135 



column. The Peruvians were acquainted with 

 gnomonic observations. They had a peculiar 

 veneration for the columns erected in the city of 

 Quito, because the Sun, as they asserted, " placed 

 himself directly on their summits, and the shadows 

 of the gnomon there were shorter than those in 

 the rest of the empire of the Inca." Might not 

 the piles and columns of the Muyscas, figured in 

 several of their sculptures, have served in the 

 same manner to mark the length of the equi- 

 noxial and solstitial shadows ? This supposition 

 is so much the more probable, as, among the ten 

 signs of the months we twice find, in the ciphers 

 ta and suhaza, a cord added to a stake ; and as the 

 Mexicans were certainly acquainted with the 

 use of the linear gnomon *. 



At the time of the celebration of the sacrifice, 

 which marked the opening of a new indiction, 

 or of a cycle of fifteen years, the victim, guesa, 

 was led in procession by the suna, which gave its 

 name to the lunar month, toward the column that 

 appears to have served to measure the solstitial 

 or equinoxial shadows, and the passages of the 

 Sun through the zenith. The priests, xeques^ 

 in masks like the Egyptian priests, followed the 

 victim. Some represented Bochica, who is the 

 Osiris, or the Mithras, of Bogota, and to whom 



* On a carved stone found at Chapultepec. See Gama ? 

 Descripcion croii. de dos Piedras, page 100. 



