The Mexican deluge was caused by the “water sun”, which suddenly discharged the moisture it had been drawing from the earth in the form of vapour through long ages.  All life was destroyed.

A flood legend among the Nahua tribes resembles closely the Babylonian story as told by Pir-napishtim.  The god Titlacahuan instructed a man named Nata to make a boat by hollowing out a cypress tree, so as to escape the coming deluge with his wife Nena.  This pair escaped destruction.  They offered up a fish sacrifice in the boat and enraged the deity who visited them, displaying as much indignation as did Bel when he discovered that Pir-napishtim had survived the great disaster.  Nata and Nena had been instructed to take with them one ear of maize only, which suggests that they were harvest spirits.

In Brazil, Monan, the chief god, sent a great fire to burn up the world and its wicked inhabitants.  To extinguish the flames a magician caused so much rain to fall that the earth was flooded.

The Californian Indians had a flood legend, and believed that the early race was diminutive; and the Athapascan Indians of the north-west professed to be descendants of a family who escaped the deluge.  Indeed, deluge myths were widespread in the “New World”.

The American belief that the first beings who were created were unable to live on earth was shared by the Babylonians.  According to Berosus the first creation was a failure, because the animals could not bear the light and they all died.[232] Here we meet with the germs of the Doctrine of the World’s Ages, which reached its highest development in Indian, Greek, and Celtic (Irish) mythologies.

The Biblical account of the flood is familiar to readers.  “It forms”, says Professor Pinches, “a good subject for comparison with the Babylonian account, with which it agrees so closely in all the main points, and from which it differs so much in many essential details."[233]

The drift of Babylonian culture was not only directed westward towards the coast of Palestine, and from thence to Greece during the Phoenician period, but also eastward through Elam to the Iranian plateau and India.  Reference has already been made to the resemblances between early Vedic and Sumerian mythologies.  When the “new songs” of the Aryan invaders of India were being composed, the sky and ocean god, Varuna, who resembles Ea-Oannes, and Mitra, who links with Shamash, were already declining in splendour.  Other cultural influences were at work.  Certain of the Aryan tribes, for instance, buried their dead in Varuna’s “house of clay”, while a growing proportion cremated their dead and worshipped Agni, the fire god.  At the close of the Vedic period there were fresh invasions into middle India, and the “late comers” introduced new beliefs, including the doctrines of the Transmigration of Souls and of the Ages of the Universe.  Goddesses also rose into prominence, and the Vedic gods became minor deities, and subject