Message #26656

[Michelle Sandberg]

The city was a center of industry, home to many potters, jewelers and craftsmen. Teotihuacán is known for producing a great number of obsidian artifacts. Unfortunately no ancient Teotihuacano non-ideographic texts are known to exist (or known to have existed), but mentions of the city in inscriptions from Maya cities show that Teotihuacán nobility travelled to and perhaps conquered local rulers as far away as Honduras. Maya inscriptions mention an individual nicknamed by scholars as "Spearthrower Owl", apparently ruler of Teotihuacán, who reigned for over 60 years and installed his relatives as rulers of Tikal and Uaxactún in Guatemala. Most of what we infer about the culture at Teotihuacán comes from the murals that adorn the site and others, like the Wagner Murals, found in private collections, and from hieroglyphic inscriptions made by the Maya describing their encounters with Teotihuacano conquerors.