Cocijo and a State Built on Monte Alban

Zapotec state religion was centered on Monte Alban, the ceremonial and political capital that rose above the Oaxaca Valley in southern Mexico to become one of the largest religious and political centers anywhere in Mesoamerica, construction there beginning as early as the eighth century BCE. Its state cult was built around Cocijo, a lightning and rain god whose favor was vital to an agricultural society dependent on seasonal rainfall, worshipped alongside a wider pantheon governing maize, earthquake and the underworld. Ancestor veneration ran through the whole of Zapotec religious life. Rulers and nobles were interred in elaborately painted tombs beneath their own residences and temples rather than in a separate burial ground, and genealogical registers carved directly into stone recorded royal descent as a standing claim to both religious and political authority, the two never fully separated in Zapotec practice. Zapotec priests also maintained a two hundred and sixty day ritual calendar, the piye, used both to time ceremonies through the year and to read the character of a person born under a given day sign, a calendar shared in its underlying structure across much of ancient Mesoamerica.