As to the names _Cain_, _Set_, _Sougriva_, _Aac_, they all convey the idea of something belonging to or having affinity with water.
_Cain_, by apocope, gives _Cay_, the Maya word for "fish."
_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.