I recently found an old email from Sander Manche mentioning his Voynich blog: going through its pages just now, one particular post on letters hidden in Voynich plants jumped out at me. To be precise, it discussed a single symbol that appears to have been hidden in the middle of the plant drawings on both f20r…
…and f32r…
Sander wondered whether this might be an ultra-rare Voynichese letter. It’s not, but I think it’s something even better: a “p”-like letter that appears both in the marginalia and hidden in a separate Voynich plant drawing. I discussed this subject at some length back in 2010, but the upshot is that f9v (the “viola tricolor” page, A.K.A. “love in idleness“), the marginalia on f66r (once) and the marginalia on f116v (twice) all contain this same character. Here’s what they look like (ignore the f4r part):-
Incidentally, there’s an interesting 2011 page from P. Han describing the viola on f9v, concluding (as I think others have done) that it was drawn upside down from life by an artist rather than a botanist, who tried to depict both the front and back views of the plant.
What are these “p”-like shapes for? Why did the author(s) bother to add them? I don’t necessarily buy into René Zandbergen’s idea that the letter-triple on f9v reads “rot”, an instruction to a German-speaking colourist to paint the drawing’s petals red. (For a start, viola tricolor isn’t even slightly red.) But all the same, I’d really like to see multispectral scans of f9v so that we can better work out exactly what is going on there. For now, f9v remains a mystery.
All three appear in Currier A / Hand 1 herbal pages, but otherwise have no obvious connection: I’d suggest that these might have been the first (“primum“) pages of individual quires in the original plaintext. That is, I suspect that these “p”-shapes might in some way be encrypted ‘Herbal A’ quire marks. Fascinatingly, the shapes appear to have been added in a slightly different ink (as per the McCrone report,), so perhaps at a different time: which means that a multispectral scan should probably be able to de-layer all such writing.
Personally, I think the presence of Voynichese in the marginalia (both on f116v and on f17r, with the latter only visible under a UV black-lamp) was already pretty close to a slam-dunk proof that most of the marginalia were added by the original author. But in my opinion, also finding the same “p”-like shape apparently concealed in three plant drawings basically makes this whole link a dead cert.
The bigger point here is that at some time, my long-standing inference that nearly all the Voynich Manuscript’s marginalia were added by the original author(s) will probably become some kind of grudgingly-held mainstream opinion: but what of it? So what?
Personally, I think this is a really big deal, because it elevates the whole “michiton oladabas” tangled mess on f116v from a secondary issue (i.e. “it’s something that could conceivably have just happened to the Voynich Manuscript, so we needn’t really worry about it”) to a primary issue (i.e. “it’s an integral part of the original manuscript and we need to understand it”).
A single multispectral scan of f116v would take less than 10 seconds to perform, and might well open a completely different set of research doors to us. Of course, I’m still a bit disappointed that the Beinecke turned my multispectral proposals down in 2006, but hey: doubtless they’ll catch up with me in the end. I’m normally eight years or so ahead of the game, so set your alarm clock for 2013! 🙂
Update: having put all this together, I discovered that (of course) some of it was anticipated by a nice page posted by Reuben Ogburn in 2004. Oh well!
http://www.studiolum.com/wang/istanbul/muteferrika/muteferrika-hasan-suuri-lisan-ul-acem-1742.jpg
If I’m correct in reading mnemonic devices set in the roots of these plants, the letters might represent the instructions informing them: for example, names in various languages, or the purpose(s) for which the plant or parts of it were used. Violets were used in both perfumery and medicine, as well as for sweets. I think an extract of violets was used to infuse fine – glove- leather with scent too. Were there scented inks?
Extraordinary coincidence.
I had to refer to my copy of Isidore’s Etymologies – which is just the CUP paperback. On the cover there is a strip of writing with letters divided by dots. Do see what you think of it.
Hi Nick: It is mentioned by someone on your other page about these characters, but I mention it again, as Elmar has given these some thought also: http://voynichthoughts.wordpress.com/2009/07/08/thorn-in-my-side/
Rich: yes, it could – as Elmar suggests – be a thorn. Ye jury is still out, meyinks! 😉
Ye jury is lost in the forest.
Me thinketh y’all might want to take another look at Edith Sherwood’s take on the “O ladaba references. See if any of her (and her daughter’s) findings/identifications of the botanicals might have inadvertently verified some of your latest discovery of the single-letter notations. One plant, that was still “a mystery” to her was what appeared to me to be a palm tree branch. One area near “O ladaba” was River of Palms (I THINK). I don’t have my atlases at hand right now. Also, I believe there were mines nearby. ??
Oops! I’m clarifying my earlier post. O ladaba (or O labada?) appears on antique maps made by Portuguese explorer/exploiters in the 1400’s-1600’s on the coast of what is now Nigeria. Today, it is identified as Ladaba Oke. So, are you thoroughly bored by now? I’m not sure if the nearby river is the same that is identified on antique atlases as River of Palms. Perhaps there might still be references somewhere to the local mines. ??
Bobbi: it is of course entirely possible that Edith Sherwood has stumbled onto something huge here. But I suspect that it is several thousand times more likely that the reason people are able to get such a wildly divergent set of readings of the f116v marginalia is that they were emended by a later owner. Until such time as a proper study of these marginalia has been carried out, nobody really knows, not even Edith. My personal guess is that the original first word here was probably “nichil”, while the original second word was very possibly “obstat” (but they’ve all been merged into one another)… but all the same, that’s just a guess. 🙂
Nick: I’ve spent a “few” hours cruising for info on earliest visitors to the modern-day location of “oladaba” “ladaba oke”. Yep, the Portuguese in the late 15th century. Today, the location is the Shell Oil plant. Several centuries before Shell Oil moved in, the location was a shipping point for traders of palm oil, bronzes, and ivory carvings –and slaves. I’m headed back to Edith’s website to see if I can get in touch with her or her daughter. Do you know anyone who might be able to attempt decipherment into Portuguese?
Bobbi: no, sorry I don’t (though I do know people have tried Portuguese as a candidate plaintext language for Voynichese without any success).
I still wonder if it is a cypher at all. Back in the 1970’s, the City Clerk for the city of San Jose, California hired a professional translator to translate the correspondence between the 18th-19th century Spanish missions of Monterey and San Jose. The translator had difficulty with the translation because the words were in an archaic “court reporter” style of shorthand used for correspondence with the Royal court of Spain. So, I’m wondering if one of the Portuguese ships (that traded w/Benin in the 15th-16th centuries may have had a “scribe” on board.
I’ve been cruising a lot of websites trying to determine if Prince Henry the Navigator’s ships had any “botanist-herbalists” on board. Apparently, one of his cartographers was Jewish and apparently fluent in several languages, as well as being an expert botanist/doctor. I’ve focused on the “papaver-somniferum” in particular. Yep, the plant was native to Northwest Africa. Do you think one of your cryptographer buddies might be able to do a translation of the mystery script by a three or four-step method: Ebo-Portuguese-Hebrew (for instance Hebrew word for God: Yah Weh: YHWH..etc). I’m going to try to contact Edith Sherwood or her daughter Erica. We can probably ALL get around the da vinci references and still find a “gold mine” of information related to Elmina and Oladaba (today known as Ladaba Oke).
(these paragraphs are probably in reverse order, but try to connect the dots……)
One of the Portuguese ship-masters was apparently doomed to some 30 years of “exploration/expansion of territory. I’m pretty sure most of your correspondents have already sailed down that path (?). Nonetheless — I have many times followed a hunch to very rewarding results. I am a former records management paralegal. I love digging through historical events & issues. One of my all-time favorite mystery novels is Josephine Tey’s classic “Daughter of Time”. …….
Bobbi
re “One of the Portuguese ship-masters was apparently doomed to some 30 years of “exploration/expansion of territory”
Very interesting. Any refs for it?
An article by Tzvi Langermann mentions that in a medical florilegium is included a treatise on pharmacological theory whose translated title is “the stratagems of compounding [according to views of Ibn Rushd]”, written by “Maestro Viole. Langermann thinks the word may be a miswriting – that it should say … of Rhodes”, but he adds that the same author is mentioned by Isaac de Lattes.
The idea was to diagnose the complaint in terms of its particular ratio of the four humors, and then to compound a medicine whose ingredients were calculated to exactly counteract.
“diseases were the manifestation of imbalances within one or both of the two pairs of opposite qualities, hot-cold and wet-dry. These imbalanceis could be quantified … the physician could determine [for example] that a certain illness was hot in the second degree and wet in the first. Medicinal substances were classifed in an
analogous fashion…[so] the physician could prescribe a
medicine that was cold in the second degree and dry in the flrst, which would rectify the illness given in our example above.
All sounds rather like, I think.
for plant identity, flow charts are best
I know this may not be the best place for this, therefore I will post anyway.
I was running some Voynich Images through Gimp and I think I may have found some more hidden writing on 11v bottom of the bottom row of leaves. I have not been able to fully clean them up because I don’t have the skills in Gimp to do this. I may have missed it and this has been known for some time but I am throwing it out for someone to verify.
Donald: thanks for passing this on, I’ll have a look at this as soon as I can. Both I and the late Glen Claston (and a number of others) assiduously worked our way through each scan looking for stuff exactly like this, but unfortunately my notes aren’t close to hand at the minute. 🙁
I suppose it may be a case of seeing what I want to see. The letters stand out in a very distinctive way and if it is what I am seeing then they are decidedly not like any others found in the ms.
Donald,
You mean the folio which is Beinecke (new scan) 1006097, yes?
here:
http //beinecke1 library yale edu/download/Voynich-New/Voynich-New-Object_ID-JPEG/1006097 jpg
There are a few different systems around, and wires are easily crossed, so just making sure…
Hi Donald,
I can see what you mean, although if we’re looking at the same thing I think I’m looking at part of the botanical drawing rather than lettering. Can you make sense of this as lettering?
Talking of letters hidden in plants, if I were to draw up a list of these, does anyone have any suggestions for a fairly stable place to put this online? Not that I have anything groundbreaking or very original to say, but at least it makes the stuff available for wiser heads than mine to use.
SirHubert: it’s something that bugs me as well. Cipher Mysteries has traditionally avoided being that kind of a resource, but perhaps that’s something that should change…
D.Vaughn. A couple of things you can try in GIMP. You can make the background transparent using the fuzzy wand tool. That selects the background then turn the background to alpha level. that should isolate any darker colourings. Next thing you could try, and my apologies if you’ve already done this, is to make sure you have your screen resolution set to high and then of course you can print out the image that you are examining, before doing so make sue you have the printer resolution set to ‘Best’ or Vibrant or whatever the optimum is on your printer. I would try heavier paper such as 150GSM to print, depending on the paper quality, lower GSM papers can throw up background ‘noise’ for want of a better term. Once you have done that I suggest you get a UV globe from a hardware store and examine your printed out image under that light and also try placing the light behind the printed image. Strong backlighting and oblique lighting may also improve your view. Use a macro lens camera to get closeup images rather than a zoom. Hope this helps.
Thank you Gordon, I will give those suggestions a shot. Unfortunately other things have kept me from working on the image. I am about 70% sure from a codicology perspective I am observing purposeful characters.
I guess I am almost to the point that I should step away before I develop any real opinions on the manuscript.
There is something exciting in f50v (blue area, look downwards from its center). Not a color code, a lengthy word. Seems to begin with the letter “g”. I was not able to extract it though. All I can do is just blindly move the sliders, which is not sufficient in this case.