Here’s news of a cipher mystery sent my way by generous Spanish blogger Eloy Caballero (who I enjoyed talking with at the Voynich Centenary conference in Frascati). Biblioteca Nacional de Madrid MSS/994 is “Memorial de los servicios prestados a los Reyes Felipe II y Felipe III por D. Luis Valle de la Zerda, correspondencia y documentos del mismo“. All the description of MSS/994 on p.216 of the general inventory is:-
“8. La cifra que Geronio Sertori milanes ofreció a S. M. por suya, y el Consejó de Estado la cometió para que la viese Luis Valle de la Zerda, el cual mostró al dicho Sertori un papel en que estaba la misma declarada por el al Rey Don Phelippe Segundo [hacía 15 años]” (fol.83 – 91[?]).
Now, Luis Valle de la Cerda (1552[?]-1606) was a courtier who not only had in 1590 reformed the Spanish national finances with the introduction of what was effectively state pawnshops [the ‘Montes de Piedad’, there’s a 2003 book by Anne Dubet on his role in that if you’re interested], but had also been made Cipher Secretary by Philip II: MSS/994 is a collection of a few choice cipher documents and keys collected and copied by him.
So far, so obscure: but what triggered this manuscript’s recent lurch into visibility was a PhD final year project by Sara Gómez Hernández, who transcribed this Sirtori cipher together with a Spanish cipher used when sending back descriptions of mines in India (but for which the cipher key has long been lost), and ran them through the well-known Cryptool online app. Though I might well have misinterpreted her results, her conclusion seems (to me) to be that these aren’t fancy-pants Vigenère polyalphas but rather just monoalphabetic ciphers (though she doesn’t offer anything so useful as a decryption of either, sorry all you armchair treasure hunters!)
Anyway, here’s a tidied-up version of Hernández’s Figure 8, which shows the 27-symbol transcription she settled upon for the Sirtori cipher:-
This yields this transcription:-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The three pages of ciphertext Hernández includes are (I think) page 85,
page 86, and page 87.
By now, you pretty much all know me well enough to have worked out my first question, which is (of course): do I believe this transcription? Because if you start out by getting the transcription basically wrong, there’s a high chance you’ll have little or no success with all the subsequent stages that stand upon that transcription.
So, let’s look closely at the first line of the second paragraph, not because I’m trying to be difficult but because it’s slightly clearer on the page than the first paragraph. Note that I’ve split it up into two halves to make it fit nicely on the screen:
Can you see the problem yet? What seems to have happened is that nearly all the punctuation-like marks have been discarded in the transcription (and for what reason? None!)… but this is surely a recipe for disaster! 🙁 Look again at my colourized version, and I think you’ll see quite a different text…
Now, only loosely following the key above I would transcribe this not as “YRSRPFPFNGD” (and what’s that all about?) but as “YR; S.E, NS3 YS, JR, NGE. , ,“, which is hugely different. So… am I at all surprised that Cryptool was unable to break such a wobbly transcription? No, sadly I am not. 🙁
And with that, I pass the whole thing over to my esteemed friend Mr Tony Gaffney to transcribe and crack his own way. He’ll see straight through its superficial scribal flourishes, so I suspect this will be right up his street. Go for it, Tony! (And the rest of you try to keep up!) 🙂
PS: incidentally, there’s some online discussion on this here in the Spanish Kriptopolis security blog, but I didn’t notice anything that seemed hugely informative or crackworthy – please feel free to tell me if I’ve missed something big there!
Nick,
I also refer you to the “Shady Character” site. He brings us “up to date” on a lot of notations that medieval script writers used, whether they were “court” reporters/secretaries, student scientists, or occupants of scriptoriums. (One of the features, the backward ‘P’ is one I mentioned several weeks ago.) He will be discussing many of the “mystery” elements of the Vms (colon, semi-colon, dots, parentheses….) as they appear in elderly handwritten documents as well as various notations/instructions to typesetters.
Fascinating! Quite relevant to your blog activities/investigations.
http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk
What I find interesting is that the cipher symbols don’t appear to be invented ones at all.
Hi Nick,
I think it says –
“Thars gold in them thar hills”
Is there any examples of Sirtoris plain writing available?
Tony
Tony: Sirtori was a Milanese courtier who later wrote a book on telescopes in Latin (“Telescopium, sive ars perficiendi”) yet spent much of his time in Spain. There’s an online scan of his book here – http://dfg-viewer.de/v2/?set%5Bmets%5D=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.zvdd.de%2Fdms%2Fmetsresolver%2F%3FPPN%3Durn%3Anbn%3Ade%3Absz%3A14-db-id2713843603&set%5Bimage%5D=1 – it’s just normal Latin, nothing really fancy as far as I can see. I’ll have a look to see if there’s anything else by him out there…
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Greetings, Nick.
I though it right to give you an advance of my proposal for the decyphering of the Sirtori Document, more precisely for the first letter (page 85).
First, my transcription once I made the substitutions that led me to my final interpretation:
S.R, DEO GD. SN,. AQ^,. NQ^,. IND. NONL,.
EDO VN UCD. LV. IAG, EIC. HO.
LN, NO,. N`. P^N AG. .E. LQ^, P^C, N^%Q^.,
SI, UO. VOI. UO., R”Q^ NQ^O NON, IA”,.
DG, .F. D.ON. SUS”. HP^,. VP^, .EL,. P^IN,.
R”D . D.OV. AS, IU P^OCI,.
R”Q^: N. D, IN^O, R”N, LQ^, IAD.,,
GUO, EDG. A^, .E. F^O. ED, IX^. DN^.
L.D. DN,. IU, VGO. HO,,. IQ^, V,V
IA”. N^L. R”P”, ND. R”P”, GE. U^ SION
IO ,I, I, E^. AN^ LR^. NN^D. DR^P”,.
EY. SG.B,,, D, EIX^ N^N LP^,,
P^NU” DR^ IN^A” IO, DO
R^N^ Q^I S^
G N” I,
SIR^ GI
Which I interpret as (Latin):
Serenissimus Rex:
Deo grandis sane atquem nuncquam indignus nonnullam
edo in undique lux iacio eicio hodie
lingua novis plane ago loquor princeps nequaquam
si utor volui ultro requiro nequeo non iam
Deo gratias dono suus ubinque eligo
Redigo auctoritas iudicium princeps occidentalis
Requiro non donatio ineo rescindo loquor in advolo
Guberno educere ars est fero edurus iudex dignus
Liberale Domine, diligens iubeo valgo. Hospes inquam visus
Iam nullus reperium nondum repugnat, gens usque Sion
Io indignus inclamo animus lucrum nondum descriptum
Ecqui singularis bonus donatio eiiectum non lapideus
Pecuniosus desero interea, io do.
Rogito nanciscor qui servus
Gloria Nobilis Ingens
Sirtori Girolamo
And my tentative translation to English (I did Latin–>Spanish–>English):
Serenissimus King:
God almighty has no doubt allowed that someone as unworthy as I am, can release this new language (tongue, cypher?) today.
By addressing the Prince like this, in no way I intend to enforce a deal, which anyway I couldn’t.
Thank God, I give it to your majesty as your own, to use wherever you please, and I submit it to the authority and the judgment of the Western Prince.
Nothing I demand in return to start working with this tongue.
In the same way that you, like a worthy judge, willingly support the great burden of governing, I’m willing to thoroughly do as I am told; and I say honestly that nobody will be able to disentangle it, not even a Hebrew scholar (? A native of Sion??).
Undeserving as I am, I declare that I don’t expect to be paid anything, for wealth I do not seek, except perhaps the richness of being able to liberate you from of the burdens that weigh like a stone on you.
In the meantime, I keep waiting….(your decision)
Submits to your consideration, your faithful servant
Glory to the greatest among the Noble
Sirtori Girolamo
I’ve posted about it in Spanish at
http://ideasexcel.com/una-solucion-a-medida-para-el-documento-sirtori/
where a video is available detailing my workings with Excel.
Discussion continues at kriptopolis and in general, people don’t give it complete credit, though there seems to be agreement in the fact that it may contain some important clues.
I think everybody is expecting something more solid, in mathematical or cryptographical terms. And to tell you the truth, I was expecting that too.
Best Regards.
Eloy: personally, I think you’re most of the way there… though not at the finishing line quite yet. What is intriguing to me is that despite the fact that I’ve been saying that the Voynich Manuscript is almost certainly a combination of cipher and (Milanese) scribal shorthand, I haven’t actually seen any examples of that “in the wild” – and if Sirtori’s cipher is indeed a cipher & (Milanese) scribal shorthand mix (as opposed to a cipher + Tironian notae mix), then you’ve done very well to get this far, because cracking that is like having to make two leaps within the same jump.
The interesting question for me is whether you managed to work out the shorthand correspondences for the various non-alphabetic signs (^.,) [i.e. ^/,/. = subscriptio/contractio/abbrevatio?], whether they are just nulls, or whether you guessed. 🙂
Well, after so many failed attempts at considering arcs, dots and commas as characters on their own right, I began to take seriously the “abbreviations/omisions hypothesis”. Also the over abundant frequencies of these symbols was a problem, very difficult to reconcile with either Latin, Italian or Spanish.
Under this considerations, and since most of the words in the Sirtori Document are only 2 or 3 characters long, and almost always punctuated or arched, I decided that my suppossition was not too far fetched after all. The problem then was how to differentiate the role each symbol played, and I was at a loss at this until reading a short tale by Lovecraft ( The Case of Charles Dexter Ward) I saw the way inverted arcs were used in Latin for ellipses in words, for instance aq^ for aqua.
I came across Sirtori’s second book “Compendium Politicum”. Here I saw that arcs were nothing more than printing tricks to fit lines, also that Latin particles with a qu… beginning (quam, quo, quidem,….) were very often abreviated as q with a small scribble in the lower part, and finally that dotted abbreviations and initials were quite common.
I checked new subtitutions, Q was a key value and also N. Once these two were in place, words came out relatively smoothly. “S”, “R” and “I” were pretty clear because of the signature, as people at Kriptopolis had previously suggested. The places of “A” and “O” were a problem and I was reticent to exchange them because frequency indicated so, but the moment I exchanged them, things began to look more hopeful.
I spoke of there being no glamour in the proccess, and it’s true that the final search for words was sort of a clamber. Sincerely, I had no confidence at all in reaching anywhere and was more than anything worried at the amount of time this affair was taking, but to my own astonishment, not only sensible words came out, but also meaningful sentences emerged, and the whole letter in the end had a logical structure for the goals of a scholar who is addressing a king in order to submit a petition related to a cypher.
Greeting, humbling, offering, rejecting compensation, expecting evaluation… I couldn’ believe it.
One of the objections I’m encountering at Kriptopolis is that there are to many degrees of freedom and everything can come out in these conditions. And I agree with everyone to that, but I think when we limit ourselves to Latin and we consider the rest of facts things can be regarded in a different manner.
Also, according to my solution, Sirtori wasn’t entirely consistent in applying a method. Sometimes he abbreviates in one way, some other times in a different way. Arcs may be in the middle or in the end, and the PI-like symbol (Q in my transcription) is always arched. Dots are almost always there, but not 100% of the times, and a few times preceeding, not following. The role of commas is still obscure to me, unless they are there only to confuse a potential code breaker. Once you can even find three of them in a row.
Eloy: I’ll need to have a think about this. As I said before, I’m pretty sure you’re close to the solution… the issue is how close you are. I’ll cross-check with his Compendium Politicum, that seems like an excellent source for his approach to language. 🙂