"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.