Klaus Schmeh Voynich audio interview…

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Klaus Schmeh, a German encryption professional who over the last couple of years has become increasingly fascinated by the cipher mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, has just been interviewed by the sparky skeptics at Righteous Indignation for their Episode #76 – Klaus’ VMs section runs from 25:50 to 45:45, and gives a fairly pragmatic introduction to the Voynich Manuscript. This was prompted by his Voynich talk at the 14th European Skeptics Conference in Budapest earlier this year (2010).

In fact, it’s quite revealing to see how far he has come from a 2008 German skeptic conference he also talked at (discussed here) [where he fell in behind the mainstream 16th century hoax position] and a 2008 article he wrote (which I reviewed here): it’s nice to see that he’s moved from seeing pretty much everything Voynichese as a combination of pseudoscience and pseudohistory to a rather more nuanced (and realistic) position.

But all the same, looking forward, to where should Voynich skepticism go from here? From what we now know, I’d say there are no obvious grounds for a hardcore skeptical position any more – the vellum seems genuinely old, with the ink freshly written on it, and the radiocarbon dating broadly meshing with the kind of evidence I’ve been working on for the last 5+ years, vis-à-vis:

  • The ‘4o’ verbose pair’s brief appearance in various Northern Italian cipher keys 1440-1456 (see The Curse Of The Voynich pp.175-179)
  • The parallel hatching which I suspect pretty much forces a post-1440 date if it was made in Italy, or post-1410 if Germany
  • The two 15th century hands in the marginalia which pretty much force a pre-1500 date for the VMs
  • Sergio Toresella’s very specific dating claim, based on his lifetime with herbal manuscripts – that it was made in Northern Italy (probably Milan or the Venice region) around 1460

The swallow-tail merlons on the two castle walls (on the nine-rosette page) that Klaus mentioned in the podcast have actually been debated for at least a decade: although these don’t prove that the Voynich Manuscript was constructed in Northern Italy (where they were an unmissable feature of many castles), they clearly do help to shift the balance of probability that way away from Germany (the #2 candidate region).

And I suppose this is where all this is going: by carefully combining all these pieces together, we can now try to think about the Voynich in terms of probabilities. Even if you discount my Antonio Averlino hypothesis, I don’t honestly mind being what I call “the right kind of wrong” – i.e. looking in the right culture, place, and time, but perhaps finding a false positive to match a very specific forensic profile. Just so you know, I’d currently rate the likelihood of the VMs’s origin’s being Northern Italy at ~80%, Savoy ~10%, Germany ~5%, and anywhere else ~5%.

Hence, if someone were to tell me tomorrow that they’d just uncovered a fifteenth century letter clearly describing the Voynich Manuscript as having been written by Giovanni Fontana, Cicco Simonetta, Brunelleschi, Lorenzo Ghiberti, Leon Battista Alberti, or any one of the hundreds of other desperately clever Northern Italian polymaths who were right there at the birth of the Renaissance, I’d be utterly delighted: for I think that is the cultural milieu linking pretty much all the strands of tangible (as opposed to merely suggestive) evidence to date.

The notions that we know nothing about the VMs and/or that it is somehow destined to be proven a meaningless hoax are not ‘skeptical’ in the true sense of the word: rather, they are postmodernist non-positions, uncritical ‘meh‘s in the face of the interconnected mass of subtle – but nonetheless tangible – historical evidence VMs researchers have carefully accumulated. In the case of the Voynich Manuscript, I think the real “beliefs that are taken for granted by most of the population” at which skeptics should be pointing their weapons of mass deconstruction are not this kind of painstakingly-assembled gear-train, but the widely-disseminated (and utterly fallacious) claim that the VMs is a 16th century hoax for financial gain.

In a way, this would turn Klaus’ own skeptical research chain back on itself – and in so doing would hopefully set him free. “More Schmeh, less meh“, eh? 🙂

“The Cadence of Gypsies” on its way…

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Here comes another book to add to my Big Fat List of Voynich novels: the just-about-released-any-day-now The Cadence of Gypsies by Barbara Casey. It has a fairly straightforward setup:

On her 18th birthday Carolina Lovel learned that she was adopted and was given a letter written by her birth mother in an unknown language. After years of research she travels to Italy on a mission to find the truth about her past.  Carolina is accompanied by three extremely gifted but mischievous  students the FIGs from Wood Rose Orphanage and Academy for Young Women.  In an effort to help their favorite teacher, the FIGs will have to use their special abilities to decipher the Voynich Manuscript, the most mysterious document in the world, and the one thing that is strangely similar to what Carolina was given. Their search will take them into the mystical world of gypsy tradition and magic, more exciting and dangerous than any of them could have imagined.

So… yes, it’s more Voynich teen fiction, continuing the mini-wave started by the sparky “That’s Life, Samara Brooks”. Enjoy!

First photograph by Durer of a Da Vinci drawing? Riiiiight…

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You may have heard the curious story from May 2008 about how Sotheby’s withdrew a picture from auction that was suspected of having been optically captured by Thomas Wedgwood in the 1790s, some 30 years before the first ‘official’ photo was taken. Photography historian Dr Larry J. Schaaf speculated that this was so “based on the letter ‘W’ that – on close inspection – can be seen inscribed in an ‘unidentified hand’ in the bottom-right corner of the image and four others” in an album of early images known to have been owned by Englishman Henry Bright.

While this is a neat little narrative built on a tiny handwritten feature in the margins, it’s – quite frankly – just not crackpot enough to make the grade here. Here at Cipher Mysteries Towers, our palettes have become accustomed to overspiced Voynich Manuscript and Phaistos Disc theories, typically high-Scoville historical decoctions that would blow most historians’ mouths off. So, all I can say to all you photographic pseudo-historians out there is – guys, guys, you’re going to have to do better than that to make the front page here.

And so it is with a sense of both pride and awe that I doff my cap to Welshman Roger Davies. His theory – which is his, and his alone, so far as I can make out – is that Dürer’s 9-inch high 1514 engraving meisterwerke “Melancholia #1” is actually a photograph of a large (but lost) drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, probably with an exposure time of several days.

What first alerted Davies was the facial similarities between Albrecht Dürer’s cherub and a Leonardo cherub in a “sketch held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen, France“. He then sketched out Dürer’s perspective, only to discover an underlying 532-point circle which trickily aligns to a good number of the picture’s features in a ‘sacred geometry’ kind of way. Davies then points to 1480 (34 years back from 1514, where 34 is the total of each line of Dürer’s magic square in the picture) and 2012 (532 years forward from 1480), but then corrects the figure to 2001, midway between the 1997 Montserrat volcanic events and the 2004 Asian tsunami.

Are you following all this?

With more than an echo of Wilfrid Voynich’s connecting the VMs with Roger Bacon and John Dee, “Davies believes that the artist must have possessed an extensive knowledge of mathematics, alchemy, geometry, astronomy and optics to, first, conceive the drawing and then photograph it onto a light-sensitive copper plate inside a camera obscura. The only person with such skills, according to Davies, was Da Vinci.”

Not yet convinced by this? “Dürer’s connection with Da Vinci also lies in their sharing the same ‘mentor in mathematics’, Luca Pacioli“, the article continues. Well, that settles it, then. 🙂

(Note that the online article is in four pieces but the internal links are broken: so here are direct links to pages 2, 3, and 4 of it).

Sean Palmer’s Voynichese word generator…

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A little bird (hi, Terri) told me about a flurry of activity on the Voynich mailing list prompted by some posting by Sean Palmer, who Cipher Mysteries readers may remember from his pages on Michitonese and the month names. Well, this time round he’s gone after a rather more ambitious target – the internal word structure of Voynichese.

Loosely building on Jorge Stolfi’s work on Voynichese word paradigms, Sean proposes a broadly inclusive Voynichese word generator:-

^                      <---- i.e. start of a word
(q | y | [ktfp])*      <---- i.e. one or more instances of this group
(C | T | D | A | O)*   <---- i.e. one or more instances of this group
(y | m | g)?           <---- i.e. 0 or 1 instances of this group
$                      <---- i.e. end of a word
...where...
C = [cs][ktfp]*h*e*    <---- i.e. basically (ch | sh | c-gallows-h) followed by 0 or more e's
T = [ktfp]+e*          <---- i.e. gallows character followed by 0 or more e's

D = [dslr]             <---- i.e. (d | s | l | r)
A = ai*n*              <---- i.e. basically (a | an | ain | aiin | aiiin)
O = o

Sean says that his word paradigm accounts for 95% (later 97%) of Voynichese words, but I’d say that (just as Philip Neal points out in his reply) this is because it generates way too many words: what it gains in coverage, it loses in tightness (and more on this below).

Philip Neal’s own Voynichese word generator looks something like this:-

^
(d | k | l | p | r | s | t)?
(o | a)?
(l | r)?
(f | k | p | t)?
(sh | ch )?
(e | ee | eee | eeee)?
(d | cfh | ckh | cph | cth)?
(a | o) ?
(m | n | l | in | iin | iiin)?
(y)?
$

Though this is *much* tighter than Sean’s, it still fails to nail the tail to the sail (I just made that up). By 2003, I’d convinced myself that the flavour of Voynichese wasn’t ever going to be satisfactorily captured by any sequential generator, so I tried defining an experimental Markov state-machine to give an ultra-tight word generator:-

It wasn’t by any means perfect (there’s no p and f characters, for a start), but it was the kind of thing I’d expect a “properly tight” word paradigm to look like. But even this proved unsatisfactory, because that was about the time when I started seeing o / a / y as multivalent, by which I mean “performing different roles in different contexts”. Specifically:-

  • Is the ‘o’ in ‘qo’ the same as the ‘o’ in ‘ol’ or ‘or’?
  • Is the ‘a’ in ‘aiin’ the same as the ‘a’ in ‘al’ or the ‘a’ in ‘ar’?
  • Is word-initial ‘y’ the same as word-terminal ‘y’?

Personally, I think the answer to all three of these questions is an emphatic ‘no’: and so for me it was the shortest of ceonceptual hops from there to seeing these as elements of a verbose cipher. Even if you disagree with me about the presence of verbose cipher in the system, I think satisfactorily accounting for o / a / y remains a problem for all proposed cipher systems, as these appear to be knitted-in to the overwhelming majority of glyph-level adjacency rules / structures.

Really, the test of a good word generator is not raw dictionary coverage but instance coverage (“tightness”), by which I mean “what percentage of a given paradigm’s generated words does the instances-as-observed make up”.

Philip’s paradigm generates (8 x 3 x 3 x 5 x 3 x 5 6 x 3 x 7 x 2) = 1,360,800 possible words, while my four-column generator produces – errrrm – no more than 1192 (I think, please correct me if I’m wrong): by contrast, Sean’s generator is essentially infinite. OK, it’s true that each of the three is optimized around different ideas, so it’s probably not entirely fair to compare them like this. All the same (and particularly when you look at Currier A / B sections, labels, etc), I think that tightness will always be more revealing than coverage. And you can quote me on that! 😉

J.K.Rowling apologizes for Voynich Manuscript, just a “viral marketing prank”…

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London, UK, 11 Nov 2010. In a surprising twist worthy of Voldemort himself, A-list children’s author and philanthropist J.K.Rowling has stepped forward to claim responsibility for the popular Internet cipher mystery meme “The Voynich Manuscript”.

She now says it all was a 1990 publicity stunt for an early release of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”, which was – much like Norwegian band’s a-ha’s 1985 hit single “Take On Me” – released multiple times before gaining market acceptance from young readers. Rowling’s first version (“Harry Otter and the Voynich Manuscript“) was set in “Hogshead School of Wizardry” and introduced many of the timeless elements of her story that toy conglomerates have since stripmined so mercilessly, but where all the characters were animals – for example, Ron Weasel, Hermione Echidna, and the ancient Albus Iguanodon (though note that Rubeus Hagfish played only a minor role).

In an attempt to promote her book to publishers, Rowling assembled her own ‘Voynich Manuscript’ on cafe tables in Edinburgh on old vellum she’d bought in a jumble sale, and added a threadbare cover story linking it to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II that ought to make any sensible historian shake his or her head in appalled disbelief: the fake manuscript then somehow ended up in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (much to its curators’ embarrassment). But once some early Internet chat group participants got hold of low-quality “CopyFlo” scans of it and decided to try to ‘crack’ its cipher, the rest is cryptographic and cultural history.

“To all the codebreakers who have fruitlessly spent decades on this, I can only apologize for my viral marketing prank”, says Rowling. “Honestly, I tried to flag it was a fake on the first page but perhaps the clue was simply too obvious:-”

As a postscript, Rowling did subsequently manage to get all copies of “Harry Otter and the Voynich Manuscript” pulped: however, copies of her intermediate version (“Harry Snotter and the Handkerchief of Doom”) do still occasionally come up at auction. Jim Reeds was unavailable for comment yesterday.

Another Voynich miscellany for you…

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Even though things are pretty quiet here in Cipher Mysteries Mansions, there’s still a backlog of minor Voynichiana to deal with. Wish me luck, here goes…

  1. Here’s a Russian-language 2010 ‘Internet Edition’ facsimile of the Voynich Manuscript. Might end up cheaper than the Gawsewitch edition, who knows?
  2. Here’s a webcomic from 2003 where the artist (David Morgan) draws the frames, people suggest text, and he loosely merges them together into something. Merely a bit of Voynich name-dropping, nothing as contrived as XKCD etc.
  3. Here’s a logo inspired by mixing up Voynichese and pictures of neutron stars (love the brief). What’s particularly nice is that the artist included all his inbetween sketches (so you can see why only one Voynichese letter made it through to the end). Just so you know, it was for a “group of what might be best described as soldier/mailcarriers in a science fiction erotica novel“. Yeah, we get a lot of those in Surbiton (probably in The Victoria, I suspect), they also need logos to distinguish themselves. (Note: the site can be a bit slow to load, but it normally gets there in the end).
  4. Another music track named “Voynich” for your MP3 collection.

“The Voynich Tattoo”

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Such a stupid thing for a bright kid to do: pinballing through her mid-teen rebellion, Jena Kyng had wanted to demonstrate some kind of unbranded online tribal allegiance, and ended up with two lines of Voynichese across her lower back (from the end paragraph of page f67r2, as if anyone off-list really cared). Though in many ways, she’d had a lucky escape: imagine ending up with that bozo Gap logo as a tattoo – now that would have really sucked.

But since then, her whole A-grade student train had derailed: and once bad boy boyfriend #1 had morphed into worse boyfriend #2, it was surely just a matter of time before her steadily-growing drink, drugs and abusive partner habits all conspired to help her paint herself into a truly dismal corner of society. All that Voynich research graft lay long behind her: why bother about history when you can see no future?

Countless times since she’d tried to fit herself into straight-ass day jobs, but the minute she got asked to work extra, she’d elevate the royal middle digit… and then it was just a matter of days before the order came from on high to clear her desk. And so, like Michael Palin, Jena’s life now danced defiantly from inhospitable pole to pole – though she somehow doubted Palin could shake his aging Pythonic tush half as as well as her. It’s a skill, she liked to console herself, however minor in the big scheme of things.

So, welcome one and all to her latest home from home, the Green Lizard Club in Muskogee, Oklahoma – ‘Green’ because the owners had replaced all the seedy lighting with LED lamps, thus helping its patrons to feel as though they were saving the planet while stuffing high-denom bills into pole-dancers’ lithely minimalist underwear. Sure, it’s a big fat eco-gimmick: but everybody loves eco-gimmicks, right?

All the same, tonight had been shaping up to be a stultifyingly mediocre night to cap a shockingly shabby week. Jena’s only ray of hope left was the bunch of startup guys – no, not the wind turbine crew (who came in once with some terrified-looking VCs but never returned), but the social media gaggle on Table 3. Bright people, no doubt, but… social media in Muskogee? As if Dave McClure is ever going to drop by here, of all places. Well, not unless he’d absolutely insisted on a live demo from some MIT Star Trek teleportation spin-out. How vividly Daveski would swear if he found himself unexpectedly re-materialized on Okmulgee Avenue, eh?

So, when the lanky one with a testosteronal chin (a bit like a pumped-down Matt Damon) called over to her, she twisted her mouth into her second-best smile (“positive, life-affirming, it’s-great-to-make-money-off-you-geeks”) and danced towards the group. As you’d expect, they knew her name already, but of course she couldn’t give a rat’s ass about theirs. Life is easy when you just don’t care.

“Hey Jena”, Matt Jnr shouted over Hooverphonic’s sweet music, “I think there’s a problem with your tattoo.”

Well, she thought, m-a-y-b-e: but that was when she noticed The Handsome But Odd Guy in the group, mouth slightly open, looking straight through her with his puppy-dumb X-ray eyes. “A problem?” she replied, her PanAm Smile still intact.

“Our guy Rain Man wants to know why you have a Latin poison book for a tattoo”, the tall guy continued. “Oh, and just so you know, Nate’s got Asperger’s, which for him means he codes like an angel but doesn’t like to get out of the office much.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it’s not a poison recipe”, Jena replied turning towards him, a wave of minor cracklets starting to break round the edge of her working smile. “It’s from an astronomical page of…”

“multa michi circa venenorum materiam“, Nate was reading, “dubia occurrent quorum declaratio nixi. Pretty funny tattoo you’ve got there, Miss.”

There was an odd, whooshing sound in her head, as clusters of Jurassic synapses creakily reassembled a fossilized memory from way back when she was still a basically whole person. Yes: it was an incipit she’d seen before, back in her Voynich research life. And if so, then it was probably from Thorndike’s History of Magic & Experimental Science, most likely her favourite Volume IV. So, it would be… the second half of Antonius Guaynerius of Pavia’s twin treatise on plague and poison, composed before 1440. Might Guaynerius have been the Voynich Manuscript’s author? The raw electricity of the possibility surged up and down her, like lightning trying vainly to reach ground. But… even if the idea just happened to be consistent with the radiocarbon dating, nothing that speculative could be true, it was all some spooky coincidence. It had to be, right?

Against her will, Jena was starting to get just a little freaked out. If any of this was even remotely right, the guy Nate must be some kind of idiot savant, unable to tie his shoelaces but able to read the frickin’ Voynich Manuscript. She sneaked a sly glance at his shoes: slip-on Vans. As if I couldn’t guess, she thought. “Does your friend actually know Latin?”, she asked as casually as her quickening pulse would allow.

“Latin?” the lanky guy replied. “He’s always seemed happier talking in Python or C++ than English. But anyway, what is that crazy shit alphabet on your back?”

“Oh, it’s from the Voynich Manuscript, a kind of weird cipher mystery thing”, she said in the best noncommittal voice she could muster. “But I think I’d better show your man the next line down, see if he can read that too.”

She moved down to the startup guys’ table, and turned to face away from them. Down went the already skimpy silver lamé pole dancing underwear an extra two inches to reveal the only line of red writing in the whole of the VMs. Way back in her Voynich research days, she’d often wondered whether this might be the single line that would some day serve to crack its cipher system. So what would Asperger’s Nate make of it?

“It’s a beautiful thing”, the Odd Guy mumbled. “But I can’t make out the first word, may I move closer, Miss?”

“Uhhh… sure”, she said.

Nate moved right up close, and ran his index finger tenderly over the red letters with a kind of Braille-reading intensity. Instantly, her long-submerged memories of holding the Voynich Manuscript at the Beinecke Library surfaced, and exploded in the physicality of his touch. For that moment, her skin was the Voynich’s vellum, her tattoo was the Voynich’s ink, and she felt utterly entangled in time and space with the Voynich’s author (whoever he or she happened to be).

But… then Jena noticed out the corner of her eye that all the other startup guys were taking out their wallets, placing hundred dollar bills into a pile on the table, and shaking their heads.

“Sorry”, said Nate in a completely different (and totally normal) voice as he stood up, “I can’t make it out, Miss.”

“Hey…”, said Jena as each of the guys high-fived Nate, “what’s going on here?”

One of the group’s regulars, a bald-headed guy with comedy glasses – perhaps the in-house web designer?, she wondered – was laughing into his hand. “Sorry, Jena, it was just a joke. Nate bet us a hundred bucks each he’d get inside your panties tonight, and we all thought he had precisely zero chance.”

“You did this for money?” Jena spat at Nate. “You made a fool of my ass to make yourself some freakin’ money?”

“Oh no”, said Nate handing her the cash, “the money’s for you. These guys work for me, I just enjoyed the challenge. When Larry” – he pointed at the bald-headed guy – “showed me a picture of you on his cameraphone, I thought you looked cute, and – you know – one thing led to another.”

“But all that Antonius Guaynerius stuff”, Jena spluttered, “how on earth did you…”

“Ah, all your old postings to the Voynich mailing list are still online”, Nate smiled. “Didn’t take long to find something to bait the line.”

“You bastard”, Jena said sotto voce, “you… smart bastard” – but this time she could feel her eyes twinkling, for the first time in a couple of years. “You… gonna come back soon?”

“I think I will”, said Nate. “I rather like the view from this table.”

All of a sudden, Jena fancied doing some problem-solving herself.

Review of Brad Kelln’s “In Tongues of the Dead”…

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With “write what you know” apparently ringing loudly in his ears, Brad Kelln constructed his fictional protagonist Jake Tunnel to be, just like him, a Nova Scotia-based psychologist (and is Kelln married with young kids too? Almost certainly). But probably unlike Kelln, Tunnel’s best friend at college Benicio Valori constantly globetrots on behalf of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the lookout for claimed miracles, in a very Gabriel-Byrne-in-Stigmata (1999) kind of way.

Hence when an autistic boy on a primary school tour of the Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscripts Library is shown the Voynich Manuscript in a permanent glass display case [this never actually happens, but never mind] and is miraculously able to read it, Benicio is sent by the CDF’s morally-suspect-yet-self-harmingly-devout Cardinal Espinosa to check it out. Once again, all very Alfred-Molina-in-The-Da-Vinci-Code (2006), though of course this is no more than a slightly updated version of the centuries-old ‘wicked Jesuit’ trope for whom the (holy) end always justifies the (unholy) means. Oh, and the autistic kid is pretty much Simon Lynch in Mercury Rising (1998), who goes on a similarly mad road trip with Bruce Willis. La-di-da.

Rapidly, the boy is revealed to be the last of the Nephilim, a race of (what X-Files scriptwriters would term) ‘human-alien genetic hybrids’ fleetingtly mentioned in the Bible and about which Erich von Däniken has spent the majority of his life writing phantasmagorically imaginative historical nonsense. And hence the Voynich Manuscript is revealed to be the Nephilim Bible, a document so earth-shattering it would Rock The Very Foundations Of The Church If Anyone Were To Read It And Reveal Its Secrets etc.

Complicating the plot are Shemhazai and Azazel, the two cursed ‘Grigori’ aliens / angels who landed on Earth seventy generations ago and whose intergalactic miscegenatory misdeeds quite literally spawned all this trouble. Despite having awesomely glowing megatronic powers, the pair mooches around the book, languidly chasing after Benicio and the boy in an almost Rastafari laid-back stylee. And complicating the matter yet further are the CDF’s dysfunctional twin thugs Maury and Jeremy, who are also tasked with chasing after the protagonists.

Kelln’s book covers a lot of ground and tells its story briskly, but I couldn’t help but feel a bit cheated by it in two main ways. Firstly, even though it’s written by a hard-working forensic psychologist, none of the characters presents any noticeable character depth or development: sure, they move around the board rapidly enough, but they basically remain Ship, Boot, Dog, Iron, Hat, and Car for the duration of the game. Secondly, there are so many parallels between “In Tongues of the Dead” and Kevin Smith’s thoroughly enjoyable (1999) film Dogma that it’s hard not to see Kelln’s book as a dourly humourless anagram of the latter. For example, Shemhazai and Azazel are basically Bartleby (also a Grigori) and Loki crossed with Jay and Silent Bob; Maury and Jeremy are basically the Stygian Triplets; Metatron and Bethany Sloane are basically Harold Grower and Jake Tunnel; and so on.

As you can probably tell, I’m getting a huge screenplays-circa-1999 buzz off Kelln’s book, and not in a particularly good way: ultimately, it seems like he has fallen into the old trap of writing not about what you know, but about what you have seen at the movies. Brad writes perfectly well – but given that he’s a psychologist, where did all the psychology end up? 🙁

The “Ptolemy Code” cracked, metal detectorists rejoice…

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Here’s a great “hidden history” news story from Der Spiegel (in English), that manages to link Ptolemy, Roman trading, Istanbul, Nazi history, and archaeology – well worth reading!

A long-standing mystery about the early history of Germany is that nobody has really had much of an idea where its towns were. Yet the Romans left plenty of references to trading with miscellaneous German peoples, to crossing Germany to get to the Baltic, to arranging politically expedient assassinations, etc: and every once in a while a huge cache of buried treasure turns up. So there plainly were people there… but where were their towns?

Helpfully, the famous 2nd Century CE Alexandrian Greek geographer and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy included a nice-looking map of ‘Germania Magna’ in his Geographia, which almost certainly drew on many earlier documents and accounts (Ptolemy never went there himself). Frustratingly, however, the countless attempts by scholars to make the towns indicated there match up to modern towns have failed to please, perhaps because the earliest copy of it they had access to was medieval, dating only to around 1300. Hence the map became infamous as something of an “enchanted castle”, a Voynich Manuscript-like intellectual quicksand apparently designed for PhDs to drown themselves in.

However, a Berlin-based team of academic surveyors and mappers now claim – after a six-year struggle – to have finally worked out how to remap Ptolemy’s 94 German town coordinates onto actual coordinates. What made this possible was the dramatic discovery in the Topkapı Palace library in Istanbul of an earlier copy of Ptolemy’s Geographia (a reproduction of which is due for publication in 2011): the team’s results appear in a new book “Germania und die Insel Thule” (“Germania and the Island of Thule”).

Incidentally, I noted a while back that Professor Gülru Necipoglu had mentioned at a conference in 2006 that a new inventory of the Topkapı Palace library had been uncovered, so perhaps this copy of the Geographia turned up as part of some wider efforts at carrying out more systematic documentation there. Let’s hope so, as many historians believe that this library is likely to contain many more as-yet-unknown historical treasures.

Generally, I have to say that I’m somewhat surprised by this story: firstly, because I’d have thought that the #1 thing any sensible 21st century historical geographer would do would be to map the datapoints into Google Earth for everyone to see; and secondly, because it fails to mention that this ought to yield a bonanza for metal detector hardware shops in Germany, as countless armchair treasure hunters dust off ancient Teutonic myths for clues to legendary gold and silver caches to unearth. Happy hunting!

PS: a great big hat-tip to Matthew Kagle for passing the story on, much appreciated! 🙂

The Voynich Translation – Chapter 2

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[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!]

* * * * * * *

Chapter 2 – “Game On”

Vivid dreams of a towering manuscript library on fire: the Renaissance inks and paints boil, become gas and swirl upwards into an angry elemental wind, textual spirits entombed for centuries but now set free to roam the atmosphere, their haunting transmuted into a gigantic elemental pall above New Haven, a Jovian minium spot written upon the Earth’s skies, a full stop in the book of the sky for many-parsec-distant alien telescopes to read…

“Hey, Mr Graydon Harvitz! I nearly didn’t recognize you!”

He started from his mid-day café reverie, nearly knocking his second half-cold latte over onto the sprawl of Voynich Manuscript scans as he half-rose, no less surprised by the sensation of his newly-shaven chin on his fingertips than by Emm’s voice.

“Yeah, well, what with my committee appearance coming up, it was time I cleaned up my act. A bit, anyway.”

Emm reached over to his shoulder, her long fingers swiftly transcribing the diagonal weft and weave of his grandfather’s ancient twill jacket, one of the few things Graydon had inherited. She paused for a second longer than he expected, reading the material’s texture as if it were a familiar book, her eyes briefly absent from the room. “Ah”, she said, “you like antiques as well”.

“When history surrounds you, you can’t really avoid it”, he replied grimly. But the truth was, he wore it in a superstitious half-hope that his grandfather’s whisky-soaked ghost might lend a hand on those occasions when he particularly lacked cryptographic inspiration. Which had been… most of the time this last few months. “Hungry?”

“As a horse – any protein-rich House Specials on today?”

“Naah”, he replied, “it’s all carbohydrates à la mode. But their Club Sandwich is pretty good.”

“Good call!”, she smiled, “I’ll be the hunter-gatherer, back in a minute…”

Graydon watched with no little curiosity as she lightly sashayed across to the counter, attracting both jealous and covetous eyeballs from the other customers as she went. Yet… even though Graydon had survived his epic (and admittedly much-delayed) battle with the razor this morning, he still felt like nothing whereas Emm really was something: where was the balance in the equation? What was in it for her? And moreover…

“What exactly does a cleaner do?” he asked as she carefully squeezed a fresh latte and her cappucino into two of the polygonal gaps between the printouts on the table.

“Well… we clean things – old things. Such as your favourite manuscript. The Beinecke’s curators have put off fixing it up for years, but let’s face it, the Voynich does need a bit of TLC, right?”

“I guess so”, he said. “I must admit my heart’s in my mouth every time I have to unfold the rosettes page. On balance, I’d prefer my tombstone not to say ‘the idiot who trashed the VMs‘.”

“Just so you know, sorting it all out is my next job, once ze feelm crew ‘az returned to La Belle France. Their director has already annoyed Mrs Kurtz, so I don’t think they’ll be here long.” She snatched a brief sip of her coffee, looking sideways through the café’s glass front. “Technically, I should just be able to get on with it, but… I’m going to need your help.”

Graydon exhaled relief as a smile rolled across his face. “And there I was thinking it was my eyes you were lusting after.”

“No, it’s your mind, you fool. Ordinary manuscripts are easy to tidy up because everything has its place. But in the case of the Voynich, I’d prefer my tombstone not to say ‘the idiot who wiped the code off the VMs‘. Without knowing what might be hidden where, being a cleaner isn’t such an easy gig.”

“Ordinarily”, he said, leaning forward conspiratorially, “I’d be a sucker for a beautiful woman so blatantly calling me to adventure, but… I also have the not-entirely-small issue of a ticking clock and a funding gun pointed at my head. And it’ll probably be no big surprise to you that my work on the manuscript is not quite as advanced as had been hoped.”

“So… is that a yes or a no?”

“Actually, as with everything else with the Voynich, it’s an ‘I-don’t-yet-know‘. I need to figure out in my mind whether hanging out with a supermodel doing cool codicology is worth risking my PhD for.”

“OK, no problem”, Emm said, quickly resting her forehead forwards onto her hand. Despite the amused self-deprecating smile on her face, Graydon could not help but notice a wave of stress flash through her eyes. “Maybe it’s not an either-or thing. Anyway, I’m just dying to ask you – what is that bulge in your pocket?”

“Jeez”, Graydon gagged,”what finishing school did you go to?”

“No”, she sighed, “not your pants, your jacket. If – as I’m pretty sure – it’s pre-1950, it really shouldn’t have a purely decorative pocket on the front. So… what’s it for?”

Graydon looked down at it as an oddly restrained silence fell over him: even though he’d worn his grandfather’s jacket countless times, he realised that he’d never properly looked at it before.

“Come on, then, pass it over”, she hustled, getting out a pair of white cotton gloves, a small ruler and a tiny flashlight from her Biba chainmail clutch bag. “I’ll have a closer look. Do you have a cameraphone?”

“Errr… yes I do”, he said, taking his Nokia out of the jacket as he passed it over the table to Emm, her eyes alive with the detail. “Though, I haven’t actually used it yet.”

“Here’s your chance to learn. You’ll need to photograph this seam here before and after I cut the thread, so I can restore it later.” Shining her light on the top seam with the ruler placed alongside it, she waited impatiently while Graydon haltingly navigated through the phone’s Byzantine user interface all the way to its camera submenu. At the clatter of the fake shutter sound effect, she lurched into action, selecting a microscopic pair of scissors from a diamante-studded Swiss army knife. One deft snip later, she was tweezing out the single long thread that had fastened the top edge in place for God-knows how many decades.

“Keep photographing, Gray… yup, we’ve got a hot one for you, Penny…”

The waiter arrived with their Club sandwiches, but Graydon slid them to one side of the table: for all their previous hunger, suddenly neither had any appetite for food at all.

At first, all they could see was a sliver of a pale brown edge: but this grew one tiny fraction at a time until Emm had finally pulled out a small scrap of aged parchment, covered in fingerprints and dirt. At its top was an inventory reference written in a mid-Victorian European copperplate hand – but in the centre there was an 8×8 table of unusual letters.

Up until now, these curious letter-forms had – for all their study – been unique to a single historical document.

But not now.

Unmistakeably – incredibly – the grid contained letters from the Voynich Manuscript.

“Game on!”, moaned Graydon, shaking his head in disbelief. “Game on!”

“Wow”, gasped Emm, her mouth dry with the tension, “even I didn’t really think codicology could beat sex.”

“But… maybe it’s not an either-or thing?”