30 May 2025 / 10 House
Article suitable for older students
Find out moreAztec pyramids
ORIGINAL QUESTION received from - and thanks to - William Cawthorne: I’m doing a school project. Can you please help me by telling me where did the aztecs build their pyramids? I also have to make an aztec pyramid: do you have any tips or instructions on how I could do this? Thank you so much. (Answered by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore)
Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital city, was laid out in a grid pattern, with a network of canals, roads and bridges dividing the land into rectangular plots. The city was split into 4 administrative sectors, one of which - the ‘Teopan’ quarter - contained the main Temple Precinct, the focal point of the entire city. At the centre of the Temple Precinct was the Great Temple (the ‘Great House of Gods’), with its twin shrines to Tlaloc and Huitzilopochtli sharing a single pyramid.
There were temples in each of the four city quarters or sectors, and within each quarter there was a local temple in each of the neighbourhoods or parishes (called calpulli or ‘groups of houses’ by the Aztecs). Building pyramid-temples ( teocalli or ‘house of god(s)’ in Náhuatl) was one of the most important architectural duties for the Aztecs, because of their religious meaning. The pyramids represented mountains - sources of water and fertility and homes of ancient ancestors.
The Aztecs employed ‘monumental’ architecture - they built to impress! Public buildings such as temples were highly visible structures that could easily be seen by the public. The Spanish were struck by just how the temples stood out: describing 3 Aztec towns just before the conquest, Torquemada wrote that they:-
...had many temples, and very high towers, that were white-washed, that from afar glimmered like silver in the sun, and they ornamented the towns greatly.
Most Aztec public buildings consisted of stone platforms, or rooms built on top of stone platforms. Professor Michael Smith (who is on our Panel of Experts) classifies these as: double-temple pyramids, single-temple pyramids, circular temples, ballcourts, shrines, and palaces. All Aztec cities, except the most powerful capitals, used the single-temple pyramid as their major temple, and most or all Aztec cities had additional, smaller, single-temple pyramids (in local parishes) in addition to their main temple. Most pictures in the codices are of the single-temple type.
Whilst the single-temple pyramid was the Aztec ‘norm’, they varied greatly in size, form and orientation. In most Aztec towns the pyramid temple was the tallest building, standing next to a large open plaza in the town centre; the temple stood out to visitors approaching the town or city and loomed over visitors in the plaza. Most temples faced west, built on the east side of the plaza (main square), with the stairway being approached from the plaza. The staircase then faced west, where the Sun descended into the underworld.
Double-temple pyramids became much more standardised in size and form - probably reflecting their status as the largest and most central temples at the most powerful Aztec capital cities. The most famous of all, of course, is the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan, whose plaza could fit 8,000 people. It was the centre point for the four cardinal directions (N,S,E,W), the place where the 5th axis or direction led up to the heavens and down to the underworlds, and where the supreme ruler and his priests communicated with the gods...
More info:-
• ‘The Aztecs’ by Michael E. Smith
• ‘Aztec City-State Capitals’ by Michael E. Smith
• ‘Handbook to Life in the Aztec World’ by Manuel Aguilar-Moreno
• ‘Everyday Life of the Aztecs’ by Warwick Bray
Making a temple!
You can find several examples of Aztec temples made by schools studying the Aztecs in our ‘School Displays’ pages (link below). Graciela suggests you may like to start with a set of square cardboard boxes that get smaller and smaller - each must be the same height, but obviously the largest one is the base.
Look at these school displays for starters:-
• Morgans Primary School
• Kettlefield CP School
• St. Peter’s CE Primary School
Picture sources:-
• Reconstruction of Tenochtitlan: scanned from Arquitectura Prehispánica by Ignacio Marquina, INAH/SEP, Mexico, 1951, p.197
• Model of Sacred Precinct: photo by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore
• Model of temple at Frida Kahlo museum: photo by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore
• Model of single-temple pyramid, MNA: photo by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore
• Codex Borgia examples scanned from The Codex Borgia: a Full-Color Restoration of the Ancient Mexican Manuscript by Gisele Díaz and Alan Rodgers, Dover Publications, New York, 1993
• Painting by Miguel Covarrubias from The Aztecs - People of the Sun by Alfonso Caso, University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 1958
• Model, school display: photo by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore
Comments (2)
Courtney
28th Apr 2016
I am also doing a project,and i need help with this question it reads:What did the Aztecs build?Please help me Thank you-Courtney
Gina Rodriguez
15th Feb 2010
Congratulations! I am doing an iconographic research about Mexico-Tenochtitlan, and I have found the image I was looking for. Thanks a lot!
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