The Zapotec are a Mesoamerican Indian people living in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. They speak a number of mutually unintelligible dialects of the Zapotecan language. In the early 1970s they numbered more than 3000,000 pepole. The ancestors of the zapotec created one of the great civilizations of ancient Mexico, with its supreme capital at the hill top metropolis of Monte Alban, close to present-day Oaxaca City.
The site was founded by people who where already urbanized and who left behind the oldest dated hieroglyphic inscriptions yet discovered in Mesoamerica. By AD 300 a disinctively Zapotec pattern of culture had emmerged. Between 300 and 900 the city reached its zenith, with numerous temples and painted tombs containing fuerary urns shaped like Zapotec gods. At the time, the city may have had up to 66,000 inhabitants.
Although never completely abandoned, Monte Alban declined after 800, and Zapotec culture continued to thrive only in the smaller towns. After most of the Valley of Oaxaca fell to Mixtec invaders in the 13th or 14th century, the center of Zapotecpower shifted southward to Mitla and the Isthmus of Tehantepec. The entire Valley of Oaxaca was eventually incorporated into the expanding Aztec empire, but the Zapotec of tehuantepec mainained their independence until the Spanish conquest.
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