Voynich theory roundup…

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Even though the Internet would appear to be full of Voynich theories, Tardis-like there’s always room for just a few more: so here are some recent ones for you to feast upon. Today’s mission, should you choose to accept it, is simply to try to categorise them: satirical, apparently deranged, serious, April Foolery, brilliant, channeled, etc.

  1. Well-known Internet palaeographer (and Australian donkey-owning grandmother) Dianne Tillotson has a theory that the VMs was written by one Leonard of Quim.
  2. Online Shakespearean theorist Franz Gnaedinger has raised Richard SantaColoma’s theory to dizzying new heights: he believes the VMs “was written and drawn by Francis Bacon in 1622, as a private sequel to the highly successful Nova Atlantis, written in a pseudo-Polynesian idiom allowing page-filling automatic writing, and drawn in a deliberate retro-style honoring Francis Bacon’s ancestor Roger Bacon. The text is gibberish but makes allusions.“
  3. Sergey K suggests (by email) a new chronology for the Voynich Manuscripts, based on some dates apparently marked in blue paint in the SW rosette: “1441 dates of the making of the Voynich MS. 1574  JOHN DEE has bought the Voynich MS. 1597 (in this place my monitor very dirty) August. The Year and month when Edward Kelley  has finished the painter (colouring) of the book and run out from the prison.“Ros1574
  4. Chy Po, who has been studying the VMs for many decades, believes that “The sketches are Red Herrings & have nothing to do with the text, however they tell a tale of their own cautioning people not to be misled“, while the text is in “a Secret almost extinct language, perhaps impossible to crack as it is a variation of a One Time Pad.” However, “the name of this language is known to very few who guard it jealously, but even is was made public it would be of no help without those exact pages of the Pad which obviously cannot exist still.  I have strong suspicions that it is a copy of an handwritten book called “v**z H******g’ very few copies of which exist to be passed on to the next worthy disciple, if no one is deemed to be worthy then that particular copy is destroyed.“

Here, the satirical is clearly (1) [Leonard of Quim is an Ankh-Morpork character], the April Foolery is (3) [thanks for that, Sergey], while (2) bravely outdoes his virtual mentor Rich SantaColoma by a whole order of magnitude. As for Chy Po, perhaps the answer to the VMs, when it eventually arrives, will indeed fit this kind of “concealed secret language” template, who knows? But as to whether the book in question is called “vuoz Habsburg” (or whatever), you’ll have to work out for yourself.

Really, who would be me? Some days, I have to admit that not even I would be me.

New Romanian Voynich theory…

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Over the years, people have suggested all manner of languages (Tagalog, Hawaiian, Chinese etc) as the Voynich Manuscript’s plaintext, but might it be written in enciphered Romanian?

Historically, the notion is just about plausible: the earliest known piece of written Romanian is a letter written by a Neacşu of Câmpulung in 1512 (there’s a facsimile online, as well as a mercifully brief Wikipedia page), which is not terrifically far from the VMs’ timeline. And others have fleetingly suggested Romanian before: Kevin Knight’s well-known slides showed a machine-generated match for “VAS92 9FAE AR APAM ZOE ZOR9 QOR92 9 FOR ZOE89” [the first few words of f1r in Prescott Currier’s transcription] as Romanian (though admittedly Knight qualifies the auto-generated Romanian plaintext as “nonsense”). After all, Romanian is merely one of the many Romance languages, and we’ve had no shortage of those proposed.

So boldly step forward “Secret Sauce”, a member of the Ssssshh (“Super Secret History”) group of “less motivated and (less) enlightened Illuminati”, who all hail from Arizona somewhere utterly secret indeed. Except that their town “starts with a T and has an ASU in it“. Their image gallery shows clearly that the group has between four and five members, presumably depending on whether or not the waiter is taking the photo.

So far, so non-Romanian: but step through their “‎Doorway to the Origin of Never Told Ancient Secret Knowledge” (i.e. “DONTASK”)‎ and you’ll see that they take the radial labels on f67r1 (the famous APOD page) to be month names (ticking clockwise around from the double line in the outer rings) and use them as cribs into the underlying language. After looking at lots of month names in different languages, Secret Sauce noted that “traditional Romanian (or a closely related language) used terms for October and November which started with the same sound (B)“, and so concluded that enciphered Romanian would be a “likely candidate” for Voynichese’s plaintext. Follow this through and you get (if you squint a bit) a verbose-cipher-like set of correspondences between Voynichese and Romanian. Though it has to be said that quite a few Voynichese letters are marked up as corresponding to multiple plaintext Romanian letters. Nonetheless, here’s the start of Voynich Manuscript page f1r as deciphered into Romanian:-

Special-Sauce-Voynich-transcription

…(etc) which Special Sauce somewhat hopefully renders as…

There are many gifts (which have been) set aside to bestow upon (us) in return (for our) humility.

We journey through (life) in passionate servitude (to God).

(Our) Heavenly Mother has chosen to reward (us).

Forgiveness (is) the gateway (to) a wondrous celestial land.

(There is) a grand home in paradise (in which) to live.

(etc etc)

Even if I am somewhat impressed at seeing “yt” and “yp” translate to “h” and “p/pa” (respectively), I have to say I’m getting more than a hint of a Stojko / Levitov buzz off this. Which is to say that more or less any transliteration could be rendered into a stream of nearest-match word fragments, corrected into nearby target language words, the grammar fixed, lacunae filled, organized into short punchy sentence-like blocks, and then all translated and resequenced into something almost resembling language. This is broadly parallel to the the way that the liquid substance dished out by the Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser to Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy was “almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea”.

Even if you do manage to overlook this kind of non-workingness, the problem then becomes that this kind of approach inevitably doesn’t scale up to a full-length document the size of the VMs: John Stojko couldn’t really explain why anyone would write such repetitive historico-religious “Old Ukrainian” nonsense on such a large scale, and the same would seem to be true here.

So… sorry, Special Sauce, but I don’t think you’ve cracked the secrets of the VMs yet. But here’s a modern-day secret that you might like!

More APOD spin-off comments…

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The APOD third-time-lucky Voynich page has (just as you’d expect) been reblogged and retweeted near-endlessly, even on the What Does The Prayer Really Say blog, which describes itself as “Slavishly accurate liturgical translations & frank commentary on Catholic issues – by Fr. John Zuhlsdorf“, and has a Catholic priest smiley in the header:  o{]:¬)  Quality-wise, I have to admit that this tramples all over my (similarly-vaguely-autobiographical) ‘surprised balding bloke’ smiley, so score one for God here. =:-o

Interestingly, Fr. Z’s version of the APOD page has a few more pertinent comments than the original APOD page, including one (indirectly) from commenter Brother Charles’ mother who just happens to work at the Beinecke:-

That’s one of our most notorious holdings. We used to have a form letter to answer inquiries about it. Now I suppose it’s a form e-mail. I believe that the best guess is that the manuscript is an herbal with pharmaceutical recipes, etc. All kinds of people, some of them pretty far out, are trying to ‘crack the code.’

Also, Denis Crnkovic (who was once asked to see if the VMs was written in Glagolithic – apparently “it is not“) remarked that “My conjecture (totally unproved) is that it is a “secret writing” codex from around the Prague area used to further the scientific experiments and conclusions of the Prague alchemists.” Well… this would arguably be the #1 Voynich hypothesis, were it not for what seems to be the set of Occitan month-name labels on the zodiac emblems. But a damn good try, anyway. 🙂

As a final aside for the day, here’s a link to a set of urban myths about the Beinecke Library, courtesy of the Yale Daily News. Enjoy!

Review: Erich von Däniken’s “History Is Wrong”…

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It’s a real-life Jurassic Park scenario: for decades, all most people have heard of Erich von Däniken is the occasional fossilized soundbite (such as “Chariots of the Gods“). But now, like a ferocious Tyrannosaurus Rex cloned from dinosaur DNA, von Däniken is back with a new (2009) book called “History Is Wrong” – it lives, it liiiives!

…OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. The von Däniken that emerges from its pages is, let’s say, far less bodacious than the one of old – though his most famous subjects of interests (Nazca lines, metal library, Book of Enoch, Father Crespi, etc) all get wheeled out, you don’t have to read too far in to notice that his delivery has changed from ‘strident’ to (frankly) ‘rather whinging’.

Actually, for the most part “History Is Wrong” focuses less on why historians have got ancient history wrong than on why contemporary historians have got von Däniken wrong –  to be precise, its full title should be “History Is Wrong… About Me!”

Hence, he goes to some lengths to paint a picture of how (particularly in the case of the underground metal library) his sources switched their stories to make him look like a fool; how subeditors and translators altered the slant of his text to make him look like a showman; how journalists (specifically German ones) serially misrepresented his claims to make him look like a conman; and, finally, how everything he wrote back then still remains basically true today. Even if everyone else thinks it’s nonsense.

So, I think the key question this book poses for the reader is whether history is right about von Däniken – is he (or is he not) a foolish showman/conman?

I’ll answer this by looking at how von Däniken looks at the VMs (which is, of course, this blog’s specialist subject). He opens the book by describing how he asked a hundred people if they had heard of the Voynich Manuscript – only one person had (yup, 1% or 2% would be about right). He then quickly recounts its history (getting some bits right, other bits wrong) with a few minor digressions, before leaping sideways on page 21 to Father Crespi, Plato, terraforming, Adam’s book, Berossus’ Babyloniaca, the Avesta, Enoch (for more than 30 pages!), IT = “Information Trickery”, Plato again… until finally (on page 81!) he loops back to the Voynich Manuscript again (but then only very briefly).

From my perspective, I don’t think you can say that von Däniken offers anything useful or insightful about the VMs that hasn’t been rolled out a thousand times before – for example, though he discusses “89” and “4”, he does this in only a fairly superficial way. The only interesting Voynich ‘authority’ EvD cites here is “German linguist Erhard Landsmann” (p.85), who (rather impressively, it has to be said) concludes in his own Voynich paper that “A prophet is thus a pumpkin shaped spacecraft” (p.6). [Note: his name is actually “Landmann”.]

Purely based on EvD’s treatment of the VMs, I can only really conclude that:-

  • von Däniken doesn’t read his sources as carefully or as deeply as he thinks he does.
  • He actively seeks out fragmentary correlations across time and space, which he then misrepresents as compelling evidence of causal connection between the two.
  • He doesn’t really know how to do history: his interest is in peering past mere facts to the shared web of doubt that he believes supports them all, that offers us glimpses of the “gods-as-astronauts” meta-narrative behind historical reality.

In short, his book is no different to the mass of non-working, unmethodical Voynich theories out there already, with the only exception being that he doesn’t even get as far as suggesting an answer. Even for von Däniken, that would be just too whacko a thing to do. 😉

And yet… because his book is in many ways an autobiography, the main thing that emerges from it is actually EvD himself: a charming and driven man, yet a victim in equal parts of his own optimistic enthusiasm and other people’s bullshit. Really, if you had a meal with him circa 2010, I think he would actually be delightful company. Sure, he became madly rich from his books (and goodness knows that few authors manage that these days): but maybe History will indeed turn out to have been (a little, just a little) Wrong About Him – that for all the readers taken in by all his non-history, I suspect that perhaps he conned himself ten times more.

“Voynich Averlino hypothesis” summary…

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In the last few days, several people have independently asked me to summarize my “The Curse of the Voynich” Voynich Manuscript theory (that it is an enciphered copy of Antonio Averlino [Filarete]’s lost books of secrets). Good theories generally improve when you retell them a few times: for example, back when I was first pitching my new type of security camera [i.e. my day job], it would take me about an hour to explain how it worked, but now it takes me about a minute. So… can I condense 230 pages from 2006 into a thousand words in 2010? Here goes…

The first part of my art history argument places the VMs in Milan after 1456 but before about 1480, and with some kind of architectural link to Venice:-

  • “Voynichese” uses a “4o” verbose cipher pair (but not as Arabic digit pairs, i.e not 10/20/30/40). This appears in North Italian / Milanese ciphers dating from 1440 to 1456 and is linked with the Sforzas, yet here forms part of a more sophisticated cipher system. This points to a post-1456 dating, locates it in Northern Italy (specifically Milan), and links it somehow with the Sforza court.
  • One of the rosettes in the nine-rosette page contains a castle with swallow-tail merlons and circular city walls. However, the only towns traditionally depicted with circular walls are Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Milan, of which Milan is the only one in Italy. Therefore, I conclude that this is probably Milan.
  • Also, the Sforza castle in Milan only had swallow-tail merlons after 1450. This gives a probable earliest date & place for the VMs of (say) 1451 in Milan.
  • Late in the 15th century, swallow-tail merlons were covered over to protect the defenders from flaming projectiles. This gives a probable latest date for the VMs of 1480-1500.
  • I argue that the central rosette shows a (slightly scrambled) view of St Mark’s Basilica as viewed from the Campanile beside it, linking the author of the VMs with Venice.

The second part highlights (what I consider to be) very close parallels between the VMs and the “little works” of secrets mentioned by Antonio Averlino in the later phases of his libro architettonico (but which have been presumed lost or imaginary), and which he compiled between 1455 and 1465.

  • The subjects of Averlino’s lost little books were: water (spas), agriculture, engines, recipes, glass-making, and bees.
  • I think Quire 13 depicts water – both spas and plumbing machinery / engines
  • I think that Herbal A pages are agriculture (grafting, herbiculture, etc)
  • I think that Herbal B pages contain engines (but visually enciphered to resemble strange plants). I also suspect that Averlino was the author of the lost mid-Quattrocento “Machinery Complex” manuscript postulated by Prager and Scaglia.
  • I think f86v3 specifically depicts bees (Curse pp.138-140)
  • After publishing my book, I discovered that Averlino did indeed have his own herbal, written “elegantly in the vernacular tongue“

The third part outlines what I suspect was Averlino’s opportunity and motive for creating the VMs, based on well-documented historical sources (plus a few specific inferences):-

  • Antonio Averlino was interested in cryptography, specifically in transposition ciphers. His libro architettonico partly fictionalizes himself and many of the people around the Sforza by syllable-reversing their names – for example, his own name becomes “Onitoan Nolivera“.
  • Averlino was friends with the powerful cryptographer Cicco Simonetta, who ran the Sforza Chancellery: when Averlino suddenly left Milan in 1465, he left his affairs and claims for back pay in Simonetta’s hands.
  • Disenchanted by his experience of working for Francesco Sforza, Averlino planned to travel from Milan across Europe to work in the new Turkish court in Istanbul – his friend Filelfo drafted a letter of introduction for him.
  • I infer (from the peculiarly intentional damage done to the signature panel of his famous doors in Rome) that Averlino travelled to Rome in the Autumn of 1465, perhaps even with the party travelling from Brescia with what is now known as MS Vat Gr 1291.
  • I also infer (from a close reading of Leon Battista Alberti’s small book on ciphers) that an unnamed expert in transposition ciphers debated cryptography practice in detail with Alberti in late 1465, and I suspect that this expert was Averlino, who would surely have sought out his fellow Florentine humanist architect while in Rome.
  • Some art historians have put forward particular evidence that suggests Averlino did indeed travel to Istanbul around this time to work on some buildings there.
  • However, this happened not long after the notorious incident when Sigismondo Malatesta’s favourite painter Matteo de’ Pasti was arrested in the Venetian-owned port of Candia in Crete. His crime was attempting to take a copy of Roberto Valturio’s book on war machines “De Re Militari” to the Turks, punished by being hauled back in chains to Venice for interrogation by the Council of Ten.
  • Though not always 100% reliable, Giorgio Vasari asserts that Antonio Averlino died in Rome in 1469: so there is good reason to conclude that if Averlino did indeed travel East, he (like his old friend George of Trebizond) probably travelled back to Italy before very long.
  • Overall, my claim is that if Averlino made (or tried to make) the dangerous trip East in 1465 and wanted to take his books of secrets (which, remember, contained drawings of engines just like “De Re Militari”) along with him, he would need to devise a daring way of hiding them in plain sight. But how?

The fourth part of my argument describes how I think Averlino trickily enciphered his books of secrets to make them seem to be sections of a medieval herbal / antidotary written in a lost language. However, given that this section is extraordinarily complicated and I’m rapidly closing in on my thousand-word limit, I’ll have to call a halt at this point. 🙂

Three years after committing all this to print, I still stand by (pretty much) every word. Obviously, it’s a tad annoying that the recent radiocarbon dating doesn’t fit this narative perfectly: but historical research (when you do it properly) is always full of surprises, right? We’ll have to see what the next few months bring…

Proto-Swedish Voynich food theory…

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As far as theories of the Voynich Manuscript’s linguistic origin go, people have over the years proposed proto-Russian, proto-German, proto-Dutch, in fact proto-just-about-every-European-language-going… yet it seemed that nobody had tried Swedish as a possible match for Voynichese.

However, when I gave this a go, I found to my great surprise that the two meshed really well, particularly the unique “dinka-donka” (i.e. ‘verbose’) scansion they apparently share. After a bit of work, I managed to compile the following set of letter equivalences (EVA transcription in square brackets):-

chefese

(The full EVA key maps “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz” →  “o–bmc–r-stxkeydnfu—-h-“, and
“ch / sh / ckh / cth” → “v / i / g / w“). This transforms the following Voynichese on f116v…

pchal larar al ckhal rain alol fchy rpchey shfy ches ar opche kan dlr
olkeey rain shey qoraiin shey ol lchedy rshey qokeedy chtain oly
soraiin ykeey rain sheeky qokain sheey qol cheds ar r arshe
qokain ar raiin shek okain yrshey qolchey okain shckhy qokam
shedy qokeey qoka qokeey lchey olkey raiin cthar shckhy qotar

…to the proto-Swedish plaintext…

yvot tonon ot got nork otet cvh nyvmh ich vmf on eyvm sok btn
etsmmh nork imh denorrk imh et tvmbh nimh desmmbh vuork eth
fenorrk hsmmh nork immsh desork immh det vmbf on n onim
desork on norrk ims esork hnimh detvmh esork igh desox
imbh desmmh deso desmmh tvmh etsmh norrk won igh deuon

I then needed to find a remote community where this (otherwise lost) proto-Swedish is still in use. After an extensive research trail, I uncovered rare video footage of the one person in the world who still talks this language: and, amazingly, I was able to link up the text in the Voynich Manuscript’s recipe section with a short section of the tape (as per the subtitles), proving without a shadow of a doubt that the eleventh starred paragraph on f116r contains the recipe for meatballs:-

SCmeatballs-subtitled-2

You couldn’t make it up. Nor perhaps would you want to. 🙂

“The Curse of the Voynich”, now back in print…

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Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you all!

Today’s brief news is that 100 copies of “The Curse of the Voynich” have just arrived from the printers, so those 20-odd people who ordered one from Amazon this month should be receiving it by the New Year (post willing). Alternatively, if you’d like your own shiny signed copy, order one via PayPal using the “Buy Now” [UK, Europe, R.O.W.] buttons at the top of the Compelling Press book page, let me know by email, and I’ll add a suitable anagram on the front page for you. 🙂

Voynich palimpsest hypothesis…?

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I was sitting on a train trying to reconcile the Voynich Manuscript’s vellum dating (1404-1438) with its art history dating (1450-1470), while also pondering the various layered aspects of its codicology (such as the pictures apparently behind some the water nymphs), when an unexpected thought popped into my head.

Might the VMs have its (erased) plaintext as a palimpsest beneath its ciphertext?

That is, might the Voynich Manuscript be an enciphered copy of the document that was originally written in broadly the same place on the same pages? The overall timeline could work like this:-

  • 1420 or so: the author compiles his/her books of secrets onto brand new vellum.
  • 1460 or so: the author copies each line or paragraph onto a wax tablet, erases the line or paragraph from the vellum, and replaces it with an enciphered version.

If this is correct (and though I admit that the odds are against it, I do think it’s worth considering), the issue would then become whether the original plaintext might somehow be made legible again – that is, whether the plaintext’s ink made a sufficiently permanent contact with the vellum that some kind of imaging might now reveal it, even if it was heavily erased at the time.

Over on the MapHist mailing list in recent days, there has been a lot of ink-related discussion about the Vinland Map (which has its own curious cryptographic angle that Jim Enterline has been doggedly pursuing for years): this interesting analytical paper on vellums and inks was cited, as well as “Ink Corrosion” by Gerhard Banik. This latter paper discusses Haerting’s “conclusion that only inks containing iron(II) salts can cause ink degradation damage. The other components of the ink […] do not cause noticeable damage to the support medium.”

At first glance, you’d have to say that the VMs really doesn’t appear to be a classical palimpsest: but this is because palimpsests were typically washed clean and the second layer of writing put down at right angles to the original direction of the text.

But perhaps some of the original ink layer wasn’t erased, in forms other than that of almost imperceptible damage to the support material: I’m thinking in particular of the “hidden house” on f77v that I discussed here back in June 2009.

voynich-f77v-central-nymph

I’m pretty sure that this originally depicted some kind of house structure (drawn in faint, straight lines), but that the “water nymph” and the “wolkenbanden” were subsequently added in a later pass (in a completely different ink) to mislead the eye.

Codicologically, what is most interesting here is that the original ink (i.e. from the “house”) might be identified and separated out into its own layer… and that understanding its particular composition (and the way that it interacts with the support material) might point to a way of imaging the manuscript’s original (1420?) ink layers from beneath the subsequent (1460?) ink layers (if it exists, of course).

Basicaly, why even try to break the cipher, if it might be possible just to read it? Now wouldn’t that be a surprise for everyone!

Voynich Manuscript – the state of play…

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For decades, Voynich Manuscript research has languished in an all-too-familiar ocean of maybes, all of them swelling and fading with the tides of fashion. But now, thanks to the cooperation between the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the documentary makers at Austrian pro omnia films gmbh, we have for the very first time a basic forensic framework for what the Voynich Manuscript actually is, vis-à-vis:-

  • The four pieces of vellum they had tested (at the University of Arizona / Tucson) all dated to 1420-1, or (to be precise) 1404-1438 with 95% confidence (“two sigma”).
  • The ink samples that were tested (by McCrone Associates, Inc.) were consistent with having been written onto fresh vellum (rather than being later additions), with the exception of the “cipher key” attempt on f1r which (consistent with its 16th century palaeography) came out as a 16th-17th century addition.
  • It seems highly likely, therefore, that the Voynich Manuscript is a genuine object (as opposed to some unspecified kind of hoax, fake or sham on old vellum).

f1r-abcde
The f1r cipher “key” now proven to have been added in the 16th/17th century 

The programme-makers conclude (from the ‘Ghibelline’ swallow-tail merlons on the nine-rosette page’s “castle”, which you can see clearly in the green Cipher Mysteries banner above!) that the VMs probably came from Northern Italy… but as you know, it’s art history proofs’ pliability that makes Voynich Theories so deliciously gelatinous, let’s say.

Anyway… with all this in mind, what is the real state of play for Voynich research as of now?

Firstly, striking through most of the list of Voynich theories, it seems that we can bid a fond farewell to:

  • Dee & Kelley as hoaxers (yes, Dee might have owned it… but he didn’t make it)
  • Both Roger Bacon (far too early) and Francis Bacon (far too late)
  • Knights Templars (far too early) and Rosicrucians (far too late)
  • Post-Columbus dating, such as Leonell Strong’s Anthony Askham theory (sorry, GC)

It also seems that my own favoured candidate Antonio Averlino (“Filarete”) is out of the running (at least, in his misadventures in Sforza Milan 1450-1465), though admittedly by only a whisker (radiocarbon-wise, that is).

In the short term, the interesting part will be examining how this dating stacks up with other classes of evidence, such as palaeography, codicology, art history, and cryptography:-

  • My identification of the nine-rosette castle as the Castello Sforzesco is now a bit suspect, because prior to 1451 it didn’t have swallowtail merlons (though it should be said that it’s not yet known whether the nine-rosette page itself was dated).
  • The geometric patterns on the VMs’ zodiac “barrels” seem consistent with early Islamic-inspired maiolica – but are there any known examples from before 1450?
  • The “feet” on some of the pharmacological “jars” seem more likely to be from the end of the 15th century than from its start – so what is going on there?
  • The dot pattern on the (apparent) glassware in the pharma section seems to be a post-1450 Murano design motif – so what is going on there?
  • The shared “4o” token that also appears in the Urbino and Sforza Milan cipher ledgers – might Voynichese have somehow been (closer to) the source for these, rather than a development out of them?
  • When did the “humanist hand” first appear, and what is the relationship between that and the VMs’ script?
  • Why have all the “nymph” clothing & hairstyle comparisons pointed to the end of the fifteenth century rather than to the beginning?

Longer-term, I have every confidence that the majority of long-standing Voynich researchers will treat this as a statistical glitch against their own pet theory, i.e. yet another non-fitting piece of evidence to explain away – for example, it’s true that dating is never 100% certain. But if so, more fool them: hopefully, this will instead give properly open-minded researchers the opportunity to enter the field and write some crackingly good papers. There is still much to be learnt about the VMs, I’m sure.

As for me, I’m going to be carefully revisiting the art history evidence that gave me such confidence in a 1450-1470 dating, to try to understand why it is that the art history and the radiocarbon dating disagree. History is a strange thing: even though thirty years isn’t much in the big scheme of things, fashions and ideas change with each year, which is what gives both art history and intellectual history their traction on time. So why didn’t that work here?

Anyway, my heartiest congratulations go out to Andreas Sulzer and his team for taking the time and effort to get the science and history right for their “DAS VOYNICH-RÄTSEL” documentary, which I very much look forward to seeing on the Austrian channel ORF2 on Monday 10th December 2009!

UPDATE: see the follow-up post “Was Vellum Stored Flat, Folded, or Cut?” for more discussion on what the dating means for Voynich research going forward…

Richard Rogers’ Voynich theory…

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Earlier this year, I was contacted by a 58-year-old US Army / Navy computer programmer from North Carolina: he claimed to have solved the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript, and wanted me to post details on my Cipher Mysteries blog, but without revealing his identity.

Yesterday, however, Richard Rogers went public with his claims (which is why I can now say his name): here’s a picture of him (from the same Havelock News article):-

RichardRogers-small

With degrees (it says here) in “ancient history, languages and computer science”, he originally used Voynichese to benchmark some anti-fraud pattern recognition software he had been developing, believing (courtesy of Gordon Rugg’s various publications, I’d guess) that it was what he calls “manufactured” (i.e. hoaxed) text. As an aside, his software was built around Benford’s Law (specifically, Hal Varian’s 1972 take on it), a logarithmic distribution law which has similarities with (the rather more familiar) Zipf’s Law.

However, when (to his great surprise) the software reported back that the Voynich Manuscript did actually seem to contain meaningful information, he found himself being rapidly drawn into the VMs’ tangled research web.

So far, this is all a straightforward techy “call to adventure” narrative: but where it goes from here is a bit odd. It took me ages to even begin to understand what he thinks he can see in the VMs – and I’m still miles off understanding why it might be so, as well as how he made the leap from (a) grasping that there is meaningful content, to (b) seeing how that meaningful content actually works. Which is why every time I tried to post about this, I’ve ended up giving up halfway through: but now he’s gone public, I guess I’ll have to complete the job as best I can…

Here’s how it all starts.

Rogers believes that Voynichese letters express a kind of symbolic language (which he calls “proto-sentential logic” or “sententional propositional calculus”) for encoding secret shapes (which he calls “runes” or “runic glyphs”), a bit like an encrypted Renaissance Logo driving a turtle trapped inside a 5×5 grid. He calls this system “Runus”.

Runus-Part-1

He calls double-leg gallows “staves” (red text in the diagram) and single-leg gallows “stakes” (blue background in the diagram): these are “key to navigating the manuscript”, insofar as (if I’ve understood it properly) Runus expressions always contain these staves/stakes (or sometimes [EVA d]) in the middle.

Finally, here are the seven specific Runus rules Rogers believes Voynichese expresses (his descriptions not mine):-

  • “RULE 1: Each line is an independent, stand-alone action. There is no punctuation because none is needed.
  • RULE 2: All Rule-Oriented Expressions (ROE) are non-mathematical algebraic ‘draw & copy’ operations based on a 5X5 numbered solution grid.
  • RULE 3: Draw operations always assume a horizontal top to bottom, left to right sequence unless modified by a functional character (i.e. a shape flag, left, right, top, bottom, etc.
  • RULE 4: ALL ROA encapsulate one of eight turnstiles (sometimes 8 is applied as a turnstile)
  • RULE 5: The eight turnstile shapes are broken into positional sets of functions. These are:
  1.  
    1. Two stave turnstiles and two stake turnstiles in the left set.
    2. Four stave turnstiles and two stake turnstiles in the right set.
  • RULE 6: Runus is a Rule-Oriented Expression (denoted by a the Greek rho, below). It is a coordinate system used to build a Rune character.
  • RULE 7: The meaning, interpretation, and function of Runa – and the shapes they describe(RO), are very dependent.”

Here’s another of Rogers’ diagrams that might possibly help explain this:-

Runus-Part-2

Just in case you glazed over halfway through the above (I’m not saying you actually did, but you certainly might have done), we should perhaps move swiftly on to look at a specific example of how Rogers thinks Voynichese works:-

[EVA odaiin] is translated as “Focus on the 3X3 square immediately adjacent to the left of the center position”.

From his Runus diagrams…

  • [EVA o] = “left side”
  • [EVA d] = “centre position”
  • [EVA a] = “right side”
  • [EVA ii] = “a count of 2”
  • [EVA n] =”horizontal grid line counter”

According to his Runus rules, this appears to denotes a horizontal line drawn from the left side of the centre position across to the right side with a horizontal grid line count of two. But that’s about as far as I can usefully take this.

Here’s how Rogers annotates the first line of f1r into five individual Runus expressions. The “turnstiles” are red, “directional modifiers” are blue, while numbers (“grid coordinates”) are in pink:-

Runus-Part-3

Here, ROE 1 says “Starting in Quadrant 1, in the DIRECTION Of the Right Half, DRAW a DEEP CURVED LINE from top to bottom“, while ROE 2 says “DRAW a SHALLOW CURVE from BOTTOM TO TOP, facing the RIGHT“. Put these two together and you get a “moon”. Rogers believes that the mysterious shape at the top right of f1r is the image described by the the first few Voynichese lines of f1r – and hence this acts as a kind of enciphering test.

Just as with the biliteral cipher I discussed yesterday, there’s certainly elements of steganography and verbose cipher at play here, lending an air of cryptographic plausibility. However, “Runus” does seem an enormously complicated piece of symbolic machinery to encrypt what are ultimately just shapes – a bit like using a Difference Engine as a shop till. And given that I personally don’t buy into the notion (however breathlessly expressed by conspiratorial iconologists) that any shapes are intrinsically heretical, or even that any particular shapes were intrinsically believed to be heretical, the whole proposed exercise of encrypting heretical shapes would seem to me to be both futile and improbable. Sorry, but that’s how it looks from here.

Also: I simply can’t see how Rogers got from pattern matching software to Runus – to my mind, there’s an inherent “chalk and cheese”-style gulf between the two. Though I can see the start-point and the end-point, I can’t see any logical reasoning that might step between the two. Yes, I can see that the “i” / “ii” / “iii” characters might in fact be Roman numbers (though even that I somewhat doubt, given that they resemble medieval page numbers so closely): but that’s about as close as I can get.

Rogers has tried to back up his “Runus” research with more conventional historical research, and “speculates that the manuscript was written by three generations of the Longhi Family in Italy, Martino Longhi the Elder (1534-1591), Onorio Longhi (1569-1619) and Martino Longhi the Younger (1602-1660).” However, I’m also somewhat skeptical of this, given that (a) the VMs appears to have 15th century marginalia, (b) the VMs appears to have had an Occitan owner in South-West France circa 1500, and (c) if the VMs was indeed bought by Rudolf II, that would have been prior to 1612, at which point Martino Longhi the Younger was 10 years old.

Of course, in the absence of any widely agreed decryption of even a single word, it’s almost impossible to disprove any assertion anyone makes about the Voynich Manuscript: and naturally, it is this rich loam of uncertainty that helps Voynich Theories to flourish so much. But now I have to go and lie down – my head’s hurting from all that proto-sentential calculus, just like it did every other time I tried to write it up. 🙁