What makes these felines singular within the pictorial corpus of Teotihuacan is not just their quality of execution or their state of preservation—remarkable after 15 centuries. What makes this mural distinctive is that it condenses in a single image several of the fundamental principles of the city's social and cosmological organization: sacrifice as a means of sustaining the cosmos, the feline as a representative of the Sun, the throne as an object of power, and architectural orientation as a declaration of function. Each of these elements exists elsewhere at the site, but here they appear together, in a neighborhood building—which confirms something Teotihuacan archaeology has been demonstrating with each new excavation: that the city's symbolic language was not the exclusive property of its great temples, but was distributed throughout its urban fabric, present at every scale.