mch

THE FOUR MOONS 165
oriented lengthwise approximately from west to east as were
most ancient monuments, to be in line with the sun, and measures
128.40 by 117.70 m. On its western end the temple has a
gallery of eleven stone pillars made of the hardest locally available
stone, andesite. This gallery is placed 4.16 m outside the
western end of the terrace and the pillars erected at unequal intervals
are of varying width. The distance between the axes of
the first and last pillars is 32.70 m and the outward borders of
these two are at 33.30 m from each other. The height of these
stone slabs was about 4 m. Nine of them are erect, leaning about
2 degrees westward, the fifth pillar, counting from south, has
been displaced by about 200 m westward while the tenth has
been toppled over next to its foundation. The sizes and intervals
of these tall stones we will analyze later, determining their astronomical
values.
The north face of the terrace is in poor shape, but can be reconstructed
easily because it is identical to the south side, which
is better preserved. This side has twenty-nine pillars of limestone,
which are more eroded than the andesite pillars on the
west. The length of the stonework terrace on which the temple
was built is divided by these twenty-nine pillars into twentyeight
equal parts of 4.60 m each. The east end of the terrace was
divided into 28 equal parts of 4.20 m each. It is possible that
originally, before the western outside gallery was built, that
that face of the temple was divided into twenty-four equal intervals
of 4.90 m, divided by twenty-five pillars.
All these numbers and divisions sound complicated, but we
will see that every dimension had its reason for being and every
one was a multiple, sometimes with a slight fraction, of the local
foot of 0.297234 m and the cubit of 0.445851 m, or 1V2 local feet.
The cubit was divided into seven hands of 0.063693 m and each
hand divided into four fingers measuring 0.015923 m each. As
can be seen on the god figure carved in the Puerta del Sol, the
gods of Tiahuanaco had only four digits each on their hands and
their feet.
Thus the cubit was equal to twenty-eight fingers, just like the
twenty-eight intervals between the pillars of the north, east, and
south fagades of the temple. The only difference shown by the
length of the intervals themselves was that the east intervals