Set is a cognate word of the Maya Ze, to ill-treat with blows. Can a name be more appropriate to designate one who has killed his brother with three thrusts of his spear; and his sister by kicking her to death, as Aac is represented doing by the author of the Troano MS.?
Set, after being treated with the same honor as the other members of the family of Seb, came to be regarded as the Evil principle and was called Nubti, that is, according to the Maya language, the adversary, from nup adversary and ti for. He also was the Sun God, the enemy of the serpent. Here again we have a most singular resemblance, to say the least. Aac, in the sculptures of Mayax, is always pictured surrounded by the sun as his protecting genius; while the serpent, emblem of the country, always shields Coh and his sister-wife within its folds. The escutcheon of the city of Uxmal shows that the title of that metropolis was the "Land of the Sun." In the bas-reliefs of the queen's chamber at Chichen, the followers of Aac are seen to render homage to the Sun; the friends of Moo to the serpent. So in Mayax as in Egypt, the Sun and the Serpent were inimical. In Egypt this enmity was a myth; in Mayax a dire reality.
The hippopotamus and the crocodile were emblems of Set. Plutarch says "that at Hermopolis there was a statue of Set, which was a hippopotamus with a hawk upon its back fighting with a serpent." Both the hippopotamus and the crocodile are amphibious animals, having consequently much affinity with water.
Aac, in Maya, is the name for the turtle, also an amphibious animal.
The name Sougriva, of the brother of Bâli, is a word composed of three Maya primitives, zuc, lib, ha, zuc, quiet, tranquil; lib, to ascend, and ha, water—"He who tranquilly rises on the water" as the turtle does.
The universal deluge is another tradition of the early days that was credited by certain civilized nations of antiquity.
The Egyptian priests who, from times immemorial, had kept in the archives of the temples a faithful account of all events worthy of being remembered, derided the Greek philosophers when they spoke of the deluge of Deucalion and the destruction of the human race. Their answer was that as they had been preserved from it the inundation could not have been universal; they even added that the Hellenes were childish in attaching so much importance to that event, as there had been several other local catastrophes resembling it. They told Solon that the greatest cataclysm on record in their books was that during which Atlantis disappeared under the waves of the ocean, in one day and night, in consequence of violent earthquakes and volcanic eruptions; that from that time all communications between their people and the inhabitants of the "Lands of the West" had become interrupted; the occurrence having taken place 9,000 years before his visit to Egypt.
An account of that fearful event was also preserved by the learned men of Mayax who give of it a description identical with that given by the Egyptians. Nearly all the nations living on the western continent have kept the tradition of it, but they do not pretend that all mankind was destroyed.
In Mayax the learned priests caused a relation of it to be carved in intaglio on the stone that forms the lintel over the interior doorway in the rooms on the south side of their college. The building is known to this day by the name of Akab-ↄib, the dark, or terrible writing.
The author of the Troano MS., a work, I have already said, on geology, dedicates several pages at the beginning of the second part to the recital of that fearful cataclysm, and the phenomena which then took place. This leaves no longer room for doubting that a large continent existed in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, and which was destroyed within the memory of man; and that the narrative by Plato of the submersion of Atlantis is, in the main, correct. The Maya author represents the lost land by the figure of a black man with red lips, which would imply that it was mostly inhabited by a race of black men. In this case, the presence of black-skinned populations on the Western continent, anterior to the advent of the Spaniards, would be easily accounted for. The Mayas like the Egyptians, represented the world as an old man. Plutarch says they called East the face, North the right side, South the left side; this conception has reached our days, only we reckon the East as the right hand, West the left, North the face.