We describe explicitly the Voevodsky's triangulated category of motives (and give a ‘differential graded enhancement’ of it). This enables us to able to verify that DMgm ℚ is (anti)isomorphic to Hanamura's (k).

We obtain a description of all subcategories (including those of Tate motives) and of all localizations of . We construct a conservative weight complex functor ; t gives an isomorphism . A motif is mixed Tate whenever its weight complex is. Over finite fields the Beilinson–Parshin conjecture holds if and only if tℚ is an equivalence.

For a realization D of we construct a spectral sequence S (the spectral sequence of motivic descent) converging to the cohomology of an arbitrary motif X. S is ‘motivically functorial’; it gives a canonical functorial weight filtration on the cohomology of D(X). For the ‘standard’ realizations this filtration coincides with the usual one (up to a shift of indices). For the motivic cohomology this weight filtration is non-trivial and appears to be quite new.

We define the (rational) length of a motif M; modulo certain ‘standard’ conjectures this length coincides with the maximal length of the weight filtration of the singular cohomology of M.