135 
column. The Peruvians were acquainted with 
gnomonic observations. They had a peculiar 
veneration for the columns erected in the city of 
Quit03 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 suhuza, 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, guesoy 
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, oceques^ 
in masks like the Egyptian priests, followed the 
victim. Some represented Bochica, who is the 
Osiris, or the Mithras, of Bogota, and to whom 
X 
* On a carved stone found at Chapultepec. See Gama 
Descripcion cron, de dos Piedras, page 100, 
