out of sequence. She couldn’t find any. The black and red ink was correctly faded. The blue ink held its color, just as real Maya blue did. The paper was weathered as if it had been inside a cave for a thousand years. The bark was brittle.
Even more impressive, the writing felt fluent. The glyph combinations made intuitive sense, as did the pictograms. The glyphs appeared to have been written in an early version of “classic Ch’olan,” as expected in a codex like this. But what Chel couldn’t take her eyes off of were the phonetic “complements” on the glyphs that helped a reader identify their meaning. They were written in Qu’iche.
The known post-classic codices with their Mexican influences were written in Yucatec and Ch’olan Mayan. But Chel had long imagined that a classic book from Guatemala might well have been written with complements in the dialect her mother and father had grown up speaking. The presence of those here represented a deep and nuanced understanding of the history and language on the part of the forger.
Chel couldn’t believe the sophistication, and she suspected that many of even her smartest colleagues would have been fooled.
Then a sequence of glyphs stopped her cold.
On one of the largest bark-paper pieces Chel had seen in the box, three pictograms were written in sequence to form a sentence fragment:
Water, made to shoot from stone
.
Chel blinked, confused. The writer could only be describing a
fountain
. Yet no forger in the world could have written about a fountain, because until recently no scholar knew the classic Maya used them in their cities. It had been less than a month since an archaeologist from Penn State figured out that, contrary to popular belief, the Spanish hadn’t introduced pressurized aqueducts to the New World; the Maya built them centuries before Europeans arrived.
A codex like this could never have been forged in less than a month. So it couldn’t have been forged at all.
Chel looked up at Gutierrez in disbelief. “Where did you get this?”
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
The obvious answer was that it had been looted from a tomb in the Maya ruins, stolen like so much else from her ancestors’ graves. “Who else knows about it?” Chel pressed.
“Only my source,” Gutierrez said. “But now you understand its value?”
If she was right, there could be more information about Maya history on these pages than in all the known ruins combined. The Dresden Codex, the most complete of the four ancient Maya books, would fetch ten million dollars at auction—and the pages in front of her would put the Dresden to shame.
“Are you going to sell it?” she asked Gutierrez.
“When the time is right.”
Even if she’d had the kind of money he would demand, the time would probably never be right for Chel. She couldn’t buy it legally, because it had obviously been stolen, and the work it would take to properly reconstruct and decipher a codex would make it impossible to hide for long. If a looted codex were ever discovered in her possession, she’d lose her job and could face criminal charges.
“Why should I hold it for you?” Chel asked.
Gutierrez said, “To give me time to figure out how to make papers so it can be sold to an American museum—I hope yours. And because if ICE finds this now, neither of us will ever see it again.”
Chel knew he was right about ICE: If they confiscated the book,they’d repatriate it to the Guatemalan government, which didn’t have the expertise or infrastructure to properly display and study a codex. The Grolier Fragment, found in Mexico, had been rotting in a vault there since the eighties.
Gutierrez packed the book back in its box. Chel already felt impatient to touch it again. The bark paper was disintegrating and needed preservation. More than that, the world needed to know what these pages said, because they testified to the history of her people. And the history of her people was
Even more impressive, the writing felt fluent. The glyph combinations made intuitive sense, as did the pictograms. The glyphs appeared to have been written in an early version of “classic Ch’olan,” as expected in a codex like this. But what Chel couldn’t take her eyes off of were the phonetic “complements” on the glyphs that helped a reader identify their meaning. They were written in Qu’iche.
The known post-classic codices with their Mexican influences were written in Yucatec and Ch’olan Mayan. But Chel had long imagined that a classic book from Guatemala might well have been written with complements in the dialect her mother and father had grown up speaking. The presence of those here represented a deep and nuanced understanding of the history and language on the part of the forger.
Chel couldn’t believe the sophistication, and she suspected that many of even her smartest colleagues would have been fooled.
Then a sequence of glyphs stopped her cold.
On one of the largest bark-paper pieces Chel had seen in the box, three pictograms were written in sequence to form a sentence fragment:
Water, made to shoot from stone
.
Chel blinked, confused. The writer could only be describing a
fountain
. Yet no forger in the world could have written about a fountain, because until recently no scholar knew the classic Maya used them in their cities. It had been less than a month since an archaeologist from Penn State figured out that, contrary to popular belief, the Spanish hadn’t introduced pressurized aqueducts to the New World; the Maya built them centuries before Europeans arrived.
A codex like this could never have been forged in less than a month. So it couldn’t have been forged at all.
Chel looked up at Gutierrez in disbelief. “Where did you get this?”
“You know I can’t tell you that.”
The obvious answer was that it had been looted from a tomb in the Maya ruins, stolen like so much else from her ancestors’ graves. “Who else knows about it?” Chel pressed.
“Only my source,” Gutierrez said. “But now you understand its value?”
If she was right, there could be more information about Maya history on these pages than in all the known ruins combined. The Dresden Codex, the most complete of the four ancient Maya books, would fetch ten million dollars at auction—and the pages in front of her would put the Dresden to shame.
“Are you going to sell it?” she asked Gutierrez.
“When the time is right.”
Even if she’d had the kind of money he would demand, the time would probably never be right for Chel. She couldn’t buy it legally, because it had obviously been stolen, and the work it would take to properly reconstruct and decipher a codex would make it impossible to hide for long. If a looted codex were ever discovered in her possession, she’d lose her job and could face criminal charges.
“Why should I hold it for you?” Chel asked.
Gutierrez said, “To give me time to figure out how to make papers so it can be sold to an American museum—I hope yours. And because if ICE finds this now, neither of us will ever see it again.”
Chel knew he was right about ICE: If they confiscated the book,they’d repatriate it to the Guatemalan government, which didn’t have the expertise or infrastructure to properly display and study a codex. The Grolier Fragment, found in Mexico, had been rotting in a vault there since the eighties.
Gutierrez packed the book back in its box. Chel already felt impatient to touch it again. The bark paper was disintegrating and needed preservation. More than that, the world needed to know what these pages said, because they testified to the history of her people. And the history of her people was
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