The Zapotec

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Between two low platforms at San José Mogote, set face-up into the floor of a passage so that anyone crossing had to step on it, lies a slab of stone a little over a meter long. Carved on it is a man — sprawled, naked, eyes shut, a scroll of blood curling from his chest — and between his feet two signs: a numeral and a day-sign, read by most scholars as a name drawn from the sacred count, the calendar-day that fixed him in the turning of time. The stone was cut around 500 BCE, at the close of the phase the archaeologists call Rosario, and it is among the oldest writing anywhere in the Americas. Before Monte Albán’s first terrace was leveled on the hill above, the people of this valley were already keeping their days in stone, and the first thing their writing does is name a fallen enemy underfoot.

They did not call themselves Zapotec. That word is Nahuatl, the Aztec name for them — Zapotēcatl, “people of the place of the sapote tree” — carried into Spanish and from there into every language since. Their own name for themselves makes a different claim, and it is a claim about where they came from.

The people that came from the clouds

They are the Be’ena’a, and on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec the Binnizá, the Bën Za — bën, people, and za, cloud — the Cloud People, and their language is Diidxazá, the cloud-tongue. The name is a genealogy. In the account the Cloud People keep of themselves, the founding lords did not descend from ordinary birth but from the beings who dwell among the clouds, and out of the living rock and the trees of Oaxaca; the land, the rain, and the ancestors are one lineage, and to be Be’ena’a is to be born of the sky over this particular ground. The record of the civilization preserves the endonym in exactly this sense: a variant of Be’ena’a, glossed as “the Cloud People” or as those who came from the clouds.

The antiquity the name claims, the ground confirms. The languages of the Cloud People are not one tongue but a whole branch of the great Oto-Manguean family — the Zapotecan branch, whose only near relatives are the Chatino languages of the Sierra Sur. They are tonal; some varieties carry up to four contrasting tones — high, low, rising, and falling — so that a syllable’s pitch is part of its meaning. And they have divided, over a very long time in place, into a spread that resists a single count: lumped together they are sometimes given as seven distinct languages, split apart they run to more than fifty closely related ones, and the Mexican state recognizes some sixty, each with its own local variants. A branch does not fork that deeply in a few centuries. The sheer internal distance of the cloud-tongue is itself a measure of how long the Be’ena’a have stood where they stand.

The writing on the San José Mogote slab — Monument 3 — belongs to the beginning of that long standing. San José Mogote was the great town of the valley floor in the Rosario phase, the regional center before there was a capital, and the carving set into its passage floor is the earliest firmly attested Zapotec text. What can be read of the script is real and narrow. The numerals resolve into dots and bars, the day-signs into the twenty named days of the sacred count, and calendar dates and personal names can be parsed even where the language behind a given glyph stays silent; connected prose cannot be read at all. The Zapotec inscriptions are terse where later Mesoamerican texts grow voluble — a name, a date, a place, a lord’s title — and much of the difficulty of the script is that the stones say less, not more. That so early a writing system says anything at all, and that it opens with a dated, named, defeated man, tells much about what writing in this valley was first made to do.

Monument 3 at San José Mogote, cut around 500 BCE — a slain, naked figure with two glyphs between the feet, most likely a calendar name; among the oldest attested writing in the Americas. Photograph by Madman2001, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.5.

About that same moment, at the close of the Rosario phase, the Cloud People raised a city where none had been. On a steep, waterless ridge some four hundred meters above the point where the valley’s three arms meet, communities that had never shared a capital converged on neutral, unclaimed ground and cut the summit flat, and out of that leveled mountain — Monte Albán — they built one of the first true urban states of Mesoamerica. At its height, between roughly 250 and 700 CE, the mountain-city held on the order of twenty-five thousand people and governed the whole of the Valley of Oaxaca from its height. The people who wrote a dead man’s name into a floor at San José Mogote were, within a few generations, running a literate state from a summit they had made by hand.

Two counts and a written sky

To be Be’ena’a is to hold an ordered cosmos in a written calendar and a peopled sky, and the calendar comes first because everything else is timed to it. The Cloud People ran two interlocking counts, as did the peoples around them. The piye is the sacred count of two hundred and sixty days: thirteen numbers turning through twenty day-signs, meeting in no repeat until all two hundred and sixty combinations are spent. It is the ground of divination and of naming — a child took its name from the piye-day of its birth, so that the numeral-and-day between the feet of the San José Mogote captive is the same kind of name a living Zapotec once carried. Meshed with it runs the yza, the vague solar year of three hundred and sixty-five days: eighteen months of twenty days apiece, closed by a remainder of five, a dangerous seam at the year’s end. Because the two counts share no common factor beyond five, a given piye-day meets a given yza-day only once in fifty-two years, and that meeting fixes the great cycle — the fifty-two-year round shared across Mesoamerica — after which the whole apparatus of days begins again.

Much of what can be said in detail about the counts comes not from the ancient stones but from the colonial page, and the distance has to be kept in view. The Dominican Fray Juan de Córdova published his Arte del idioma zapoteco and his Vocabulario en lengua çapoteca in 1578, and his word-lists and notes preserve the day-names, the reckoning, and much of the vocabulary of the sacred world — a grammar and dictionary compiled, it must be said, in the middle of a campaign to end the religion they describe. The count itself did not stop when the friars wrote it down. It was carried on in clandestine ritual booklets, kept by day-keepers who wrote the old calendar in adapted alphabetic script and knew exactly what they were guarding, and it is partly through those booklets — and through the trials that seized them — that the piye reaches the modern record at all. Read against the ancient carvings, the colonial calendar is the key that lets the day-signs on the stones be named. It is also a key handed over under duress, and it fits the older locks only approximately.

Over this ordered time presides the rain. Cocijo — the name is also the Zapotec word for lightning itself — is the great power of the sacred world, the lord of rain, thunder, cloud, mist, and standing water, “he who dwells at the four corners of the world,” and his pre-eminence follows from what the valley depended on: a short, uncertain rainy season on which the maize, and so everything, hung. His doubling runs through the calendar. The four sixty-five-day quarters of the piye were themselves each called a cocijo, so that the storm was divided among the four directions of the sky, a lightning-lord for every corner of the world, each fed in its own season. The single fanged face that stares from a thousand years of gray funerary urns is therefore also four faces, and the whole architecture of the heavens is folded into it. The god has his own full account; here it is enough that he is the axis on which the Zapotec year turns.

The five-part world in the tomb

The clearest statement the Cloud People made of the shape of their universe, they made underground. In the stone tombs beneath the houses of the great, archaeologists have recovered sets of gray-ware effigy urns arranged as a group: four small urns bearing the rain-god’s fanged mask set around a single larger urn — and, as the study of the urn tableaux by Javier Urcid and the tradition of Caso and Bernal reads them, the arrangement models the fivefold Mesoamerican universe: four Cocijos of the four cardinal directions framing, at the center, the axis of the world. The lord at that axis is the maize made a god, Pitao Cozobi, the giver of the crop the rain is for. Rain at the four rims, maize at the center — the tomb is a diagram of the sky and the field, set beside the dead so that the source of the year’s water and the source of the year’s bread stand together at the threshold of the ancestors.

At the far edge of that world, where the earth takes the dead in, stands another lord. Coqui Bezelao — also rendered Pitao Bezelao — is the keeper of the dead and of the underworld, patron of Lyobaa, “the place of rest,” the subterranean sanctuary beneath what is now Mitla, where the caverns were held to be a door between the country of the living and the country of the ancestors, and where the lord of the dead received the great dead of the valley. Rain, maize, ancestor, and death made a single circuit — the storm that fed the seed, the seed that fed the living, the living who became the ancestors, the ancestors who passed through the door at Lyobaa — and the urns set that circuit where it could be watched.

Here the registers have to be kept apart, because much of the named theology rests on thin and late ground. The urns, the tombs, the sequence of the phases, the association of the fanged mask with rain — these rest on the archaeology and are not in serious doubt. But the names — Cocijo, Pitao Cozobi, Coqui Bezelao — reach the record chiefly through the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sources, through Córdova’s vocabulary and the later Dominican chronicles, and to fasten a colonial divine name onto a Classic-period urn is an interpretation, not a caption. The excavators who know the material best — Alfonso Caso, Ignacio Bernal, Joyce Marcus, Kent Flannery — have said as much: an urn is an object, and reading a particular god off a particular face is inference, well founded and genuinely contested at once. Across Mesoamerica the same offices were held under other names — the central-Mexican peoples fed a storm-lord they called Tlaloc, and the neighboring Nuu Savi knew the rain as Dzahui, for whom that nation is named — and these are cousins in an office, parallels and not identities. The Cloud People’s sky is their own.

After the mountain

Monte Albán did not fall to an enemy; it dispersed. Through the Late Classic, between roughly 700 and 900 CE, the population that had concentrated on the summit drained back out to the valley floor, monumental building ceased, and the great capital stood as a venerated ruin centuries before either the Aztec or the Spanish came near it. Power did not vanish with it. It devolved to a set of Postclassic centers — Zaachila in the valley, Mitla at the head of the Tlacolula arm, Lambityeco, and others — and into these same centuries the Nuu Savi, the Mixtec, the People of the Rain, pressed east from their western highlands. Zapotec and Mixtec lineages intermarried and contended in the same towns; the fret-worked palaces of Mitla take on a mixed Mixtec-Zapotec character in exactly this period, and one of the emptied Zapotec chambers at Monte Albán, Tomb 7, was reopened for a fabulously rich Mixtec burial. The valley in the Postclassic was a shared and contested country, not a single people’s.

The next pressure came from the north. In the later fifteenth century the Mexica of Tenochtitlan pushed their empire toward the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the corridor between the gulfs, and the Zapotec king of Zaachila, Cosijoeza, met them. He fortified a hilltop stronghold, Guiengola, above the Isthmus, and there — by the account preserved of his reign — Cosijoeza held out against a protracted siege that the emperor Ahuizotl pressed for some seven months around the turn of the sixteenth century. The war ended not in conquest but in a marriage: a daughter of the Mexica ruler was given to the Zapotec king, and the alliance sealed a peace that left the Isthmus in Zapotec hands. The Cloud People entered the sixteenth century still holding their own ground, having fought the greatest power in Mesoamerica to a settlement.

Then the Spanish came. Forces out of the newly fallen Mexica capital reached Oaxaca in 1521 — the valley town that became the colonial city was founded that November — and with the conquest came the campaign against the religion of the Cloud People. It is to be told soberly, as what it was: a religious persecution. The friars burned what they called idols and seized the painted and written calendar books; they broke the sanctuaries, filling and sealing the underworld caverns at Mitla so that the Zapotec could not go back down into them, and raising a church on the sealed platform. The campaign did not end with the first generation. As late as the early eighteenth century the idolatry proceedings centered on Villa Alta, in the Zapotec sierra, gathered up the clandestine ritual calendars and prosecuted the day-keepers who had gone on keeping the count in secret. The vocabulary that drove all of this — idolatry, superstition, devil-worship — is a frame to be named and refused, not adopted: what it called idolatry was a literate people’s thousand-year knowledge of its own sky, and the sharpest irony of the record is that so much of that knowledge survives precisely because the persecutors, needing to identify what they meant to destroy, wrote it down. The Dominican Fray Francisco de Burgoa, whose Geográfica descripción of 1674 gives the fullest early account of Mitla and its underworld, stands exactly at that seam — a describer of what he came to end.

What the friars could not do was end the Cloud People. They are a living nation. Their languages are spoken by numbers approaching half a million in Mexico’s 2020 census, and given higher — commonly between four hundred thousand and six hundred fifty thousand — once the diaspora is counted, across the Valley of Oaxaca, the Sierra Norte and Sierra Sur, and the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and northward into California and beyond. On the Isthmus the Binnizá keep a distinct and vivid life of their own, the towns of Juchitán and Tehuantepec centered on the economic and social authority of their women, the Tehuanas in their gold and embroidered huipiles; in the sierra and the valley the piye is still turned by day-keepers who name children by the day. Monte Albán and the historic center of Oaxaca were inscribed together on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1987, and the leveled mountain now draws its tide of visitors — but for the Be’ena’a it is not a scenic ruin. It is the work of their own hands and the ground of their own dead.

Zapotec women in the gold-and-embroidered Tehuana dress of the Isthmus, dancing the Sandunga at the Guelaguetza in Oaxaca. Photograph by México en Fotos, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.

Set the whole span beside the little slab at San José Mogote and the shape of it comes clear. A people who said they were born from the clouds cut a captive’s name into a floor twenty-five centuries ago, in a script that named days and lords and the towns they had beaten; they raised a city on a mountain they flattened, quartered their sky among four storms, buried the rain around the maize, and kept a door for the dead beneath a hill in the east. Empires broke against them and a church was built on their sealed sanctuary, and the cloud-tongue is still spoken in the valley below the leveled mountain, in as many forms as the branch has had centuries to grow. The Cloud People wrote their sky down, and they are still under it.

→ Related: Cocijo · Pitao Cozobi · Coqui Bezelao · Dzahui · Nine Wind · Monte Alban · Mitla · Apoala · Tilantongo · The Mixtec · The Mixe