boat is made up of three pictures with distinct definition? The first meaning a vehicle, the second is the number eight, and the third, a clear depiction of a mouth. A vehicle with eight mouths?”
“Does this have an application to Mesoamerican languages?” said Alred, wrinkling her brow.
“Both have connections to Biblical tongues,” said Porter, lifting an open hand. “Noah’s ark had eight mouths: Three sons and their wives, and also Noah and his wife.”
“Doesn’t folklore school us that Noah brought two of every kind of mouth on the planet?”
Porter smiled, but his excited eyes didn’t waver. “More, actually. But…there were only eight humans on the ark. All ideograms, like Egyptian, Mayan, and Chinese-in fact all letters! — originate from preconceived mental images. Why did the ancient Chinese, when desiring to write the word boat, describe such a detailed picture that has no reference to floating or even water? Why was a vehicle with eight people on it so clearly representative of this particular word?”
“You’re shooting in the dark,” Alred sighed.
“Isn’t that what all scholars do, followed by an analysis of facts explaining their assumptions?” said Porter.
“What’s the rest of this?” Alred said, looking at the pad full of foreign figures and badly scrawled English.
“Ever heard of the Popol Vuh, a Mesoamerican codex written not long after the Spanish conquered the area?”
“Did you forget my area of expertise?” Alred smiled. “ The Book of the Council. I’ve quoted it. It was created by American Indians of the Quiche tribe, the most powerful nation in the area and also a branch of the Maya.”
“Right, in 1524, a general under Cortez forced the Quiche to surrender, burning their capital city, Utatlan.”
“You know some American history,” Alred said, her eyes relaxing. “The Popol Vuh was one of the few books that survived the period. Most of the native libraries were decimated by the Spanish inquisition, ruining our chance to obtain a detailed history of the Maya.”
“Some Mayan codices survived the Conquest,” Porter said quickly.
“Most are fakes.” Alred crossed her legs. “The Popol Buj, or Popol Vuh as you call it, was only one of four authentic works we know of. What about it?”
“Well, you know it is a collection of oral tales recorded by the Quiche nobles,” said Porter.
“I am well aware of the book’s background, Porter. Do you also know that we don’t have the original?”
“Is that supposed to preclude what I’m about to say?”
Alred paused. “I’m the Mesoamerican scholar here.”
“I…realize that. That’s why I think you’ll appreciate this. Especially in light of our new study. I have the book right here.” He picked up an English copy from under a thick lexicon of Hebrew words. “Listen to this: ‘… they planned the creation.’”
“Is that why we’re talking about the Popol Vuh?”
Porter looked at her, shock on his face.
Was she supposed to understand something in all this rhetoric?
“It says the same thing in the Book of Genesis.”
“I thought the Bible defines one god as the creator,” Alred said as Porter reached into his briefcase and pulled out his scriptures.
He put them on the table and Alred’s eyes widened. The black book with worn gilding was at least three inches thick, and as he opened it, she could see the onion skin pages. “Here. Genesis 1:26. ‘And God said, Let us make…’” He shot his face up at Alred’s.
“What happened to Judeo-Christian Monotheism?” said Alred.
“ Vayomer elohim vaaseh adam btsalmenu kdmutenu. The Hebrew word for God in this verse is Elohim. As in Cherub im and Seraph im, the — im implies plurality, just as — es in the English language. And the gods in this scene are obviously planning to come down and create. Here: chapter 2 verse 4 and 5: ‘…in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, and every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew…’
“‘Thus it was created in the darkness and in the night by the heart of heaven,’ says the Popol Vuh.” Porter looked up from his books.
Alred nodded. “Is that the Mormon in you speaking, or the scholar.” She didn’t know why she listened. She was sure she could find a Jew capable of explaining why their monotheistic religion had a deity with a name implying plurality.
“The scholar, actually!”
“You’ll bring up The Books of Chilam Balam next,” said Alred.
“You know I can find Semitic relations with the name Balam, but I wanted to point out the Popol Vuh. See these names?” he indicated the pad again. “I’ll read them for you.”
“Please.” Alred closed her eyes.
“This one, Vucub Cakish, a main character in the book,” he said. “Did I pronounce that right?”
She nodded.
“And this… Xbalanque.”
“Small Jaguar,” Alred said, opening her eyes and folding her arms.
“What?”
“That’s what the name means.”
“Well,” said Porter, “both correspond to…names in the Book of Mormon. But neither Vucub Cakish nor Xbalanque were available to scholars let alone anyone else until Carl Scherzer translated the text in Vienna from the original language into Spanish in 1857…many years after the publication of the Book of Mormon.”
“Really,” she said, skepticism in her voice. “What Book of Mormon names exactly.”
“Well in a section called the Book of Ether, there is a person by the name Akish. That’s not a stone’s throw from Cakish.”
“But ambiguous enough for debate,” said Alred.
“True. The second might take a deeper dive, but look. Break up the name Xbalanque. Of course the x in older Spanish and Portuguese languages is pronounced sh. And you know vowel shifts are common enough that rarely can we trust vowels at all in etymology.”
“Okay, you’ve effectively turned Xbalanque into the word SH-B-L-N-Q,” said Alred. “Where’s your correlation.”
Was she humoring him? Or just hoping he’d get it over with.
“Do you believe the q with an n preceding it could fall off the end of a word?”
“Why not.”
Porter tightened his lips together, then softened. “And an m is interchangeable with an n?”
“Are you patronizing me?” she said lifting her brow. “We all know p and b, t and d, k and g, l and r, and other such combinations can be found in the evolution of languages. Balam and Balan are essentially the same name. What’s your point.”
“There is both a Shiblon…and a Shiblom in the Book of Mormon. Incidentally, the Hopi Amerindian tribe professes even today that they come from the ‘great red city of the south.’”
“Oh, really,” she said, relaxing with the realization that the further Porter babbled into American anthropology and philology, the more he left behind his area of scholarly specialty.
“Yes. There is a similar mention in the Book of Mormon about groups of people departing a city they called Zarahemla. By a strange coincidence, in Arabic, dar or zar is one word for settlement, and ahmar means red. Zarahamra and Zarahemla,” Porter tilted his head. “Could be nothing, but seems enough evidence to at least warrant serious consideration of transoceanic contact with the Old World even without Ulman’s codex.”
“Did our conversation just leave the Popol Vuh?” said Alred.
“The Mayan Indians possess plenty of proofs of Near East connections if you ask me,” said Porter.
“All long shots?” said Alred. “Give me one.”
Porter raised a hand and let it flop as if he’d already spoken his thought. He grabbed his copy of the Popol Vuh, flipped the torn up pages, and read a line. “‘In this way they carried Avilix to the ravine called Euabal-Zivan,’ pardon my pronunciation, ‘so named by them, to the large ravine of the forest, now called Pavilix…’ Pavilix, in
