At about the same time that the biblical prophet Daniel is visited by an angel in the Middle East, and Gautama Buddha achieves enlightenment in India, and at about the same time that Darius I of Persia is defeated by the Greeks at the Battle of Marathon, the Zapotecs of what is now Mexico begin to build a city, perhaps the first of it's kind in the New World. It would endure for more than a thousand years before coming to an end eight centuries before the Spanish arrived.
The first thing they did was lop off the top of a mountain overlooking the Oaxaca Valley, and create a plaza about the size of 50 football fields, or about 8 times the size of St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City. Then they carried stones up from the valley and constructed magnificent monuments, tombs, ball-courts, temples and palaces all rectangular in shape and painstakingly aligned to the cardinal directions, save one. Of all the buildings in this massive complex just one is skewed dramatically from everything else, turned almost 45 degrees, pentagonal in shape, and aligned with the star Capella in the constellation Auriga, The Charioteer.
One side of this odd structure looks very much like the rest of the buildings with a broad stairway leading up to a platform on top, but the other side is shaped very much like an arrow, pointing to the southwest. It points in fact to the place where 5 of the 25 brightest stars disappear over the horizon. What else it may point to is a matter of much speculation. Many believe that the building served as a celestial observatory.
So here’s the thing about Auriga. The constellation consists of 5 stars whose pattern in the sky is directly in alignment and matches exactly the footprint of the observatory. Capella is the brightest star in the constellation, and the biggest and brightest yellow star visible in the sky. It is actually two stars, each with a golden color similar to our sun. Both are about 10 times our sun’s diameter and emit about 80 times more light than our sun, although they’re much further away. And although most stars in the heavens seem to blink, Capella flashes red and green as it rises above the horizon each year on the exact same day that the sun reaches its zenith.
The Zapotecs also constructed another curious feature, referred to as a “zenith tube”. As anyone in the tropics knows, the sun passes more or less directly overhead twice a year and at noon your shadow is directly at your feet. If for some reason you wanted to know exactly when this occurred each year you could simply erect a pole and observe the shadow become increasingly shorter until, when the sun was directly overhead, the shadow disappeared.
If you wanted to do this is in a very dramatic fashion, say for ceremonial purposes, you might construct a darkened chamber with a vertical shaft or tube placed directly above so that when the sun reached its zenith it would dramatically flood the darkened chamber with light. If you were the one who constructed all this, you could then predict or “command”, depending on your political preferences, the exact moment the light would illuminate the chamber. This is exactly what occurred here, and interestingly this was all accomplished about 1,000 years before the birth of Galileo, a man the Europeans rather optimistically refer to as “the Father of Observable Astronomy”. The combination of the heliacal rising of Auriga and Capella in conjunction with the sun moving directly overhead obviously held great meaning for the people of Monte Albán.
Los Danzantes is the name given to about 300 large bas-relief panels, about half of which were discovered at what is now known as the Templo de Los Danzantes on the western side of the plaza. Thought by one imaginative historian in the 19th century to depict swimmers and dancers hence the name, these figures are now believed to be warriors captured in battle who were ritually sacrificed. The sculptures depict the limp and distorted poses of the dead whose mouths are often open, eyes closed, and whose genitals are sometimes mutilated with stylized blood in flowing patterns.
Given this realization, it’s puzzling why the playful name still persists, and restaurants, bars, and other places in the area continue to light up the name on the exterior of their establishments as venues of fun and entertainment.
Massive stelae rise to various heights throughout the complex and may have been used to memorialize people or battles or used to record and predict celestial events.
The greatest collection of treasure ever found in the Americas was discovered in Tomb 7, and it is as extensive and astonishing as it is priceless. It includes a gold mask so detailed that the eyelashes almost seem to flutter, a necklace of 846 pieces of gold, a human skull covered with jade mosaic, a crystal goblet honed so thin that it is transparent, a gold ring shown on its original finger bone, a coral necklace, pearls the size of robin’s eggs, gold mounted tiger’s teeth, and jade plugs for ears and lips. The relics fill room after room in the Cultural Museum in Oaxaca. The detail and the artistry are exquisite, these people were not only accomplished engineers, architects and builders, they were master jewelers and artisans.
Although there are endless theories, no one knows why the city was built here, or what caused its decline. The site is easily defensible, but on the other hand, the nearest source of water is the Atoyac River on the valley floor and even this does not flow in the dry season. It may be that the promontory provided an unobstructed 360 degree view of the horizon allowing observation of celestial and astrological alignments so important to agricultural events and religious festivals. The pictures and glyphs that permeate these buildings have an extraordinary story to tell, but to date none have been deciphered and so the true story of this shining city on a hill remains untold.
It is estimated that only 10% of Monte Albán has been excavated.
Photography by Bill Sheehan
Oaxaca, Mexico - April, 2019