC; the orientation fixed and the great monuments built between about AD 100 and 250, the compounds from about 250; at its height around 400–500; its civic core burned around 550; named by the Aztecs eight centuries later; cleared and reconstructed from 1905; a World Heritage site since 1987
Presentation
Rubble, earth and adobe held by stone, faced in talud-tablero under painted lime plaster; one orientation over some 20 km²; two pyramids, a two-kilometre avenue, a walled enclosure at the crossing, and some 2,000 walled apartment compounds
Register
From the Pyramid of the Sun to a drain under a compound floor, one bearing and one profile; impersonal throughout, masks, processions and gods in ranks, and no face of a ruler
Scale
A valley’s population, 100,000 or more, inside one plan; five centuries of building legible in one city
Governing Proposition
A people in a valley at the north-east of the Valley of Mexico laid out a city on one bearing, about fifteen and a half degrees east of north, and held every pyramid, avenue and house to it for five centuries, and a river besides. The wager of the city is that a whole population can be housed in one order, and that the order needs no face: no ruler is portrayed, named or buried here, and the state shows itself as the plan, a mountain doubled in stone at the end of a two-kilometre road, a pyramid set over a cave, and bound men laid in rows under a temple at the crossing.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The city is turned. Every wall in it, from the Pyramid of the Sun to a drain under a house floor at its edge, stands on one bearing, about fifteen and a half degrees east of north, and the San Juan river, which crosses it, was channelled to the grid’s east–west line for part of its course. The orientation covers some twenty square kilometres of the Teotihuacan Valley, at the north-east of the Valley of Mexico, some forty kilometres from the centre of Mexico City. On it stand two pyramids, an avenue about two kilometres long, a walled enclosure at the crossing of the city’s two avenues and, by the map, some two thousand walled compounds in which the city’s people lived. At that scale the bearing is a choice no one could miss. It is the city’s first fact, and its law.
The city grew from about 100 BC, built its great monuments between about AD 100 and 250, rehoused its people in masonry compounds from about 250, held a population commonly put at 100,000 or more at its height around 400 to 500, and lost its civic core to fire around 550, on the dating now generally followed; older accounts put the fire a century or two later. Every name it carries is Nahuatl, given by the Aztecs some eight centuries after the fire. Teotihuacan itself is commonly rendered “the place where gods were made” or “where one becomes a god”; the Avenue is Miccaotli, “road of the dead”, because the Aztecs took the platforms along it for tombs; the Sun and the Moon are their names too. Its own name, its language and the names of its rulers are unknown.
No architect, patron or king is named for any part of it, and the silence is not only the record’s. The city’s art portrays no ruler, carves no royal name and, in a century of excavation, has yielded no royal tomb, which sets it apart from the Olmec before it, the Maya beside it and the Aztecs after it. Who ruled, and how, is inferred: a dynasty whose faces were withheld, or a collective rule, perhaps in the later centuries. Who the people were is also open; the city held foreign quarters, and the proposals for its own tongue differ. The makers are a people, over some five centuries, who chose not to sign. Virgil’s poem of founding closes its proem on the price of a city: “Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem!”
“Such length of labor for so vast a frame.” (Aeneid 1.33, Dryden). Here the labour is the only signature.
Movement II
The Avenue of the Dead runs north from the Ciudadela for about two kilometres, and it is not level. It climbs in terraces, with stairs between sunken plazas, so that walking north is climbing. The San Juan crosses it south of the Sun. Along both sides the three-temple complexes repeat, three platforms round a court open to the road. On the east side the Pyramid of the Sun stands within its own platform enclosure, its plaza and the platform built against its west face turned to the Avenue, so that the pyramid is approached and not only seen. At the north end the Plaza of the Moon, enclosed by platforms with an altar at its centre, is a room before the last stair, and the Pyramid of the Moon closes the axis.
The Moon is set so that its silhouette repeats the profile of Cerro Gordo, the mountain behind it, and the Avenue leads to that doubled mountain. The Sun was built over a cave. In 1971 a tunnel was found under its west stair, running east to a chamber of four lobes near the pyramid’s centre; whether the cave is natural or cut is disputed, and either way the pyramid was placed on it. Mountain over cave is the Mesoamerican figure of origin. The names the Nahuatl later gave it, altepetl, “water-mountain”, for the city itself, and the seven caves of emergence, only name what was built here in stone before those names existed. The Moon was rebuilt seven times between about 100 and 400, each body burying the last, and in the bodies lay offerings of sacrificed animals and bound men, excavated in 1998–2004.
The plan is built to produce elevation, and it does so along the whole road: from the Ciudadela looking north, the terraces rising to the Moon and the mountain repeated above it; the Sun from its plaza, a mass nothing in Mesoamerica approached, and the grid and the valley from its top; the Plaza of the Moon before the last stair. The terms are vastness, succession and uniformity, and the height is the outdoors’. There is no interior at Teotihuacan that rises. The pyramids are solids; the temples that stood on them are gone; the compounds are single-storey and turned inward; and the red plaster that once made the whole city one colour is gone from every exterior. What is lost is not credited, and what the ruin adds, bare masses against the sky, is not credited either. What remains is a sublime of mass, distance and the mountain, with no room in it.
Movement III
The Ciudadela lies at the crossing of the north–south and east–west avenues, the centre of the city’s four quarters and the state’s seat. It is a walled square, its platforms carrying a row of small pyramids, round a levelled floor large enough to hold a great part of the city. Across the Avenue the Great Compound faces it. At the Ciudadela’s east, facing west into the plaza, stands the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, commonly dated about 200, with two palace compounds flanking it. The floor puts the city on one level before one temple: audience is a form before it is an event, and the form is the only portrait of the state the city made.
On the temple’s west face the tableros carry heads in rows, carved in the round and tenoned into the panels, and between them serpents swim through a sea of shells, the first water: a creation set at the city’s crossing. Under the temple lay some two hundred people, most of them young men in military dress, their hands bound behind them, with obsidian points and collars of shell carved as human jaws, laid in rows; they were excavated in 1988–1989. Beneath it a tunnel, found in 2003 and excavated from 2009, ends in chambers under the temple with offerings of greenstone figures, pyrite spheres and mercury. The temple is the one great facade the city has, and it rests on killing.
Around 350 the city’s own people built the Adosada platform against the temple’s west face, hiding it, and broke and burned the sculpture on its other faces. The face survives because it was buried; Manuel Gamio’s project found it behind the Adosada in 1917–1922. What the Ciudadela discloses can be stated, and it holds of this polity and of its kind: that a whole population can be housed in one order; that here the order was the ruler, with no king’s face anywhere in it; and that an impersonal order rests on killing and ends by it. Around 550 the temples, palaces and platforms along the Avenue were burned and their sculpture smashed, the burning concentrated on civic and sacred buildings while most of the compounds were spared. The city’s end reads as the order’s end from within.
Movement IV
From about 250 the city rehoused its people in masonry compounds of one type, some two thousand of them by the map. Each is a walled rectangle, single-storey and blank to the street, holding several apartments round patios, with a shrine in the patio, drains under the floors and the dead buried beneath them. No house stands alone. At Tetitla, Atetelco, Zacuala, Yayahuala, Tepantitla and La Ventilla, among others, the compounds have been excavated, and the excavated ones stand for the rest. The compound discloses the unit of the society: a city of corporate households, not of houses. A Teotihuacano woke, cooked and buried the dead at fifteen and a half degrees east of north, inside the cosmogram.
The walls are painted, true fresco on lime in mineral reds. At Tepantitla a goddess stands over a mountain pouring water, and below it small figures play; at Atetelco armed coyotes and jaguars go in procession. The city worked: obsidian workshops, ceramic and lime industries, and lime plaster in quantities that imply an industry of their own, since the whole city was coated in it. It held strangers in their places. In the west the Oaxaca barrio kept Zapotec tombs and urns inside the grid; in the east lived people from the Gulf and the Maya lands, and the Merchants’ Barrio. The household, labour and the foreign are built into the plan, not kept at its margins; the grid places each on the same axis as the god.
Nothing in the Americas had done this. The elements were inherited: the pyramid and the plaza from the Preclassic, Cuicuilco’s round pyramid in the same valley and La Venta centuries before; the talud-tablero, a sloping base under a vertical framed panel with a projecting cornice, already in use before the city; the orientation of buildings to the horizon. The departures are in kind and in system: one orientation imposed on monumental and domestic building and a river alike; a valley’s population concentrated in one city and housed in standard masonry compounds; the Sun raised in one effort to a mass nothing in Mesoamerica approached; and a state art with no ruler in it, against the whole Mesoamerican habit from the Olmec colossal heads to the Maya stelae. The stake was placed on the form itself, a people’s life tied to a plan, and no one had built this kind of city before.
Movement V
The city travelled as a profile and a cult before it was a ruin. Kaminaljuyú, in the Guatemalan highlands, built in talud-tablero with Teotihuacan goods in its tombs. At Tikal, Stela 31 records the arrival of Siyaj K’ak’ in 378 and a new dynasty in Teotihuacan dress, with the talud-tablero in the Mundo Perdido. At Copán the founder of 426–427 is portrayed with Teotihuacan goggles. Monte Albán carved stones showing Teotihuacan embassies, and kept a quarter at Teotihuacan in return. After the fire Cholula, Xochicalco, Cacaxtla and Tula took the profile and the serpent. The grid itself and the compound were not copied; what travelled was the profile, the cult and the idea of the city, and the tradition that carried them ended in 1521.
The state ended around 550, and a smaller population lived on among the ruins. The Aztecs came to it some eight centuries after the fire. They named it, took its platforms for tombs, carried its masks into the offerings of the Templo Mayor and built temples in its style beside it, and set the making of the sun there: in their account the gods gathered in the dark at Teotihuacan to make the sun. Aeneas on the hill above Carthage looks down at a city rising: “Miratur molem Aeneas, magalia quondam, / miratur portas strepitumque et strata viarum.”
“The prince with wonder sees the stately tow’rs, / Which late were huts and shepherds’ homely bow’rs, / The gates and streets” (Aeneid 1.421–422, Dryden). The poem holds the city and the man looking at it. Teotihuacan holds only itself; the first looker it admits is the Aztec, a thousand years late.
In 1905–1910 Leopoldo Batres excavated and restored the Pyramid of the Sun for the centenary of Independence, inaugurated in September 1910. He stripped the pyramid’s outer layer, found loose fill, watched the rains begin to wash it out, and re-faced the exposed core with stone. The pyramid lost several metres of its dimension, and its present stepped outline is in part his. Gamio’s project followed in the Ciudadela; Bernal and Acosta rebuilt the Avenue’s northern stretch, the Plaza of the Moon and the Quetzalpapalotl Palace, in 1962–1964; Millon’s mapping project, begun in 1962, published in 1973 the map that made the city visible as a city. The Avenue’s platforms are reconstructions of 1917 to 1994 on original cores; it was inscribed as a World Heritage site in 1987. It is among the most visited sites in Mexico, walked as it was built to be walked, with crowds on the Sun at the spring equinox, a rite the city did not prescribe. The dwelling has not returned.
Act III · The Twelve
Run the subtractive test from the plan inward. The orientation cannot go: every wall obeys it, and the river was bent to it. The Avenue cannot go: it lays the Moon against Cerro Gordo and holds the city’s two halves. The Sun stands over the cave; the Ciudadela is the crossing of the two avenues and the state’s seat. The compounds are compelled by the people they housed; their uniformity is the plan’s argument. What resists, and holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the small pyramids ranged round the Ciudadela, more than the enclosure needs; the three-temple complexes repeated along the Avenue; the Moon’s seven bodies; the platforms set before the Sun and the Feathered Serpent by later politics; five centuries of addition. A city built by generations is in part assembled; this one was assembled to one rule from the start.
Score: 8.6 / 10
What the city brings into the open can be stated: a whole population can be housed in one order, and here the order was the ruler. No king is portrayed, named or buried in state; the state shows itself as the plan. The compound discloses the unit of the society, apartments round a patio with a shrine, the dead under the floors, a blank wall to the street: a city of corporate households. The Ciudadela discloses the cost: some two hundred bound young men under the Feathered Serpent; the temple’s face buried around 350; around 550 a fire that took the temples and spared the houses. An impersonal order rests on killing and ends by it. Held below the top because, without texts, much of this is excavated rather than seen, and the reading of its rule is inference.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Elevation recurs along two kilometres, and the plan is built to produce it: from the Ciudadela looking north, the Avenue rising in terraces to the Moon, with Cerro Gordo’s profile repeated in the pyramid’s; the Sun from its plaza, a mass nothing in Mesoamerica approached; the Plaza of the Moon, a room of platforms before the last stair; the Feathered Serpent’s west face, heads in rows and serpents between them. Vastness, succession, uniformity. The height is the outdoors’. No interior at Teotihuacan rises: the pyramids are solids, the temples on them are gone and not credited, the compounds are single-storey and inward, and the red plaster that once made the city one colour is lost and not credited. Held below the top for that: a sublime of mass, distance and the mountain, with no room in it.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Myth is built into plan and section, and it stays particular. The pyramid is the mountain: the Moon is set so that its silhouette echoes Cerro Gordo behind it. The Sun is built over a cave, a tunnel running east from under its west stair to a four-lobed chamber near its centre; natural or cut, the pyramid was placed on it. Mountain over cave is the Mesoamerican archetype of origin, which the later Nahuatl names, altepetl, “water-mountain”, and the seven caves of emergence, only name; here it was built in stone first. The Feathered Serpent’s tableros show serpents swimming through a sea of shells, the first water, at the city’s crossing. The Aztecs read it as the place where the sun was made. Held below the top because pyramid, plaza and horizon orientation were inherited from the Preclassic, and the Aztec myth is reception, not construction.
Score: 9.4 / 10
The inheritance is a Preclassic tradition of pyramids and plazas, the talud-tablero already in use, and the Mesoamerican habit of ruler portraits from the Olmec heads to the Maya stelae. The departures: one orientation imposed on some 20 km² of city, without precedent in the Americas; the decision, around 250, to rehouse a valley’s population in some 2,000 masonry compounds of one type; the Sun, raised in one effort to a mass nothing in Mesoamerica approached; and a state art with no ruler in it, against the whole Mesoamerican habit. The stake was the form itself: a population concentrated in one city, its life tied to the plan. A wager on a proven path is not a swerve, and this path was not proven. Held below the top because the elements were inherited; the swerve is in the scale and the system, not in any one member.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Change the form and what the city knows goes with it. The grid makes every household live on the city’s axis: a Teotihuacano woke, cooked and buried the dead at fifteen and a half degrees east of north, inside the cosmogram. The compound makes the corporate group the unit of life: no house stands alone, the patio with its shrine is the centre, the burials lie under the floors, and the street sees a blank wall. The Avenue is terraced, with stairs between its sunken plazas, so that walking north is climbing toward the mountain. The Ciudadela puts the city on one level floor before one temple: audience is a form before it is an event. Worship, rule and dwelling are lived as procession, enclosure and rank. Held below the top because no interior teaches: what the form knows, it knows out of doors.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Evidence over promise, and the return is long. The Aztecs returned first and read it: they named it, set the sun’s birth there and carried its masks into the Templo Mayor’s offerings. Then Batres; Gamio’s project, which uncovered the Feathered Serpent and founded a discipline; Linné in the compounds; Millon’s map, which made the city visible as a city; the Feathered Serpent’s victims (1988–1989) and its tunnel (from 2003); the Moon’s burials (1998–2004). The questions stay open: who ruled, and how; what language was spoken; what the Feathered Serpent means and why its own people buried it; who burned the city; whether the cave is natural; what the orientation marks. A city without texts yields by excavation and has not stopped. Held below the top because much of the yield is evidence about Teotihuacan rather than further meaning in it, and the century of close study is short.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Force and reach together; the field is Mesoamerican building and its region. The intrinsic force: the city reorganised what a city could be in the Americas, with the grid, the apartment compound, the talud-tablero made a state style, and an impersonal art of the state. Held below the top because the grid and the compound were not copied; what travelled was the profile, the cult and the idea of the city, and the tradition ended in 1521, surviving as emblem rather than practice. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Kaminaljuyú built in talud-tablero; Tikal’s Stela 31 records the arrival of Siyaj K’ak’ in 378; Copán’s founder of 426–427 wears Teotihuacan goggles; Cholula, Xochicalco, Cacaxtla and Tula took its profile and its serpent; the Aztecs made it their place of origin and built temples in its style beside the Templo Mayor; and modern Mexico made it the emblem of the pre-Hispanic past.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Weighed on form, use and fabric together. The form is whole: the orientation, the Avenue, the three great complexes and the quadripartite plan are legible on the ground; it outlived the state by nearly fifteen centuries, and its profile was copied from Tikal to Tenochtitlan. The use is lost in kind: the temples burned around 550, the compounds emptied, and the dwelling has not returned; use was regained twice, as a sacred site of the Aztecs and, since 1910, as a national monument. The fabric is the heaviest charge: the city quarried and mostly buried, plaster and paint gone from every exterior, the Avenue’s platforms reconstructions of 1917 to 1994 on original cores, and the Sun stripped and re-faced by Batres in 1905–1910, its stepped outline in part his. What makes the work is its plan, and the plan survives entire; the lost dwelling, the buried city and the Sun’s altered skin hold it below the top.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Command of the medium, structure and engineering included, and planning above all: an axis kept straight over two kilometres with changes of level; a grid over some 20 km²; a river turned to the grid; the Sun’s mass raised, its core of adobe and rubble bound by stone retaining walls; lime plaster in quantities that imply an industry; the murals, true fresco on lime, in mineral reds; the Feathered Serpent’s heads, carved in the round. The talud-tablero is a structural grammar as much as a style: the batter holds the fill, the framed panel takes the sculpture and the paint. The costs are the medium’s. The fabric is surface over mass: strip the plaster, as Batres did, and the core runs in the rain. There is no vault and no span beyond a timber roof. Planning and painting are load-bearing; refinement of the member is not what this craft was for.
Score: 8.9 / 10
One physics: fifteen and a half degrees east of north. Take the two most distant elements, the Pyramid of the Sun and a drain under a compound floor at the city’s edge. They obey one orientation, one profile (talud-tablero from the great pyramids to a patio altar), one surface (red lime plaster) and one unit (the walled rectangle, from the Ciudadela to a compound). The range is a city’s: the sacred, the state, the workshop, the foreign quarter, the household. The law held across five centuries of rebuilding. This is not narrow: 100,000 people or more under one rule. What resists: the city has two centres, the Sun’s, early, and the Ciudadela’s crossing, later; the Oaxaca barrio kept its own rites inside the grid; and the burial of the Feathered Serpent is the law turning on one of its own works. Held below the top for the two centres and the accretion.
Score: 9.3 / 10
The orders held are nine. The cosmos: orientation, mountain, cave, the serpents’ sea. The sacred: the Sun and the Moon, with sacrificed animals and bound men in the Moon’s bodies; the Tepantitla goddess with her mountain of water. The state: the Ciudadela’s palaces, and a plaza for the city. War and sacrifice: the Feathered Serpent’s two hundred soldiers; the armed coyotes and jaguars of Atetelco. Labour and economy: obsidian workshops, the lime and ceramic industries. The family and household: 2,000 compounds with their patios and their dead under the floors. The foreign: Oaxacans, Gulf people and Maya, each in a quarter. Nature: the river bent and the mountain mirrored. History: five centuries legible in the Moon’s bodies. The grid integrates them, placing each on the same axis. What is held weakly is the single consciousness: no person is here; the city made itself faceless, and holds everything but the one.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
9.1 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier V · Epochal
Strongest Dimensions
The Archetypal Deep at 9.4 and The Inner Law at 9.3, with The Sublime, The Living Form, Pressure on Tradition and The Encompassed at 9.2. A cosmos built into plan and section, mountain over cave at the end of a two-kilometre road; one bearing over some twenty square kilometres, from the greatest pyramid to a drain under a house; an elevation that recurs along the whole Avenue; a form in which worship, rule and dwelling are lived as procession, enclosure and rank; a reach across a subcontinent, recorded by its receivers; and a city that holds the household, labour and the foreign as a palace or a temple cannot.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.6: a city built by generations is in part assembled, with its small pyramids ranged round one plaza, its three-temple complexes repeated, the Moon’s seven bodies, and the platforms set before the Sun and the Feathered Serpent by later politics. Below the rest, The Unconcealment at 8.8, and The Swerve and The Made at 8.9: without texts, much of what the city discloses is excavated rather than seen; its elements were inherited and the swerve is in the system; and its fabric is surface over mass, with no vault and no span. The four are one fact: a city without a face, read by excavation, made whole by a plan rather than by any member.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.2, The Made at 8.9, The Inner Law at 9.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Archetypal Deep at 9.4, Pressure on Tradition at 9.2, The Imperishable at 9.1, The Swerve at 8.9 and The Unconcealment at 8.8 clear the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis falls below 8.6, against 7.5) and The Encompassed clears its own floor of 6.0 at 9.2. Every summit condition is met.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the city as it stands in 2026 (its documented plan, section, fabric and building history) and of what happened to it afterwards. No plan, image or written source on the city was consulted. Teotihuacan left no text that can be quoted: its glyphs are few and unread; the Nahuatl names are given with their usual renderings, which vary; and the Aztec account of the making of the sun is paraphrased, not quoted. The only quotations are from the first book of the Aeneid, in Virgil’s Latin, the Perseus Digital Library text, with Dryden’s translation, Project Gutenberg e-text #228, beneath, its apostrophes set in the page’s style; the poem is the bench’s epic of the founding of a city, and its lines are neither credited nor charged to the work. The work scored is the planned city as a whole, not its ceremonial core alone: the grid, with its orientation, its quadripartite plan on the two crossing avenues and the channelled San Juan; the Avenue of the Dead with its terraces, stairs, sunken plazas and three-temple complexes; the Pyramid of the Sun with its adosada, its plaza and enclosure and the cave beneath it; the Pyramid of the Moon with its plaza and the Quetzalpapalotl Palace group; the Ciudadela with its platforms, its plaza, the Temple of the Feathered Serpent with the Adosada before it, its flanking compounds and the tunnel beneath it, and the Great Compound facing it; and the apartment compounds, of which the excavated ones stand for the rest, with their murals as parts of them. The ceremonial core alone is a second unit, described and not scored; scored alone it would stand a little below the city, not above it. The later towns over the city, the site museum, the Aztec reception, the objects removed to the Templo Mayor, to the National Museum of Anthropology and abroad, and the other Classic cities are context and evidence only. The Adosada over the Feathered Serpent, the breaking of its sculpture and the Moon’s successive bodies are the makers’ own acts and are read as the work. The fire of about 550, the abandonment and quarrying, the looting of murals, Batres’s stripping and re-facing of the Sun in 1905–1910 and every reconstruction since are weighed only as facts of survival, and none is charged to the makers; what the ruin adds, the bare masses against the sky, is not credited to them, and what is lost, the plaster, the temples on the pyramids and the compounds’ roofs, is not credited either. The proposals for the city’s rulers, its people’s language and the identity of the lord who came to Tikal are not used, and readings of the orientation as a calendar are not credited. Every date before 1500 is approximate, and the phase dates are given as the record gives them. Figures that could not be verified, among them the dimensions and heights of the pyramids and the temple, the size of the Ciudadela and of a compound, the width and full length of the Avenue, the counts of heads, victims and three-temple complexes, the measure of what Batres removed, the share of the city excavated and the yearly count of visitors, are not given; the population and the number of compounds are given as the record commonly gives them, in round figures.