173 



that went back to the epocha of a great deluge ; 

 after which their ancestors, led by a chief called 

 I'otan, had come from a country lying toward 

 the north. In the village of Teopixca, there 

 still existed in the sixteenth century descendants 

 of the family of Votan, or Vodan ; for these two 

 names are the same, the Toltecks and the Az- 

 tecks not having the four consonants d, b, r, s, 

 in their language. They who have studied the 

 history of the Scandinavian nations in the heroic 

 times, must be struck at finding in Mexico a 

 name, which recalls that of Wodan or Odin, 

 who reigned among the Scythians, and whose 

 race, according to the very remarkable assertion 

 of Bede*, " gave kings to a great number of 

 nations." 



If it be true, as many learned men have sup- 

 posed, that these same Toltecks, whom pesti- 

 lence, followed by a great drought, had driven 

 from the elevated plain of Anahuac about the 

 middle of the eleventh century of our era, reap- 

 peared in South America as founders of the 

 empire of the Incas, why should not the Peruvi- 

 ans have abandoned their quippus, and adopted 

 the hieroglyphical writing of the Toltecks ? 

 Almost at the same epocha, in the beginning of 

 the twelfth century, a Greenland bishop had 



* Betla, Hist. Eccles. lib. 1, c. 15. Francisco Nunnez de 

 la Vega, Constitutiones Synodales, p. 74. 



