12 MONUMENTS OF ANCIENT PERU. 



customs were first regulated ? To those ages in which the lyre, 

 and the sweet harmony of vocal sounds, subdued the ferocious 

 tyger, tamed the enraged lion, and softened the obdurate 

 rocks ? A philosophical poet denied the eternity of the world, 

 solely on this account, that, prior to the Theban war, and 

 the destru6lion of Troy, no poems or monuments were to be 

 found, to hand down the remembrance of those remarkable 

 events which fame is wont to record, and which illustrate all 

 ages*. But in succeeding times, and in the nations which pos- 

 sessed the art of writing in all its perfeclion, the want of the 

 press to renew the leaves which the moth or the corroding hand 

 of time had destroyed, has rendered archeology, or the study 

 of antiquities, indispensable, to fill up the chasms they have 

 left, or to comment on the fables they have transmitted to us. 

 In re6tifying chronology and history, how useful has been the 

 examination of the hieroglyphics and enigmas of the supersti- 

 tious Egyptians, the ruins of Palmyra, the odes and descrip- 

 tions of the Greeks, the busts and pyramids of Rome, &c. 



This subject, as it relates to Peru, acquires a new degree of 

 value and interest. At the time of its conquest, the archives of 

 Cuzco, Caxamarca, and Quito, were lost for ever. The fragile 

 Quipos are now reduced to dust ; and the tradition of the me- 

 morable events of the kingdom having by degrees become less 

 and less perfe6t, through the ignorance and carelessness of 

 those to whose charge it was entrusted, the observer is obliged 

 to recur to the comparison, or, as it may be said, to the in- 

 terpretation of the ancient fragments and ruins, to complete 

 the imperfe6t pi6lure of this ancient empire, as it has been 



* Lucretii, lib. v. ver. 325. 



sketched 



