"A very remarkable representation of the ten plagues which God sent on Egypt, occurs in the eleventh and twelfth pages of the Borgian Ms. Moses is there painted, holding up in his left hand his rod, which became a serpent; and, with a furious gesture, calling down the plagues upon the Egyptians. These plagues were frogs, locusts, lice, flies, etc., all of which are represented in the pages referred to; but the last and most dreadful were the thick darkness which overspread Egypt for three days, and the death of the firstborn of the Egyptians.
"The curious symbol of one serpent swallowing up others, likewise occurs in the nineteenth page of the same Ms. It is not extraordinary that the Mexicans, who were acquainted with one portion of the exodus—that relating to the children of Israel journeying from Egypt—should also not have been ignorant of another."
TRADITION OF EVE.
Bernardino de Sahagun, a Franciscan missionary and historian of the sixteenth century, author of "Historia Universal de Nueva Españia, says concerning the Aztec tradition of Eve:
"This woman was the first who existed in the world, and the mother of the whole human race; who was tempted by the serpent who appeared to her in the terrestrial paradise, and discoursed with her, to persuade her to transgress the command of God, and that is likewise true, that after having committed sin, etc., she bore a son and a daughter at the same birth, and that the son was named Cain and the daughter Calmana; and that afterwards she brought forth a second birth, Abel, and his sister Delborah, so that she bore them by twin birth."
Prof. Short, in his "North Americans of Antiquity," page 238, quotes from the native writer, Intellxochitl, as follows:
TRADITION OF THE FLOOD.
"It is found in the histories of the Toltecs, that this age and first world, as they call it, lasted seventeen hundred and sixteen years; then men were destroyed by tremendous rains and lightnings from the sky, and even all the land, without exception of anything, and the highest mountains were covered up and submerged in water 'caxolmoletli' or fifteen cubits, and here they add other fables of how men came to multiply from the few who escaped from this destruction in a toptlipetlacali, this word signifies a close chest."
"No tradition has been more widely spread among nations than that of a Deluge. . . . It was the received notion under some form or other, of the most civilized people in the Old World, and of the barbarians of the New. The Aztecs combined with this some particular circumstances of a more arbitrary character, resembling the accounts of the east. They believed that two persons survived the Deluge, a man named Coxcox and his wife. Their heads are represented in ancient painting, together with a boat floating on the waters at the foot of a mountain. A dove is also depicted, with a hieroglyphical emblem of language in his mouth, which he is distributing to the children of Coxcox, who were born dumb. The neighboring people of Michoacan, inhabiting the same high plains of the Andes, had a still further tradition, that the boat in which Tegpi, their Noah, escaped, was filled with various kinds of animals and birds. After some time, a vulture was sent out from it, but remained feeding on the dead bodies of the giants which had been left on the earth, as the waters subsided. The little humming bird, huitzitzilin, was then set forth, and returned with a twig in his mouth. The coincidence of both these accounts with the Hebrew and Chaldean narratives is obvious."—"Conquest of Mexico," by W. H. Prescott, (pages 463-4).
LED BY YOUNGEST BROTHER.
Fernando Montesinos, the Spanish historian of Peru says of the Peruvians:
"That nation was originated by a people led by four brothers, the youngest of these brothers assumed supreme authority, and became the first of a long line of sovereigns." (See Book of Mormon, Book of Jacob, 1: 9-11).