Teotihuacan once ranked among the world’s largest cities
Mesoamerica alone in the Americas invented Indigenous writing before Europeans arrived. Five great civilizations—Olmec, Maya, Teotihuacan, Toltec, and Aztec—set the political weather for millennia. At its height Teotihuacan may have held more than 200,000 people in multi-floor apartments.
Human presence once seemed to stretch 40,000 years on Valley of Mexico footprints; that date is now doubted, and 23,000-year-old campfire remains remain unclear as earliest proof. Mild paleo-lakes around Lake Texcoco favored hunter-gatherers before western Mexicans began breeding maize between 5,000 and 10,000 years ago. Corn, squash, and beans—the Three Sisters—anchored diets that also included tomatoes, peppers, chocolate, and tobacco. No pastoral herds existed before Europeans. Shared religion featured jaguar and jade symbolism, cave-mouthed temple masks, and a pantheon flexible enough to absorb new gods—an openness that later eased Christian overlay.
Olmecs appeared on the Gulf coast (modern Tabasco) about 1500–900 BCE, forging the first identifiable Mesoamerican art style and possibly inventing regional writing; by 900–300 BCE their style reached the Valley of Mexico and Costa Rica. Maya kingship (ahau) is visible from 300 BCE; classic kingdoms from Pacific Guatemala to northern Yucatán supported millions—Tikal alone perhaps 500,000, though typical realms held under 50,000. The earliest known long-count date, 199 AD, opens the classic florescence of temples and elite power. Teotihuacan, founded around 100 BCE and built out to about 250 CE, dominated the Basin of Mexico with pyramids, the Avenue of the Dead, and thin orange pottery traded widely until decline between the seventh and eighth centuries.
Toltec Tula (about 800–1000 CE) was remembered by later Aztecs as the gold standard of civilization—so much that Nahuatl “Toltec” came to mean artisan—though how much of that memory is history remains debated, as do links to Chichén Itzá. Nahua groups entered central Mexico from the sixth century; Mexica migrants reached the Valley in 1248 and founded Tenochtitlan in 1325. In 1428 they led a Triple Alliance with Texcoco and Tlacopan that toppled Azcapotzalco and ruled central Mexico until the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest created New Spain.
Source: History of Mexico
