Following a trail of breadcrumbs from my recent post on Johann Adam Schall von Bell, I’m returning to the issue of whether the VMs could ever have had a Far Eastern origin. To recap, Jacques Guy originally proposed Chinese as a kind of linguistic fou-merde joke on the Voynich research community, only to be unhappily surprised when people started taking it seriously enough to dig up evidence why he might actually have been right. Guy’s “Chinese theory” was, then, somewhat like the Rosicrucian manifestos, in that it was a ludibrium that somehow managed to survive and thrive quite independently of its creator.
Of course, every class of Voynich theory has its naysayers (who normally outnumber the proposer[s] by some 1000:1). In this instance, such people typically point to three major areas of difficulty that any particular Chinese theory would have to overcome – cultural mismatch, codicological mismatch and linguistic mismatch.
Cultural mismatch is the easiest one of the three: where are the Chinese faces, Chinese motifs, Chinese artefacts, Chinese sequences, etc? Search as hard as you like, but you’ll probably (despite what some novelists like to pretend) only find signs of late medieval European culture in there – baths, castles (yes, with swallowtail merlons), European herbals, heads in the roots, cryptoheraldry (eagle, lion, etc)… essentially the same set of cultural conceits that you can see in real Quattrocento herbals and related manuscripts (oh, and in the so-called “alchemical herbals”, which are neither alchemical nor herbal, strictly speaking). I’m also somewhat culturally suspicious about the apparent 30 x 12 = 360-degree division in the zodiac section, because Chinese astronomy before Johann Adam Schall von Bell had long been based on a 365.25 day astronomical year (no matter how awkward this made the maths).
Codicological mismatch is also fairly easy to spot: why would a mysterious Chinese herbal have marginalia and quire numbers written in various 15th century hands? If you are arguing that the VMs is a genuine Far Eastern linguistic artefact (i.e. that it is not openly deceptive), then you’d need to have a particularly strong narrative argument if you are going to try to date its return to Europe much after 1500 (or even 1450). The vellum also seems to have a physically European origin, so this too needs to be taken account of. Furthermore, Voynichese’s general ductus seems to fall within the range of late medieval European styles (it was written by someone fairly adept with a quill rather than with a brush), so the most likely point of codicological departure here would always be that the VMs was written by a European rather than by a Chinese person.
Linguistic mismatch is perhaps both the hardest to spot as well as the hardest to deal with. The core of the Chinese theory was based on Jacques Guy’s amused observation that the frequent “CVCV…” patterns found in Voynichese (such as “otolal“, etc) might be not so much a highly-structured consonant-vowel linguistic artefact as a tonal transcription artefact. That is, that Voynichese is ‘simply’ a structured tonal rendition of an exotic language such as Mandarin Chinese etc, and that perhaps a lot of the letter-following structures we observe are caused by limitations of the way that tones happen to work in that language. OK… but given that the very first tonal rendition of Chinese was apparently attempted by Matteo Ricci in 1583-1588 (the point where the whole idea of a tonal transcription seems to have first appeared), this would seem to point to quite a strong earliest dating for the VMs of (say) 1590 or so, unless you’re going to rewrite a fair bit of the history books etc in your quest to tell your narrative.
Now, you really don’t have to have as big a Renaissance brain as Anthony Grafton’s to be able to notice the contradiction here: which is that for a Chinese theory to overcome the codicological mismatch it seems to require a pre-1500 dating, while for it to overcome the linguistic mismatch it seems to require a post-1590 dating, while simultaneously overcoming the quite separate (and quite large) cultural mismatch issues. The easy answer, of course, is simply to ignore any such problems and just get on with telling your story: it’s far harder to tackle the underlying mismatches and see where they take you.
Incidentally, there’s a little-known interview with Guy Mazars and Christophe Wiart in Actualites en Phytotherapie to be found here (in French) where they propose that many of the Voynich Manuscript’s mysterious plants may in fact be East Asian plants (for example, that f6v depicts Ricinus communis) or Indian plants (they think that many of the plants shown are types of Asteraceae, with f27r representing Centella Asiatica). But you’d have to point out that there are also many, many, many plants in the VMs that are unlikely to match anything these (very learned) experts on Indian and East Asian plants have ever seen. Make of all this what you will (as per normal).
Actually, the dating’s not really such a problem.
In 1282 an embassy came from Kublai Khan and spent twelve months visiting the courts of Europe, including a wintering-over in Genoa waiting for the next sailing season to begin.
http://www.aina.org/books/mokk/mokk.htm
Diane: ah, that whole Nestorian / Syriac / Mongolian thing is a completely separate historical strand, one relatively untouched by Voynich theorists to date. So yes, you’re right… but as the whole linguistic support leg of the ‘Chinese theory’ tripod is absent there, it’s not really the same thing at all. And please don’t get me started on Gavin Menzies “1421” / “1434” etc! =:-o
Most of the objections are based on an expectation of direct transmission. You can find an Indian text composed in the 6thC bce within a manuscript written in Arabic in a fifteenth-century hand, on contemporary vellum, an with nary a hint of Indian ornament. The matter is still Indian.
The notion of a ‘transcription artifact’ sounds odd to me, but I guess it could happen – in a primer.
Sorry Nick, our messages crossed.
Isn’t the point that the Nestorians were multilingual, and by the 1200s had about 600 yrs or so experience in Chinese and Mongolian regions? The envoys were Uigur, and while they used Syriac for liturgical purposes, they spoke the local languages, including Chinese and Arabic.
Actually by 1200 hardly any used Syriac.
Diane: Jacques Guy’s whole “transcription artifact” notion is how Voynich Chinese theorists bridge between the unusually formalized structure of Voynichese and real-world languages – so without that to explain Voynichese, Chinese theories would end up somewhat adrift.
As for language circa 1400, would the Nestorian Uyghur envoys have spoken Chinese as their first language or Chagatai? I had always assumed they still used Syriac, but if you’re saying this was wrong…
ok noveletist scenario.
uigurs come. Have to communicate with European rulers, and the church.
The preaching orders positively collect languages. First chairs in Hebrew, Arabic etc. all established for Dominicans.
They say Hey! another language. Here, sit down and tell me the Asian equivalent to (the usual medieval stuff; herbals, bestiary,…) and I’ll transcribe it. We’ll need a phonetic transcription, so you talk, I’ll write. Companion translation volume lost. A few months later, off go a few Catholic preachers to convert the heathen (Alans, Mongols, Chinese..) from their heretical Nestorian ways – in their own language.
Actually, the early guys say that the Alans or the Nestorians translated for them, but this is a novelette scenario.
Thing is, the person positing Chinese is not positing something historically impossible. The rest of the world didn’t sit around waiting for Europeans; that embassy wasn’t the first.
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I did follow the Voinich manchu theory. I did transliterate whole Voinich manuscript by means of Zbigniew Banasik’s relevant alphabet of this view point. The outcome really did not resemble manchu but when i did insert the part of the text to the Google translate i got the answer t We do not yet know how to translate English into Yoruba.
(But firts without last vowels i got that they cant ‘t translate from kashak to english.
Yoruba!!
On the first attempt to create a common script for the Mongol empire – just btw –
http://www.jaars.org/museum/alphabet/people/mongolian.htm
and so
http://www.ancientscripts.com/hphagspa.html
Making no argument..
Diane: do all Chinese roads have to lead to Gavin Menzies? Ohhhhhhhhhhh nooooooooooooooo! =:-o
.. and who is Gavin Menzies?
Diane: a best-selling historical fiction writer, some might (and indeed do) say. As for me, I’d merely observe that his publishing success currently stands well ahead of his success in gaining academic converts. For example, did any part of a 15th century Chinese fleet really cross Egypt by canal to present itself in Italy? I… don’t… think… so, sorry.
Have now discovered Gavin Menzies. Thank you.
No, the canal was blocked in about the 7thC by the incoming Arabs who felt it was agin nature.
Whether or not the Chinese rounded the Horn, I don’t know. But if the Portuguese could, so could the Chinese (there’s an awful lot of concealed chauvenism in western notions of what foreigners wer ‘likely’ to have been able to do – e.g. Ughurs speak Latin, or Chinese beat the Portuguese around Africa. Anyway, the whole point is irrelevant; we have proof of Chinese technnology, specifically printing, reaching Europe before the 14thC, and where technology can travel – and be translated – so can other books.
I don’t think Voynichese is likely to be Chinese, though.
Nick, of course I’ll give a link, but I’d really like to have permission to quote the details of that interview.
Frankly I’m staggered – not only to have been preceded, but to have forgotten all about this paragraph. I wonder if I read so far? *shakes head*.
Diane
As you know, and without any reference to Wiart & Mazar, my own research finally brought me to a similar conclusion, I still see nothing specifically monotheist about the ms’ imagery, though the botanical section does seem to be most concerned with plants of the Indo-Asian region, not the Mediterranean, and plants accessible by sea. It the book for a peripatetic class of person, I’d say – mariner, religious vistor, trader.. that sort of person. IMO
First of all, thank you Nick for organizing so much of the recent research (even if some of it seems far-fetched!) on the Voynich manuscript on your website. I really appreciate your work on this mystery!
I just wanted to second some of the points that Diane has made with respect to the intercultural contact between the Mongol Khanates and Western Europe in the thirteenth century. The linguistic efforts on the part of the envoys (particularly mendicants) who left for Persia, India, and China on behalf of the pope are evident in the historical record. Their attempts to learn multiple languages for the sake of conversion included Mongolian, Chinese, and Uyghur as well as the more predictable Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Syriac, and Greek.
Diane mentioned the mission that arrived from Khanbaliq (Peking) in 1282, but I wanted to add one more tidbit. Roger Bacon had already interviewed a Franciscan missionary, William of Rubruck, who had been at the court of Mongke Khan in Karakorum in 1253. Bacon records the various writing systems of the court, including Chinese in his Opus Majus (Bridges ed. Opus Majus, pg. 374; searchable on google books) where he says “The eastern Chinese write with short strokes [lit. “little points” or “pricks”] by which they paint pictures, and in one figure they produce several letters composing an entire word [or expression]. …”
(Latin: “Cathai orientales scribunt cum punctorio quo pingunt pictores, et faciunt in una figura plures literas comprehendentes unam dictionem …”, pg. 374)
Has the association of the Voynich manuscript with Roger Bacon been decisively refuted yet?
Nicholas,
Is there any proof that Bacon and Rubruck met? I think Charpentier’s speculations are reasonable, but (pace the wiki authors who seem obsessed with Grosseteste), it seems that all we can say certainly is that some copy of Rubruck’s report was available for Bacon to study.
Many of the primary sources for study of the so-called ‘silk roads’ can be read on the old site of the Silk Road Seattle Project, including an English translation of Rubruck’s account of his travels.
Cheers
I did not know that the meeting between Roger Bacon and William of Rubruck was in dispute.
In the Opus Majus, Roger Bacon is explicit that he, not only read Rubruck’s work, but communicated with him personally. On page 305 of Bridges’ edition, Bacon writes: “I looked at [Rubruck’s] book with care, and consulted with its author – as well as with many others – who have explored southern and eastern locales.”
(original: “quem librum diligenter vidi, et cum ejus auctore contuli, et similiter cum multis aliis, qui loca orientis et meridiana rimati sunt.”)
I take this to mean that Bacon and Rubruck conferred with one another in Paris around 1257. I hadn’t considered it before, but perhaps they corresponded by letter. As far as I know, there are not any letters that have survived to corroborate this though.
Yes, I was left in the same impasse. I daresay Neal or someone with unrusted Latin might discern the exact sense if it were able to be discerned from the Latin, but to do so is well beyond me. 🙁
Nicholas,
If you ever visit this page again – the conclusion that Bacon and Rubruck met seems justified. I suspect that you had already seen, as I had not, the 1935 edition of Jarl Charpentier’s paper….
“showing that Book IV of Bacon’s Opus maius is frequently verbally indebted to William of Rubruck’s report of his visit to the Mongols, and speculating that Bacon derived more from conversations with William – since they were both in the same order, and both in and around Paris from 1257 to 1267; with a lengthy display of parallel passages in parallel columns (and a Swedish abstract of this contribution to a Festschrift for the explorer Sven Hedin). A valuable groundwork for any study of the knowledge of the Mongols in Europe or the sources of Roger Bacon.”
It is advertised as due to be re-printed by Georgias Press ( as Analecta Gorgiana 761) at the time of writing.