Ancient Bronze Age symbol on the mountain above Teotihuacan

 

Let us put this in perspective.  It is three thousand years since the global Bronze Age Culture that operated from at least 2400 BC which was its apex through 1159 BC.  Obviously that apex needed five prior centuries to become global through multiple voyages, just as ours did.

That surely meant ample trade factories and  trader lords all depending on copper ingots to act as acceptable currency.  This is the society that built pyramids globally and which was echoed in Mesoamerica and elsewhere after their fall.

Thus concurrent glyphs from Sweden to Mexico makes total sense.  Our problem is that three thousand years is wonderful for making things disappear.  Even this site was torn down, likely when the copper stopped in 1159BC,  This is also when Mycenae fell to annoyed Greeks from the Baltics...

Ancient Bronze Age symbol on the mountain above Teotihuacan

Posted by Richard Thornton | Jan 6, 2019 | Archaeology, Art, Mexico, Mysteries |

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Long forgotten slide of a Great Sun glyph

While wandering around the stone ruins on the top of Cerro Gordo, north of Teotihuacan,  I took color slides of several rock carvings.  However, I never really looked again at the slide immediately to the right, after first glancing at it in a slide viewer in 1970.  It was never used in any of my lectures on Mesoamerican architecture, during the subsequent decades. It didn’t look very “Mesoamerican” and seemed to have nothing to do with architecture.  There it sat in the slide box, forgotten, until just recently.

 

You can thank Georgia Tech architecture professors,  Ike Saporta and Julian Harris, for me having all those precious images of Mesoamerican civilization that you never see in videos or in books.  Ike was also president of the Atlanta Archaeological Society and hammered into my head the directive that I document EVERYTHING I encountered . . . not just what interested me.  Julian was the architect for the Etowah Mounds Museum and also a professional sculptor.  In writing, he requested that I photograph as many glyphs and motifs as possible.  He often sculptured traditional Creek motifs to place on his buildings.  Copies of all my slides were to be held by the Georgia Tech Library.

Someone really, really didn’t like whoever the Great Sun symbol stood.  The petroglyph had been torn from the wall of a building and severely defaced.  In fact,  all of the stone ruins near where archaeologists are working now, showed signs of violent destruction.  Archaeologists had to dig down to an earlier phase of the structure or building complex to get to walls that had not been torn asunder.  

Although the other fragments of rock carvings on Cerro Gordo look more “Mesoamerican,”  they still do not look like those in the valley above.  My guess is that the rock carving above dates from the time of the Olmec Civilization.  Note that the rock has an Olmec Civilization- Maya number on the upper right-hand corner.  In fact, I believe that it is safe to say that we are looking at an early form of their writing system. This stone slab was also torn from a building an broken up, but there were no attempts to gouge out the imagery.

2018 archaeological dig on the western crest of Cerro Gordo