Teotihuacan

Teotihuacan, the city where gods were made, rose in a sub-valley of the Valley of Mexico and became the largest city of the ancient Americas: at its zenith in the first half of the first millennium, some hundred thousand people, a sixth of the world's great cities, lived along the Avenue of the Dead between the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon. Beginning as a religious centre in the first century CE, it grew into a planned grid of apartment compounds housing a multi-ethnic population, workshops turning out thin-orange pottery and obsidian blades, and muraled temples to the Feathered Serpent and the Storm God. Its merchants, soldiers and ideas reached Monte Alban, the Maya lowlands and the Gulf. Around 550 the great monuments were sacked and systematically burned, perhaps amid the famines of the 530s; the city lingered into the 7th or 8th century and then emptied. The Aztecs, finding the ruins centuries later, named it the birthplace of the Fifth Sun.