For ourselves, we can entertain no doubt that this is a cosmic myth. Mama Ogllo, or "the mother egg," and Manco Capac, or "the mighty man," are two creators. The myth indicates that there existed an ancient solar priesthood on one of the islands or on the shores of the Lake of Titicaca (at an early date the focus of a certain civilization), and that this priestly family became at a given period the ruling power at Cuzco. It was thence that it radiated over the small states which surrounded Cuzco, embracing them one after another under its prestige and its power, until it had become the redoubtable dynasty that we know it. Manco Capac and Mama Ogllo, the creator and the cosmic egg, have become the Sun and Moon, represented by their Inca high-priest and his wife. There is no practice towards which a more wide-spread tendency exists in America than that of conferring the name of a deity on his chief priest. And if Garcilasso fixes the appearance of Manco Capac at about 1000 A.D., it is simply because the historical recollections of his family mounted no higher, and that about that time it began to rise out of its obscurity. It had the advantage of numbering in its royal line both successful warriors and, what is more, consummate politicians, instances of whose ability we have already seen and shall see again. The point at which the legend preserved by Garcilasso is clearly at fault, is in its claim for the Incas as the first and only civilizers of Peru. We shall presently meet with other Peruvian myths of civilization which do not stand in the least connection with Manco Capac and the Incas. The kingdom of Quito, which the Inca Huayna Capac had recently conquered when the Spaniards arrived, though not on the same level as Peru proper, was far removed from the savage state, while as yet a stranger to the influence of the Incas. The country of the Muyscas, the present New Granada or land of Bogota, though standing in no connection with Peru, was the theatre of another sacerdotal and solar religion _sui generis_, which, though very little known, is highly interesting. The valley of the Rimac, or Lima, and the coast lands in general, were likewise centres of a pre-Inca civilization. The Chimus especially, themselves dwellers on the coast, were possessed of an original civilization differing from that of the Incas. They were the last to be conquered. To sum up, everything leads us to suppose that various centres of social development had long existed, up and down the whole region, but that, under the presiding genius of the priesthood of Manco Capac, the civilization of Cuzco had gradually acquired the preponderance, till it consecutively eclipsed and absorbed all the others.