Teotihuacan - Name

Name

The name Teōtīhuacān was given by the Nahuatl-speaking Aztec centuries after the fall of the city. The term has been glossed as "birthplace of the gods", reflecting Nahua creation myths that were said to occur in Teotihuacan. Teotihuacān is a Nahuatl (Aztec) name meaning "place where gods were born". Nahuatl scholar Thelma D. Sullivan interprets the name as "place of those who have the road of the gods." This is because the Aztecs believed that the gods created the universe at that site. The name is pronounced in Nahuatl, with the accent on the syllable wa. By normal Nahuatl orthographic conventions, a written accent would not appear in that position. Both this pronunciation and Spanish are used, and both spellings appear in this article.

The original name of the city is unknown, but it appears in hieroglyphic texts from the Maya region as puh, or "Place of Reeds". This suggests that the Maya of the Classic period understood Teotihuacan as a Place of Reeds similar to other Postclassic Central Mexican settlements that took the name Tollan, such as Tula-Hidalgo and Cholula.

This naming convention led to much confusion in the early 20th century, as scholars debated whether Teotihuacan or Tula-Hidalgo was the Tollan described by 16th–century chronicles. It now seems clear that Tollan may be understood as a generic Nahua term applied to any large settlement. In the Mesoamerican concept of urbanism, Tollan and other language equivalents serve as a metaphor, linking the bundles of reeds and rushes that formed part of the lacustrine environment of the Valley of Mexico and the large gathering of people in a city.