“It’s a relief that you know the rules,” he said.

Remi said, “Are you sure it’s from Copán? We found this at Tacaná, north of Tapachula, Mexico. That’s at least four hundred miles from Copán.”

Caine shrugged. “Native people in the Americas sometimes covered a lot of ground on foot. There’s also trade.”

“How old is it?”

Caine cocked his head and looked. “Wait. Here we go. The king is Yax Pasaj Chan Yopaat, the sixteenth ruler of Copán. It says so here.” He pointed at a group of vertical columns with rounded designs like seals.

Sam said, “You can read those?”

“Yes. These columns each consist of one to five glyphs and each glyph is a word or phrase or an indication of a position in a sentence. You read from top left to right, but only for the first two columns, then go down a line and read the left one and the right one and so on. There are eight hundred sixty-one glyphs that we know.”

“There are over twenty Mayan languages,” said Remi. “Does this form of writing work for all of them?”

“No,” he said. “The only ones we have were written in Ch’olan, Tzeltalan, and Yucatec.”

Sam stared at the pot. “So this comes from Copán. I wonder how it got from Honduras all the way across Guatemala to the border of Mexico.”

“And when,” said Remi.

“Exactly what I was wondering,” said Caine. “We could do a carbon date on any organic material associated with the find and on the man himself. That would do it.”

“I’ll call Dr. Talamantes and Dr. Garza and see if they can arrange to have the man tested,” said Remi. “He’s in a hospital morgue in Tapachula. They signed him in, mostly on the strength of the goodwill they built up with the medical community in the area after the earthquake.”

“Are they also archaeologists?” asked Caine.

“No, just medical doctors,” said Sam.

“Then would you mind if I stepped in and got a couple of Mexican colleagues to go to work on this? They’re first-rate scientists and very well respected.”

“We’d be delighted,” said Remi.

“Then I’ll call them this afternoon and get them going on it. You’ve done a good job of keeping his location quiet since the first blast of publicity, so there hasn’t been a crush of people trying to get in and see him. But you can be sure that lots of people are waiting and listening—some scholars and scientists, and some crackpots and some charlatans as always.”