From the historian's notes

Teotihuacan, 450

Mexico · North America · May 450 · spring (dry)

What it was high

at its height: perhaps 100,000 people in some 2,000 apartment compounds, one of the largest cities in the worlda city from around the 1st century BCE

That year

• The city at its peak, laid out on a grid around the Avenue of the Dead, with apartment compounds whose walls are painted inside ongoing higha planned metropolis
• Foreign neighbourhoods inside the city: a quarter of families from Oaxaca, and a merchants' quarter with pottery from the Gulf Coast and the Maya lands ongoing higha city of migrants
• The green obsidian of Pachuca, worked in the city's workshops, travels across Mesoamerica ongoing highthe city's export

Who held it medium

the Teotihuacan stateunknown: no ruler's name or portrait is known, and power may have been sharedTeotihuacan's influence reaches far: in 378 its envoys arrived at Tikal in the Maya lowlands and a new dynasty followed

Its name low

unknown: the city's own name is unrecorded. Classic Maya inscriptions may call it Puh, 'place of reeds'Written in unknown: Teotihuacan's sign system is not deciphered

The date, there low

unknownthe Mesoamerican 260-day ritual count and 365-day yearThe sun and the ritual calendar.

Money low

no coinageunknownunknown: barter, with cacao and cloth probable as valuables

Weather medium

May: the end of the dry season, warm days, the first afternoon storms

Things

Objectsgreen obsidian blades; Thin Orange pottery; stone masks; theatre-style incense burnersFoodmaize as tamales and atole; beans; squash; chiles; turkey and dogClothcotton mantles traded up from warmer lands; maguey fibre for most peopleGetting abouton foot, loads carried with a tumpline: no wheels, no draught animalsIn the aircopal incense; cooking fires; wet lime plaster

What she'd hear

Unknown: the city's language is not identified, and its quarters spoke many.

Where she could stand

• the Avenue of the Dead — the great axis running north to the Pyramid of the Moon
• the Pyramid of the Sun — the vast stepped platform, plastered and painted
• an apartment compound — rooms around patios, walls painted with processions and jaguars
• an obsidian workshop — green and black blades knapped by the thousand

Researched for this card · confidence medium