"It is a very remarkable fact," says M. Alfred Maury, "that we find in America traditions of the Deluge coming infinitely nearer to that of the Bible and the Chaldean religion than among any people of the Old World. It is difficult to suppose that the emigration that certainly took place from Asia into North America by the Kourile and Aleutian islands, and still does so in our day, should have brought in these memories, since no trace is found of them among those Mongol or Siberian populations,[57] which were fused with the natives of the New World.... No doubt certain American nations, the Mexicans and Peruvians, had reached a very advanced social condition at the time of the Spanish conquest, but this civilization had a special character, and seems to have been developed on the soil where it flourished. Many very simple inventions, such as the use of weights, were unknown to these people, and this shows that their knowledge was not derived from India or Japan. The attempts that have been made to trace the origin of Mexican civilization to Asia have not as yet led to any sufficiently conclusive facts. Besides, had Buddhism, which we doubt, made its way into America, it could not have introduced a myth not found in its own Scriptures.[58] The cause of these similarities between the diluvian traditions of the nations of the New World and that of the Bible remains therefore unexplained."
I have particular pleasure in quoting these words by a man of immense erudition, because he does not belong to orthodox writers, and will not therefore be thought biassed by a preconceived opinion. Others also, no less rationalistic than he, have pointed out this likeness between American traditions of the Deluge and those of the Bible and the Chaldeans.
The most important among the former are the Mexican, for they appear to have been definitively fixed by symbolic and mnemonic paintings before any contact with Europeans. According to these documents, the Noah of the Mexican cataclysm was Coxcox, called by certain peoples Teocipactli or Tezpi. He had saved himself, together with his wife Xochiquetzal, in a bark, or, according to other traditions, on a raft, made of cypress wood (Cupressus disticha). Paintings retracing the deluge of Coxcox have been discovered among the Aztecs, Miztecs, Zapotecs, Tlascaltecs, and Mechoacaneses. The tradition of the latter is still more strikingly in conformity with the story as we have it in Genesis and in Chaldean sources. It tells how Tezpi embarked in a spacious vessel with his wife, his children, and several animals, and grain, whose preservation was essential to the subsistence of the human race. When the great god Tezcatlipoca decreed that the waters should retire, Tezpi sent a vulture from the bark. The bird, feeding on the carcases with which the earth was laden, did not return. Tezpi sent out other birds, of which the humming-bird only came back with a leafy branch in its beak. Then Tezpi, seeing that the country began to vegetate, left his bark on the mountain of Colhuacan.
The document, however, that gives the most valuable information as to the cosmogony of the Mexicans is one known as "Codex Vaticanus," from the library where it is preserved. It consists of four symbolic pictures, representing the four ages of the world preceding the actual one. They were copied at Chobula from a manuscript anterior to the conquest, and accompanied by the explanatory commentary of Pedro de los Rios, a Dominican monk, who in 1566, less than fifty years after the arrival of Cortez, devoted himself to the research of indigenous traditions as being necessary to his missionary work.
The first age is marked with the cipher 13×400+6, or 5206, which Alexander von Humboldt understands as giving the number of years of the period, and Abbé Brasseur de Bourbourg as the date of its commencement, from a proleptic era going back from the period of the execution of the manuscript. This age is called Tlatonatiuh, "Sun of Earth." It is that of the giants, or Quinames, the earliest inhabitants of Anahuac, whose end was destruction by famine.
The number of the second age is 12×400+4, or 4804, and it is called Tlatonatiuh, "Sun of Fire." It closes with the descent on Earth of Xiuhteuchli, the god of fire. Mankind are all transformed into birds, and only thus escape the conflagration. Nevertheless, one human pair find refuge in a cave, and repeople the world.
As to the third age, Ehécatonatiuh, "Sun of Wind," its number is 10×400+10, or 4010. Its final catastrophe is a terrible hurricane raised by Quetzalcoatl, the "god of the air." With few exceptions, men are metamorphosed into monkeys.
Then comes the fourth age, Atonatiuh, "Sun of Water," whose number is 10×400+8, or 4008. It ends by a great inundation, a veritable deluge. All mankind are changed into fish, with the exception of one man and his wife, who save themselves in a bark made of the trunk of a cypress-tree. The picture represents Matlalcueye, goddess of waters, and consort of Tlaloc, god of rain, as darting down towards earth. Coxcox and Xochiquetzal, the two human beings preserved, are seen seated on a tree-trunk and floating in the midst of the waters. This flood is represented as the last cataclysm that devastates the earth.
All this is most important, as a mind of the order of Humboldt's did not hesitate to acknowledge. However, M. Girard de Realle wrote quite recently:
"The myth of the deluge has been met with in several parts of America, and Christian writers have not failed to see in it a reminiscence of the Biblical tradition, nay, in connection with the pyramid of Chobula, they have found traces of the Tower of Babel. We shall not waste time in pointing out how out of a fish-god, Coxcox, among the Chichimecs, Teocipactli among the Aztecs, and a goddess of flowers, Xochiquetzal, it was easy to concoct the Mexican figures of Noah and his wife by joining on to them the story of the ark and the dove. It is enough to observe that all these legends have only been collected and published at a relatively recent period.[59] The first chroniclers, so cautious already despite their honest simplicity, such as Sahagun, Mendieta, Olmos, and the Hispano-indigenous authors, such as the Tezcucan Ixthilxochitl and the Tlascaltec Camargo, never breathe a word of stories they could not have failed to bring to light, had they existed in their days. Lastly, we find in Mr. Bancroft's[60] work a criticism of these legends, due to Don José Fernando Ramirez, keeper of the National Museum, which proves incontestably that all these stories spring from all too ready and tendency-fraught interpretations of old Mexican paintings, which according to him only represent episodes in the migration of Aztecs around the central lakes of the plateau of Anahuac."