Meso American People - Chapter Five: Zapotec

maxjoy (68)in #history • 8 years ago

Welcome to these article about the Zapotec.

Like we have seen the Maya were not the only ones around, nor were the Olmec before. Another major Meso American civilisation was the Zapotec.

The Zapotec

The Zapotec lived in the valley of Oaxaca in southern Mexico. Their main city was Monte Alban. That city was quite impressive. First of all with was build on a mountaintop… that’s quite impressive already but what’s really fascinating is that they levied the mountain in order of the city to be built.

That’s an incredible achievement.. almost surreal… it had to take decades of hard work by thousands of people, to do such a thing. They actually made the mountaintop flat for the building of the city… crazy!

From the mountaintop, Monte Alban could look into their kingdom… no other city nearby could match or come close to the sophistication of the site.

I guess we can call it the Zapotec Capital and it ruled that region for over a thousand years. By 100 B.C. it had 17 000 inhabitants. It ruled all the places in their region, creating (in a way) a Zapotec identity of all that region.

It made the trades very city specific, like every other city would produce materials for them, it’s even speculated that even water was imported to Monte Alban…

Another curious fact is that the city seemed to be planed from the beginning… like a master plan of a city planner. Unlike the Maya cities, this Zapotec one was conceived as one solid city from the beginning.

There are several monuments, palaces and other’s dedicated to astronomy. We can also see an influence of Teotihuacan. ( A major city as we will explore in these series)

There are some engravings in stone showing high-level captives… maybe royalty from other cities… displaying the Monte Alban, total control of the region.

We can also find some writings in the city. However, we haven’t been able to decipher them… but they do show that the Zapotec had a writing system as really as the Maya.

The cities power started to fade and eventually, it would come to an end. But even though it was losing its totalitarian power and some suspect that Teotihuacan started controlling their elite, the end of the city was mysterious like all other classic period cities of Meso America.

People just left… and I do mean left… no signs of sacking, conquest nor destruction where found… 35 000 people just left. (We will talk about that in another article)

Later it would become active again… but not by the Zapotec… but rather another people, the Mixtec.