The Walls of Teotihuacan May Finally Be Speaking

From the Archaeology Desk:

Stand in the Avenue of the Dead at Teotihuacan long enough, and you start noticing what isn’t there.

Not ruins. The ruins are everywhere, pressing up against the sky in two directions. The Pyramid of the Sun dominates the horizon. The Pyramid of the Moon anchors the northern end of the great avenue. Palace compounds and apartment complexes stretch away into a city laid out with a precision that still astonishes archaeologists.

What is missing is text.

There is no great royal inscription announcing the name of a king. No monumental list of rulers like those found at Maya sites. No equivalent of the inscriptions at Karnak, where generations of pharaohs carved their names and accomplishments into stone.

Teotihuacan was one of the largest cities in the ancient Americas. At its height, perhaps 100,000 or more people lived there.

And yet, for generations, the city seemed to have left us almost nothing that could tell us what its people called themselves or what language they spoke.

For a long time, that silence was treated almost as a fact of Teotihuacan itself.

The Maya wrote. The Zapotec wrote. Teotihuacan, the argument went, communicated through images — sophisticated, powerful images, but images rather than a true writing system.

That distinction matters.

A picture can tell us what a culture valued. A written language can tell us what someone wanted to say.

A name.

A title.

A place.

Perhaps even a sentence.

Now, a 2025 study argues that some of those silent images may have been speaking all along.

A Question Older Than the Discovery

The idea that Teotihuacan possessed some form of writing is not new.

Researchers have been debating it for decades.

The city’s murals, ceramics, and architectural decorations contain recurring signs and combinations of signs. Some appear often enough, and in consistent enough contexts, to raise an obvious question:

What if these aren’t simply pictures?

What if they are words?

Earlier scholarship established that Teotihuacan’s signs share characteristics with the writing traditions of other Mesoamerican cultures. But the harder question remained unanswered.

Were the signs actually recording language?

And if they were, which language?

That problem is enormous.

We know what language the Maya inscriptions record because we can read Maya writing. We can follow royal names, dates, titles, battles, dynasties, and political events across centuries.

Teotihuacan offers nothing nearly so generous.

Its corpus of surviving texts is comparatively small. The signs occur primarily in murals, ceramics, and other contexts rather than in the enormous historical inscriptions that later civilizations sometimes produced.

The result has been a strange archaeological paradox.

We can see Teotihuacan.

We can map Teotihuacan.

We can walk through its neighborhoods and stand inside its temples.

But we still struggle to hear the people who built it.

That may be beginning to change.

What the Murals Might Be Saying

In 2025, linguist Magnus Pharao Hansen and archaeologist and epigrapher Christophe Helmke of the University of Copenhagen published The Language of Teotihuacan Writing in Current Anthropology.

Their argument is ambitious.

They believe the signs found at Teotihuacan constitute a genuine writing system — and that the system encoded a Uto-Aztecan language closely ancestral to languages such as Nahuatl, Cora, and Huichol.

That does not mean they simply took the language of the Aztecs and translated Teotihuacan’s murals.

In fact, they specifically caution against doing that.

The problem is one of time.

The Aztec language we know as Nahuatl was spoken many centuries after Teotihuacan’s great period. Instead, Hansen and Helmke reconstructed an earlier stage of the language family, one that could have existed much closer to the period when Teotihuacan’s writing was actually being used.

Think of it as trying to read an ancient inscription in the ancestor of a language rather than simply assuming that a modern descendant would use the same words.

That distinction is critical.

Then comes the intriguing part.

The researchers argue that some Teotihuacan signs behave according to principles familiar from other Mesoamerican writing systems.

Some signs can function as logograms — images that represent words or concepts.

But images can also represent sounds.

That’s the rebus principle.

It is the same basic trick behind a modern rebus puzzle: an image may be chosen not because of what it depicts, but because its name sounds like the word the writer wants.

Hansen and Helmke also identify what they call “double spelling,” a principle in which a sign’s sound and meaning can reinforce one another.

Taken individually, any one of these observations might not prove much.

Taken together — particularly when signs recur in patterned combinations and contexts — they begin to look less like decoration and more like a system.

And systems can be read.

Why It Matters

If the proposed reading survives further testing, it could change one of the biggest unanswered questions surrounding Teotihuacan.

Who were these people?

For more than a century, the city has often been treated almost like a civilization without a voice. Its monuments are spectacular, but its political and linguistic identity remains elusive.

We know Teotihuacan had enormous influence.

Its art and architecture traveled.

Its obsidian reached distant regions.

Its people lived in a city that drew communities from across Mesoamerica.

Its influence can even be traced into parts of the Maya world.

But influence is not identity.

A writing system could give archaeologists something they have never really had before: a chance to approach Teotihuacan through the words of the people who actually lived there.

And the linguistic proposal carries another potentially important implication.

If the language represented at Teotihuacan really was an early Uto-Aztecan language, then the long relationship between Teotihuacan and later Nahuan-speaking peoples may need to be reconsidered.

The traditional picture of language movement and population history in central Mexico could become considerably more complicated.

Later arrivals may have had deeper connections to the people who lived there earlier than previously assumed.

That is a very different story from one in which Teotihuacan simply vanished, and later civilizations arrived to inherit its ruins.

What Hansen and Helmke Are Not Claiming

This is the part worth emphasizing.

Hansen and Helmke have not announced that Teotihuacan’s writing has been completely deciphered.

They are proposing a reading.

That distinction is important.

Archaeological decipherment is rarely a matter of finding one magical translation and suddenly understanding everything. A convincing decipherment needs repeated tests. Signs need to behave consistently. Proposed readings need to work in different contexts. Other researchers need to examine the evidence and see whether the same system holds up.

Teotihuacan presents a particularly difficult case because the surviving corpus is limited.

The Maya left thousands upon thousands of inscriptions.

Teotihuacan did not.

That makes every surviving sign more valuable — and every proposed reading more difficult to prove.

Hansen himself used a useful analogy: trying to read an ancient language through a much later related language is like trying to read Viking runestones using modern Danish.

The languages are related.

That does not make them identical.

The same caution applies here.

If the proposal is correct, we may be looking at the beginning of a decipherment rather than its conclusion.

And honestly, that may be the most exciting part.

A City in Conversation With Its Neighbors

Teotihuacan did not exist in isolation.

Its artists and scribes belonged to a wider Mesoamerican world in which images, symbols, sounds, names, and written language could overlap in remarkably sophisticated ways.

The city interacted with cultures to the north, south, and east. Its influence reached far beyond the Valley of Mexico.

The signs at Teotihuacan therefore shouldn’t necessarily be imagined as an isolated invention.

They belong to a larger history of Mesoamerican communication — one that eventually produced some of the most sophisticated writing systems in the ancient world.

The Maya developed a script that could record complex historical narratives.

Zapotec inscriptions preserve some of the earliest known writing traditions in Mesoamerica.

Later Nahuatl traditions combined images and phonetic elements in ways that allowed names and places to be represented.

Teotihuacan may have been participating in that same larger experiment much earlier than we once understood.

If so, the city was never truly silent.

We simply didn’t know how to listen.

What This Means for Echo of Atlantis

This is exactly the kind of discovery that fascinates me when I think about the world behind the Ūmdëdŭ Codex.

Not because Teotihuacan is Atlantis.

It isn’t.

And archaeology does not need Atlantis to be extraordinary.

What Teotihuacan gives us is something more useful: a real-world example of how knowledge can survive while its meaning disappears.

The walls remain.

The symbols remain.

The people who understood them are gone.

And centuries — sometimes millennia — can pass before someone begins to understand what those symbols were saying.

That idea sits at the heart of Echo of Atlantis.

In the novels, the four descendants do not discover the Codex’s secrets simply by finding something nobody has ever seen before.

They have to learn how to read what was already there.

Teotihuacan reminds us that this is not merely a fantasy device.

Human history is full of things we can see without understanding.

Sometimes the lost knowledge isn’t buried.

Sometimes it is sitting in plain sight.

Questions Still Waiting for Answers

Even if Hansen and Helmke’s proposal survives years of testing, enormous questions remain.

Did Teotihuacan have one dominant language, or did its writing system function across a multilingual population?

Did the script primarily record names and places, or could it record more complex statements?

Do the surviving murals preserve rulers’ names?

Priests?

Lineages?

Neighborhoods?

Foreign visitors?

Or people whose social roles we haven’t yet learned how to recognize?

And perhaps the biggest question of all:

How much more is still out there?

Teotihuacan was enormous.

Only a fraction of the ancient city has been excavated.

Some inscriptions may still lie beneath structures that have never been fully explored. Others may have disappeared completely, destroyed by weather, later construction, or the simple passage of time.

Every new fragment could either strengthen the proposed readings or force researchers back to the drawing board.

Either outcome would be valuable.

Because decipherment is not about proving that our first interpretation was right.

It is about getting closer to what the people themselves intended to say.

For a city that has been silent for nearly fifteen centuries, even the first few words would be extraordinary.

Coming Up Next

Next in the Ancient Texts pillar, we’ll follow the chain of transmission behind the single most influential written account of Atlantis ever created — the story Plato said he received secondhand more than twenty-three centuries ago, and the ancient source that became the foundation for nearly every Atlantis theory that followed.

From the Archaeology Desk is a recurring series exploring new discoveries from the ancient world and the real history that inspires Echo of Atlantis.