The Kukulkan Manuscript

by James Steimle

  She could hear the vent, pumping hot air into Porter’s tiny office. But she couldn’t find a thermostat on the wall.

  “Heating’s controlled from a central system. In all my years at Stratford, I have yet to find the controls,” Porter said without lifting his eyes. “What perfume are you wearing? Polo Sport?”

  “There’s gotta be a way to turn this down,” she said, using a chair to boost herself up to the vent. Almost sacrificing her nail and the tip of her thumb, she successfully pulled the little lever on the metal grating, shutting the duct. Looking at it from the ground, however, she realized the aperture would only close halfway.

  “We could go to Bruno’s,” said Porter, dropping his pencil. He stabbed both his tired eyeballs with his fingers and smashed them as if they were trapped cockroaches.

  “What did you say?”

  “Where the temperature sustains human life. Sorry, I—”

  “No,” said Alred, “about the dating?”

  Porter looked to the right of his chair. From amid the high stacks of indiscernible files, multicolored volumes, and stapled papers, he pulled up the last issue of LOGOS, The Journal of Archaeology. “In Albright’s article.” He flipped it open to a well marked page.

  “Did you memorize it?” she said, looking at his yellow and green highlighting, blue, red, and black underlining, and the masses of notes he’d scrawled in the margins.

  “Right here in the introduction Dr. Albright says he’s dated the KM-1 codex to 700 BC.”

  “BCE,” said Alred. In the modern world of scholarship, there was a big difference between the terms Before Christ and Before the Common Era, though the years were essentially the same.

  “Whatever.”

  “He said he dated KM-1 based on the writing. He talks about that later in his paper,” Alred said, leaning over Porter and pushing red hair behind her ear. Porter realized he smelled a little too well-aged today and knew Alred recognized this also as she pulled back to a standing position.

  “He’s guessing. And these footnotes?” Porter looked up at her. “They look like they’ve been added by someone else, an aid or something. I think Albright hadn’t returned to the states before writing the article.”

  “You’re saying Albright raced to get his paper published?” Alred said, taking the seat opposite the desk. She couldn’t even stand by Porter, he stunk so bad. It came with not showering. His exuberance and panic at completing the task would make him a social outcast, she deduced.

  Porter’s hair hung wet to his eyebrows. If he’d had Fabio-length locks, the sweat probably would have repulsed Alred out of the room. Nevertheless, Porter nodded and reached for another magazine. “I missed this. Too busy with my dissertation, I suppose.”

  Alred examined the periodical as he flashed the front of it. Bold letters in a black cover read: Archaeological Journal.

  Flipping to another spot devastated by his rainbow markings, Porter tossed the open journal onto Alred’s lap.

  She looked down.

  THE NEW MESOAMERICAN MYSTERY

  Guatemala’s Hidden Treasure

  by

  Dr. Alexander Peterson, Ohio State University

  “Ohio State University,” she read out loud.

  “An obvious connection to Dr. Albright.”

  “But this was Ulman’s discovery,” said Alred. “Why haven’t there been any essays by him?”

  “Maybe there have been,” Porter said, leaning back in his chair, which squeaked with the sound of a thousand tortured mice. He put his hands behind his head and closed his exhausted eyes. He didn’t want to think about Ulman. Frankly, he wished Alred would go away. Porter preferred working with solitude, his quiet lover these past years.

  Alred saw the codex on the desk. Porter weighed the volume through her eyes. She recognized it instantly, once she saw past the piles of other academic junk Porter had put there as if to hide it. The artifact held the same tan color of the other ancient Central American books she had seen.

  The manuscript was thick, but the pages were surprisingly thin. Each page of the bark paper had years ago been attached to the page beside it until it looked like an unrolled scroll of great length. But instead of being rolled together, the pages had been bent toward each other to make it look like an accordion or an oriental paper fan that could close into one solid form. The codex was opened now, not unlike the way books open today.

  Numerous colored glyphs washed across the pages. Different inks and paints had been used, and pictures were interspersed among the lettering.

  Alred squinted as if to decide what language the codex had been written in.

  Porter eyed her closely.

  She had read and reread Albright’s paper by now, but still couldn’t come to grips with the possibility that Near Eastern devices were found in KM-1. But then, she didn’t know exactly what she was seeing right at this moment.

  Porter held his eyelids parted only slightly. He smiled. That the terrible thing was on his desk would be enough to throw her logical mind into emotional chaos, he figured. He’d wait a bit.

  Alred saw him appraising her, however, and recreated her unfeeling face with contemplative green eyes. “You don’t think these professors killed Dr. Ulman to get to his find.”

  “Well,” Porter said, dropping his hands into his lap, “I didn’t say it. You seem to be more concerned about Ulman than the manuscript on my desk.”

  “What is it?” she said nonchalantly, as if it didn’t matter as much as it did. All this time she’d done her work in her apartment, checking out books from the library and ordering others through the inter-library loan system. She’d kept her work quiet. Her prerogative. But in the end, she would need to face the archaeological evidence. Well, here it was.

  “In tradition of the great scholars who wrote articles before we knew it was a race, I call this KM-2,” said Porter with a hand presenting the object like a new guest in the small room.

  “Ulman’s codex.”

  “The one he sent Dr. Kinnard, yes.” Leaning back to his card table, resting his elbows thereon, Porter looked at the bark book and at the notes he’d hoped to finish before she arrived. “I’ve been translating—”

  “You don’t know Spanish,” Alred said, “how can you translate a Mesoamerican document?”

  Porter looked up at her. “Why are you making this so difficult, Alred? We’ve talked about this. Can you be so obstinate concerning science vs. religion as to not see the facts before you?”

  “Religion isn’t an issue,” Alred said, sitting back in her chair.

  With unbelieving eyes, Porter said, “I’m glad to hear that. Be a scientific judge then.” He lifted a hand again to the codex.

  “KM-2,” she said, carefully picking up the ancient book.

  “Hope your hands are clean,” Porter said as he dived back into his notebook. He flipped through the pages to review his work. It really was a mess and needed to be rewritten. But he was really wondering with all his mental faculties what his companion was thinking. “Ever see a volume like that? Looks a lot like a scroll someone decided to press flat and open differently, doesn’t it?”

  “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 CM-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.”

  “What kind of connections?” said Porter.

  “Architecture, art forms, symbols…but I don’t believe Rameses had anything to do with America. Some things just look alike.”

  Porter smiled a wry grin.

  “You don’t think—”

  “No, I doubt there is any relation between Rameses III and Mesoamerica,” Porter said, closing his eyes. “But some of the facts cited in the book might be valid.”

  “Two Egyptian figurines were also purportedly found on the west coast of El Salvador. Roman coins dating back to the year 200 have been discovered in North America. but those things could have easily been transplanted.”

  Porter nodded.

  Alred put KM-2 back on his desk. “I’d like to examine the codex in detail when you can take a
break.”

  “Sure,” Porter said. He felt the back of his teeth with his tongue.

  “So why do you think Albright’s paleographic dating is incorrect,” she said, a sigh in her voice.

  “Just a hunch,” Porter said, realizing it was pointless to continue the discussion. Alred’s mind stood solid. She wouldn’t listen. If he said anything else, it would only make her regret her participation in the project more. It was obvious she wasn’t enjoying this. If he was going to work with her, he’d have to be more amiable.

  “I see,” she said with a light nod. “I say we subject the codex to carbon 14 dating. We can get Dr. Atkins to do it with little hassle.” She stood. “Unless you have a problem with that?”

  “In my first archaeology class,” Porter said, “we…talked about different dating processes. When my professor, Dr. Jacob Noble, told us that many scientists argue the date of a find or question the validity of the year concluded by the tests, I pursued the idea of arguing archaeologists with a string of questions which probably made my professor sorry for writing up the lecture that day. I just couldn’t understand how science could bicker with itself. If the carbon dating’s done, I naively figured…the date had to be right. If it wasn’t, how could scientists continue to use that dating procedure. I asked Noble what would happen if I removed my right ear and had it carbon dated? What year would the process present? He shocked the class by telling us…my ear could be 150 years old.”

  “That can’t be true,” Alred said, shaking her head, her eyes drawn into thin slits.

  “Right! I would have just cut it off. Two opposing truths cannot exist at the same time. And yet in science, they often do! When I came to Stratford, Kinnard told me that the problem with scholarship is that about fourteen years after you write a paper on a given subject, some other scholar formulates a paper proving what you said to be false. It’s all a big game, with new truths forever overriding old ones. But then, if the discoveries had really been true in the first place, no one could debunk them at any point in the future. So we are not necessarily dealing with truths here, but the redefining of reality. Every scholar wants to make a name for himself—”