“I saw one in a museum in Mexico City. They are rare, but not unheard of. This codex was very well-preserved.” She looked at the writing on the top half of the pages. The characters were very square-like, while the figures on the bottom of the pages resembled organized chicken scratches written in black and red.
“You translated some of this?” she said, shooting her eyes up.
“A little over halfway through as you can see,” Porter said, motionless.
“Halfway. When did you start?”
“As soon as I got the codex.” Porter jumped to his feet. He took two books from his desk and added them to an apparently orderless pile against the wall on Alred’s right. Immediately he started fishing for another volume. “I couldn’t make a bit of it out right away, but Kinnard thought he could read some of it.” He found his book and sat back down with an explosion of metallic cricket sounds.
“Kinnard’s an Orientalist.”
“So am I, Alred.” Porter couldn’t understand why she wouldn’t accept the Mesoamerican connection with the ancient Old World as Albright had described in his paper. “You know that.”
“And you can read ancient Mayan?” she said, lifting a brown eyebrow.
Porter looked at the codex. “Is that what it is?” He opened the book he’d found and started rummaging through the pages with two wild hands. “I suspected a correlation with the Maya, but when I looked up their script, I thought it didn’t match well enough.”
“You’re not a Central American archaeologist,” said Alred, turning the delicate pages of KM-2.
“Please don’t lose my spot,” Porter said, one of his hands leaping from his book.
Alred found an envelope on the edge of his desk, which she gently used as a bookmark. Before turning the page again, she glanced at five hand-written letters above the address on the envelope: FARMS. She held up the white paper for a moment. “What’s this. You’re a farmer on the side?”
“Forever harvesting new levels of knowledge,” Porter grinned as she put it back and turned the page. The word was an obvious acronym, but he didn’t want to explain it at present.
Alred tightened her eyes. “I thought you said you’d translated-”
“The bottom half of the codex,” said Porter, standing up again, one finger jammed in the volume he held. “What language might that be?”
Alred squinted at the letters, as if it helped her to think, and tilted her head to the left. “Mmmm…proto-Mayan, maybe? The language of a sister group small and fortunate enough to have evaded archaeologists until now?”
“Possibly,” Porter said. He came to her side-pushing her away with his smell-and opened his book before her eyes.
“That looks different,” she said.
“Only as different as the Mayan on the top half of the codex pages and the Mayan I found in the Stratford Library.”
Alred examined the letters in the hard-bound volume, comparing them to the characters on the lower half of the ancient page in her hands.
“This is a facsimile of a document written in a language scholars now call Meroitic. It dates to approximately 600 BC, and is closely related to Egyptian Demotic from the same time period,” Porter said.
Alred forgot about his odor. “You can read this Meroitic?”
“Well,” Porter said, setting the book on his desk and returning sluggishly to his seat. He landed in his chair with a thud and another irritating squeal. “I’m a little slow going, but…yes.”
“Would you please stop doing that,” Alred said, closing her eyes. Her head was obviously throbbing. Either that, or the ideas she was hearing made her want an excuse for a pain reliever.
“What,” said Porter, trying to prop his feet on his desk. He didn’t have much room between his table and the wall and so had to rest the heels of his running shoes on the corner of the desktop.
“Never mind,” Alred said.
“You know…reading KM-2…is easier than translating Meroitic Egyptian.”
Alred stared at him. “It should be C M-2.”
“What?”
“Kalpa should be spelled with a C. I know of no village that starts with a K in Central America,” she said.
He dropped his heels to where they belonged and leaned forward, still unaware of his screaming chair. “Meroitic was developed by a group of people fleeing Jerusalem around the year 600, as I said. The language is a mixture of two Egyptian scripts: Demotic and its mother, Hieratic. Hieratic is simply a shorthand version of the famous Hieroglyphs everyone thinks of when picturing Egypt.”
Alred pointed at the bark page. “You’re saying this is a form of Meroitic?”
Porter shook his head. “Not really. It’s a twist on a Demotic/Hieratic style; kind of a sister to the Meroitic language.”
Alred sat up. “If I’m following you correctly, Porter, you’re saying these ancient Mesoamericans living in Highland Guatemala wrote in an Egyptian language.”
“Of a sort,” Porter said.
“That’s why Kinnard could read this,” she said.
“Well he could and he couldn’t.”
“That sounds scientific,” said Alred, reaching up to wipe her brow. The stickiness was probably growing under her arms as well, and whether or not the headache had ever truly come, Porter could tell she wanted to leave. “You know, Porter, I hate to say this, but it sounds like you’re not proving your Book of Mormon true. I understood you believe Jews settled in Central America.”
“Kinnard had difficulty understanding what he was reading because while he recognized it, he didn’t.” He realized that sounded stupid so he rubbed his mouth with his wet fingertips and started again. “The writing is clearly of Egyptian origin…but it has distinctly Hebraic attributes.”
“What?”
“Moses Maimonides, one of the greatest rabbis and Jewish philosophers of the late twelfth century, worked for a time as a court physician in Cairo. He recorded his thoughts in what may seem to be a peculiar way. His book is quite famous: The Guide for the Perplexed.”
“Sounds like the book we need,” said Alred.
“The language was Arabic,” Porter said with a sniff, “but he used the Hebrew alphabet.”
“He mixed up his languages on purpose?” said Alred, unsure of whether she understood Porter right. Of course it wouldn’t make sense to the casual student, but this was business, so she had to understand.
“Actually, it is not uncommon to find such crossovers in history,” Porter said.
She lifted her eyebrows.
“I have read of Arabic texts scribbled in Coptic characters. There is also the London Magical Papyrus, and then Papyrus Anastasi I, and then other Hebrew works penned in Arabic writing. Papyrus Amherst 63 confused Egyptologists for years until they realized the demotic script formed sentences in the Aramaic language. There are plenty of examples from the earliest times to this very day!”
“Give me an illustration outside of the Near East.”
Porter lifted a hand. “You are probably aware that there’s a lot of French-Latin out in the world-I don’t mean French derived from Latin, but a form of pseudo-Latin. It was written by people who tried to use the language of the well-schooled, but ending up blending their own speech with their writing. Like the folk in the middle ages who wanted to write in illustrious Latin, which was seen as more prestigious than their own language. Whoever wrote our codex, scribed words in the characters of the learned Egyptians while most of the lingo was Hebrew.”
Silent, Alred let it soak in.
“In other words,” Porter said, “KM-2 was written by someone schooled in Egypt, who was a native of Palestine…or one of this man’s descendants. It is well-known that distinguished people studied in Egypt during in the fifth and sixth centuries BC. Many famous Greeks did it. I could start dropping names. Socrates, Pythagoras-”
“Please. Don’t,” Alred said with an uplifted hand. “I read a year ago that Rameses III was the Father of Ancient America. The book was full of evidence suggesting connections between Central America and Egypt.”