Michael rolled the paper around in his mouth, as if sampling a fine wine, then turned and spat on the floor.
“Oh, really …” began Galen.
“Sorry,” said Michael. “It was turning nasty. At least we know, now—the paper is definitely Tibetan.”
“And you know this how?” asked Jude.
“Arsenic,” replied Michael. “Tibetan paper is sturdy—it won’t decay easily—and generally poisonous, because it’s usually treated with an arsenic-like substance that prevents it from being damaged by mildew or hungry insects with good taste in books. As a matter of fact, I’ll give even odds that if any of us spends too much time looking at this thing in a closed room, we’ll have a screamer of a headache before long.”
“Yes,” said Galen. “I’d wondered about the smell.”
Jude refilled his coffee and sat back in the couch. “I’m interested in how you knew that a taste of Arsenic indicated the paper’s origin.”
“Well, when I’m in the field, there are usually budgetary restraints that must be adhered to,” said Michael, spreading his hands in explanation, and apparently not noticing the suddenly upraised eyebrow of the Vice-Rector sitting next to him, “and I have to be able to make judgement calls without the benefit of extensive—and expensive—testing. A lot of priceless documents have been lost to poachers and accidents because of delays needed for identification. Conversely, a lot of dreck has been purchased with the use of scholarly funds that could have been left in the dust if a few more researchers had been inclined to taste and spit. And incidentally,” he added, turning to look at Galen directly, “I never spend money for dreck.”
Galen met his eyes and nodded slightly, a respectful underscoring of the unspoken subtext—Michael was not the spendthrift many at the University believed him to be, and he knew that whatever their shared interest in this document, Galen was evaluating him as a researcher.
He is good at this, Galen realized with a start; and he might be good enough to be worth what he costs. He made a mental note to reschedule the Rector’s evaluation of the Visiting Professor of Ancient Literature and Historical Studies—at worst, the gesture would keep him around long enough to pick apart the Prime Edda, and Galen was beginning to feel that notations aside, he would not get far with the book without the help of the gangly professor.
As Galen mused over the odd situation he found himself in, Michael continued his analysis. “Most European books and manuscripts utilized only one side of the paper. Tibetan block-printed books, especially those of great antiquity, consist of separate, and often very long sheets of paper printed on both sides …”— as both Galen and Jude could see when Michael lifted the first page, setting it to the left of the stack—“… and each sheet usually bears the abbreviated title of the work, the chapter and volume, and the page number in the margin.”
“I don’t see anything like that on the sheets,” Galen said, peering over his arms.
“I think that’s because this is not written as the Tibetans normally wrote. A Westerner wrote this, and was mixing …” he squinted more closely at the text, “… Yes, he was mixing the Skaldic and Eddic forms, and so there were no benchmarks for the block cutters with which to indicate anything about the work. They simply didn’t know what to do with the forms themselves.
“The printed sheets are stacked one on top of the other, wrapped in a cloth, and then tied tightly between two covers made from some kind of wood …”— again gesturing to the pages on the desk—“… although in the case of a particularly special work, or one produced in several volumes, a strip of material with a protective flap of decorative brocade, that indicates the volume and title, is also included. It’s generally placed between the cloth wrapping so that it can hang loosely from the narrow edge of the text, making it ready for accessible cataloguing and easy storage on library shelves.”
Michael carefully removed the cover boards and began unwrapping the linen. “As with the margin note, I don’t really expect to find this …” He stopped, eyes crinkling. “Hm,” he mused. “There is a marker, here …” He looked at it a moment more, when suddenly his eyes grew wide and he swore softly under his breath.
“What? What is it?” asked Galen.
Michael looked up at him, then at Jude. “Did you know about this, Jude? About the marker?”
Jude shrugged noncommittally. “You’re the expert.”
“What is it?” Galen said, crowding alongside Michael next to the small coffee table. “What does the marker say?”
“I can’t be entirely certain,” said Michael, “because it’s in Tibetan, rather than Icelandic, apparently added by the block-makers rather than the author—but it says that this is the second to last of an eighteen-volume set.”
In one motion, the two men looked at each other, then at Jude, who seemed pensive. “That may be true,” he began, “the particular grouping from which I took this volume could have contained that quantity. They were arranged by age in descending order, and as this was the last one in the batch, I’m assuming it’s also the youngest of the volumes.”
Michael and Galen’s jaws moved, but no sounds came forth. They were stunned into a stupor. First the Vice-Rector then the Historian collapsed into chairs on either side of the table which bore the apparently not-so-unique book.
After a protracted silence, Michael spoke. “You’re going to have to explain that one, Jude, and in great detail.”
“Agreed,” put in Galen. “I’m as used to fantastic tales as he is—and just as astute at recognizing when they’re about to collapse into farce.”
Jude dipped his head with a regal slowness. An expression of arrogance, Michael wondered? An acceptance of a challenge? Or merely an acknowledgement of the incredulity of the story he had yet to share?
“As I said,” Jude began, his voice smooth and unstressed, “it appeared to be the youngest of the volumes; youngest by quite a wide margin, actually. If there were eighteen in all, as the marker seems to indicate, then it was perhaps mis-shelved—there’s no way to know—although the markings on the shelves, the remnants of some rudimentary archiving system, indicated that they were grouped in subsets of about twenty, all of which comprised a much larger set of approximately more than six hundred thousand volumes.”
Michael nearly sat up with a derisive snort of laughter. “Uh-huh. The stories in the Eddas were set down anywhere from the ninth century to the fourteenth, and covered periods almost as long. To estimate that the book you brought us is the most recent of even a thousand volumes is a supremely naive sentiment.”
“That is itself a supremely naive sentiment, Professor Langbein,” said Jude, “considering your own education and inclinations. As ancient documents go, the Prime Edda is only a moderate contender, if a uniquely interesting one—and it’s quite possibly older than the codexes which are widely known. Take the Bible, for instance—there’s one for you. It has within it a close approximation of what Westerners consider to be the first six thousand years of civilized human history—and yet, other than several crumbly tomes of questionable lineage and a scattering of parchment found in shepherd’s caves, there is no traceable proof. And yet, if all of the writings from the period covered were somehow maintained, undamaged and unaltered, just how many volumes do you think they would fill?”
“Are we talking historical writings, or religious ones?”
“What’s the difference? Was Jesus a religious or an historical figure? If I teach a history course involving events dating to the fourth century, just whose birthdate do you think initiated the scale that provided the dates?”
“I see your point,” Michael conceded. “You said there were perhaps seventeen to twenty books other than the Prime Edda…?”
“Yes. Of the set, I was only able to peruse the first seven in ascending order of age, and this was the only one in Icelandic—or German.”
“How were you able to do more than give them a cursory glance,” asked Michael, “given that they were all probably
written in languages either dead or unfamiliar to you?”
“Obviously, I would be unable to actually translate, but my studies and my travels have given me enough of a general grounding in language to glean at least a smattering of information from a number of languages I may not be familiar with.”
“Okay,” said Michael. “We’ll give you that one, for the moment. Why did you only look at the first seven?”
“Because,” said Jude, “after that, there were too few markers with which to extrapolate syntax from the languages I didn’t know.”
“Extrapolate syntax? You were learning languages as you translated? Wouldn’t it have been easier to make some sort of copies and compare them?”
“Sure,” said Jude, “if you’re dealing with existing languages—which I wasn’t. After a certain point, there was nothing recognizable to them, and I had to extrapolate, and in a few cases, invent, what I could from the available material.”
“Invent?” gasped Michael. “How old were the books?”
“It’s difficult to say, though a reverse review of the first seven gave me a rough time frame, and extrapolation of common linguistic elements found in decreasing quantities in the others allowed me to estimate a thumbnail projection of their historical coverage.”
Michael coughed. “How … how long?”
“Around two million years, give or take. And that’s not counting the Gregorians.”
Galen merely raised an eyebrow, but Michael looked as if he’d been shot. Jude would have laughed at the expression on the historian’s face if it hadn’t been one he was entirely prepared to receive. “Shall I go on?”
“Please.”
“The next youngest volume, speaking of things Biblical, was written in Aramaic, and was a Judaically-contemporary copy of the five books of the Law; the Pentateuch of the Hebrew Bible, which everyone supposes was written by Moses.”
“It wasn’t?”
“Oh, actually it was,” said Jude brightly, “but the volume I saw was approximately forty percent longer than the most exhaustively-interpreted set of scripture—and most of the excess material was pre-Adamic.”
“How could it be pre-Adamic? What in any interpretation of the Bible would allow for that?”
“You see the paradox,” said Jude, “and you’re once again confusing history and religion. Moses wasn’t writing for publication—he was writing for posterity. This was the one thing Jesus had down pat—if you’re going to teach, you’re better off creating parables, and leave history to the historians. If any version of this material actually made it through the centuries to the Jewish Elders or the Vatican, it’s not hard to see that neither group would have benefited from a public proclamation that Adam not only had a father, but was also sixth son in a family of eleven.”
“Adam wasn’t the first man, then.”
“He wasn’t anyway—unless you want to tell the Chinese that their migration patterns are off by a thousand years,” said Jude. “But I digress. I should continue.
“The third and fourth volumes predated Moses, and were indistinct in terms of a chronological frame of reference; they were in Akkadian …”
“You’ve lost me,” Galen admitted.
On cue, Michael spoke up. “Akkadian is the oldest known member of the family of Semitic languages, which succeeded Sumerian as the common tongue of Mesopotamia. It was spoken by the Babylonians and Assyrians for nearly two thousand years.”
“Well said. The text was written in the cuneiform script invented by the Sumerians, and constituted the history of a tribe of giants which dominated the landscape from the Tigris-Euphrates Valley up to what is now the Afghani Desert.”
“Interesting. What happened to the giants?”
Was there a brief hesitation before answering? Michael couldn’t be sure.
“I don’t know,” said Jude, “The volumes were quite far apart, but both were written early in the culture’s rise. Where they went to is a mystery not likely to be solved without more specific text from the era.”
“I have only two problems with this,” said Michael. “The Sumerians wrote with a stylus on wet clay tablets—doesn’t it seem logical that if the books you saw were authentic, that they’d have been written in the same way, on clay instead of paper? And as much as I can believe that your travels could allow you to fudge a working knowledge of ancient Semitic languages, I can’t believe that you’d have had the same exposure to cuneiform.”
“The book you and Professor Galen are hovering over wasn’t written or printed in any manner previously known to Sturluson, Wagner, or Liszt, yet you are more than eager to believe in its authenticity as a chronicle of Norse poetry. And as to the pictographically-based language skills—I think my position at the University as head of the Mathematics Department should be confirmation enough of my ability to comprehend signs.”
“Well, I’m not convinced about the book—not yet,” said Galen, quite unconvincingly.
“Uh, you were saying?” said Michael, a blush rising to his cheeks.
“Excellent,” said Jude, heartened to continue. “The fifth book was Sumerian in origin, and pre-dated the Akkadian scripts. It was also written in a numerically-based syntax—probably based on the word-pictures originating in Uruk—that took quite an effort to master.”
“I’d’ve liked to have seen it.”
“I’d’ve liked to have shown it to you, but I only managed to acquire the Sturluson.”
A brief glance between Galen and Michael noted the unanswered question of how the book came to be in Jude’s possession, and simultaneously set it in the to-be-asked-before-this-is-done pile.
“What did it describe?” asked Michael.
“It was a business ledger of sorts,” said Jude. “In fact, it was an accounting of a venture of a commercial nature, a pan-Oceanic agricultural venture which spanned the entire Northern Hemisphere.”
“Pan-Oceanic? Atlantean?”
“The original version from whence come our ideas of Atlantis, actually, which may or may not have been called Ys. And it pre-dated any estimates of that pseudo-culture by almost a hundred millennia. As a matter of fact, it even intimated a foreshadowing of what caused the downfall of the entire culture.”
“My God,” said Michael. “What happened?”
“Same thing that always happens,” said Jude. “You just can’t mix a Democracy and a Republic and still have effective free enterprise.”
“I knew it,” said Michael. “Wh-what about the sixth?”
“An odd one. It had traces of the Sumerian numeric language, but—and this is the paralogical part—was interspersed with Mayan. It was a combination of phonetic and glyphic symbols. Very odd.”
“One hundred thousand year old Mayan?” Galen asked.
“It could have been Olmec,” Michael suggested. “The Olmec writing is unique, and might have predated the Mayan. The signs are similar to the writing used by the Vai people of West Africa, and the Olmecs spoke an aspect of the Manding language spoken in West Africa, which some have argued could be the oldest spoken language on earth.
“Both the Olmec and epi-Olmec had primarily hieroglyphic writing systems,” Michael continued, feeling a calmness which comes with an expression of authority. “Traditional Olmec was a syllabic writing system used in their heartland from the ninth century B.C., but unlike the Mayan, the Olmec script also utilized a logo-syllabic script, comprised of both a syllabic and hieroglyphic script, although the hieroglyphic signs were simply Olmec syllabic signs that were used to make pictures. There are basically just two forms of Olmec hieroglyphic writing. The pure hieroglyphics, which are the picture signs, and the phonetic hieroglyphics, which are a combination of both the syllabic and logographic signs. That sounds an awful lot like what you saw in that book.”
“Or an approximation thereof,” said Jude in acquiescence. “The text dealt with the Ur-city; the first city that could be called such, as did the last translatable volume, which contained information about the cit
y’s founding some four hundred thousand years ago. In that one, however, the vestiges of the cuneiform were gone, and the Mayan—or Olmec—was bastardized with a minimalist language I couldn’t place at all—no base of reference. This language had a syntax which by all rights should have predated every other phonetically-based language including the Mayan, but the Mayan of a few thousand years ago—not a Mayan of multi-millennia ago.”
Michael shook his head. “You must’ve read it wrong,” he said. “Writing didn’t even begin for any culture until around thirty-three hundred B.C.—and that was only in the Fertile Crescent. Even speculating that a Mayan or Olmec script could be older than about five thousand years is just … it’s a common amateur mistake—you just misread the settings, and that’s throwing off your whole projection. Or perhaps you mis-recognized the forms entirely.”
“Considering I knew enough Icelandic to know to bring the Prime Edda to you, and your knowledge of my, ah, rather exceptional academic prowess, do you doubt my capacity to approximately date ancient manuscripts?” asked Jude.
“Date them, no,” said Michael, “translate, yes.”
“Then I suppose that you’d simply see it as a translation mistake if a portion of a document which I had confirmed as being nearly half a million years old was translated as describing the founding and rise of a city called Londonium?”
A light flared in Michael’s eyes, then just as swiftly, faded. There was no possible way this was correct—Londonium was the name of the Roman settlement which became the British capital, and was no more than two or three thousand years old at the broadest interpretation. Add to that the jumbled mishmash of Sumerian cuneiform, Mayan pictography, and Tibetan printing, and the whole line of discussion becomes less Joseph Campbell and more Rod Serling.
Galen snorted. “That’s the end of the illusions, then. The documents you read were obviously fictions, and I don’t know what sort of scam you’re trying to pull off here …”
He was rising to leave, but stopped when Michael put an arm across his shoulders. “Hang on a minute, Galen,” said Michael placatingly. “I agree, there’s a lot here that sounds bogus, but one thing I’m certain of—that book he brought to the nightclub is absolutely authentic. It is at least a thousand years old, and contains cultural information at least that old, if not older. Whatever else Jude has to tell us is worth listening to, if only for that reason. When he’s done, then we can evaluate how much is garbage and how much is going to turn the world upside down. Agreed?”
The Festival of Bones: Mythworld Book One Page 8