172 SOUTH AMKEICA— THE ANDES EEGIONS. 



the division of the people into exclusive social castes. Of these the first was that 

 of the priests, at once magicians, medicine-men, judges, and executioners. Then 

 came the warriors, who during peace were charged with the functions of police 

 and the collection of the taxes. The third and fourth classes comprised the traders 

 with the artisans and the peasantry, who in time of war were held to military 

 service as simple soldiers, incapable of rising to the rank of chiefs. A fifth class 

 included the nomads, for the most part conquered tribes, differing from the 

 Muyscas in speech and usages. 



Private property was established on a very solid base. Defaulting debtors 

 were condemned to pay double the amount, and the creditor, if a person of distinc- 

 tion, sent a tame bear or jaguar to the house of his client, who had to feed both the 

 animal and its keeper till the debt was discharged in full ; otherwise his hearth was 

 quenched with water, and he himself enslaved. Robbers lost their eyes, either 

 burnt out by means of red-hot metal plates, or, in case of serious theft, torn out 

 with thorns. The penalties imposed on the lower orders were always of a nature 

 to enrich their betters, while the upper classes, regarded as men of honour, 

 more sensible to disgrace than to torment, were simply degraded. They received 

 names usually reserved for outcasts, their hair was cropped, their clothes torn, 

 and at times they were sentenced to be whipped by their wives. 



Although the industries were fairly well developed, these Indians had no 

 knowledge of iron, and made their agricultural implements of wood or stone ; 

 hence the ground could be properly tilled only in very wet seasons, so that pro- 

 longed droughts were inevitably followed by famine. On the plateaux little was 

 cultivated except maize, potatoes, and chcnopodiuni qninoa, a goosefoot yielding 

 edible seeds ; lower down, but still in the temperate zone, manioc and arracacha 

 were the staple products. 



Thanks to their copious salt-springs and rich gold-mines, the Muyscas were 

 able to procure abundant supplies from the inhabitants of the plains, with whom 

 they traded far and wide. The chief market was held in the upper Magdalena 

 valley, in the territory of the Poincos (Yaporogos), not far from the present town 

 of Neiva. In their commercial transactions the Muyscas made use of a gold 

 currency in the form of cast discs, an almost solitary instance of a metal coinage 

 properly so called amongst the aborigines of the New World. 



The Muyscas were tolerably skilful workers in gold, which they wrought into 

 grotesque little figures of men, frogs, and other animals, thousands of which are 

 preserved in the museums of Europe and America, despite the wholesale destruc- 

 tion of these objects by the iconoclastic missionaries of the sixteenth and seven- 

 teenth centuries, who supposed them to be consecrated to demon worship. They 

 also executed carvings in relief on hard stones, and in the collections may be seen 

 four- and five-sided slabs of basalt, with symbolical figures in which some archaeo- 

 logists have recognised the signs of the calendar. 



But although their territory abounded in minerals of all kinds gold was the 

 only metal they had learnt to extract and work. One of their most highly 

 developed industries was weaving, their looms producing an extremely durable 



