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.

Parchminers, scriveners, lymners, bookbinders, stationers…

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Since the recent Austrian Voynich Manuscript documentary (where the age of the VMs’ vellum was tested using radiocarbon dating), there has been debate about how vellum was created, stocked, sold, stored and used in and around the 15th century. The #1 issue is that if uncut pieces of vellum were routinely held for long periods (years? decades? centuries?), Voynich theories that require a later use dating still stand. Conversely, if you acknowledge that the manuscript itself displays many of the attributes of a copy, Voynich theories that require an earlier creation dating still stand. In which case, hard science would appear to have gone fairly soft on us.

However, simply relying on the possibility of storage is historically imprecise (if not actually woolly): we might well do better to try to understand the medieval parchment ‘ecology’ – that is, the set of trade, guild, and use behaviours associated with parchment – and see how parchment worked within (and for) the broader economy.

An accessible starting point for this is the first chapter of Cyprian Blagden’s (1960) “The stationers’ company: a history, 1403-1959”. According to this, the word stationarius (“stationer”) is mentioned in Oxford and Cambridge in the 13th century, and in London and York in the early 14th century, and denoted a permanent stall-holder (and so “stationary”, though we now spell it as “stationery”) rather than a hawker or peddler: the word quickly became associated with the book trade. The main people involved in 14th century book production in London were:-

  • parchminer – supplied the parchment
  • scrivener – wrote the text
  • lymner – added the illustrations
  • bookbinder – sewed gatherings into quires, and bound quires and covers into books
  • stationer – “arranged for the manufacture of a book to a customer’s order” (p.21)

Of course, these were the trades most directly affected by the introduction of printing: but interestingly, Blagden notes that “even parchminers and text-writers were only gradually squeezed out of the book business” (p.23), and that there was “no evidence of unemployment or of organized opposition” (p.23) to mechanical printing presses in England (unlike in Toulouse in 1477).

Some Voynich theorists have posited that the parchment trade suddenly collapsed, so that old vellum was readily available many years later. Well… it’s true that paper eventually killed the parchment trade, just as video eventually killed the traditional radio star: but the suggestions that circa 1450 parchminers ‘suddenly’ found themselves with warehouses full of uncut parchment that would subsequently sit around unsold for decades or centuries seems just plain wrong. As paper manufacturing slowly evolved (and as madly expensive incunabula gave way to quite expensive books, and as the later gradually became affordable), parchment usage did experience a slow decline – but I can’t see obvious evidence of any rapid ‘phase change’ or ‘parchment catastrophe event’.

For sure, we’re still waiting for the raw radiocarbon dating values so that we can validate the headline dating calculation (and make a sensible assessment of the various uncertainties that would be implicit in it) in a transparent kind of way. But if the date range is basically as claimed, I’m finding it grasp to glimpse the economic mechanism by which sufficient uncut parchment to make the VMs would be stored for even a decade, let alone 50, 100, or 150 years. The numbers don’t seem to add up… all in all, a tricky history challenge.

Coming soon to your TV: “The Voynich Channel”?

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Stephen Chrisomalis, “anthropologist, linguist, historian, and all-around numbers guy” (oh, and author of the soon-to-be-released “Numerical Notation: A Comparative History“), recently blogged about being interviewed as a talking head for a Canadian TV documentary on the Voynich Manuscript, a show that will apparently be hosted by none other than (as he delicately puts it) “WILLIAM FREAKIN’ SHATNER“.

Chrisomalis seems pretty well clued up on the structural properties of Voynichese (which is nice to see), but somehow omitted any mention of whether the documentary makers asked him about the VMs’ curious quire numbers (“abbreviated longhand Roman ordinals”, technically speaking), which appear to be a unique historical feature of the codex. I mean, he is Mr ‘History Of Numbers’, right? D’oh!

No more significant details about the documentary itself as yet… but given that documentary makers are excited enough to be wheeling in Captain Bloomin’ Kirk, it seems pretty safe to conclude that the Voynich Manuscript has suddenly become the lowest-hanging fruit upon the giant TV tree of enigmas. Expect a blizzard of TV Voynich documentaries to air around December 2010 – OK, perhaps not quite enough to make up an entire “Voynich Channel“, but a relatively cornucopic amount nonetheless. 🙂

Hmmm… the image of countless documentary teams being scrambled worldwide to film the VMs brings to my mind Nina Hagen’s #1 “99 Luftballons“, whose lyrics hinge on the idea that a set of toy balloons could trigger a nuclear armageddon. When does reaction become overreaction?

99 knights of the air
Ride super high tech jet fighters
Everyone’s a super hero
Everyone’s a Captain Kirk
With orders to identify
To clarify, and classify
Scramble in the summer sky
99 red balloons go by

🙂

Bert Hall’s 1979 article…

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The ever-reliable BibliOdyssey blogger has posted up some more manuscript images, this time of Giovanni Fontana’s “Bellicorum Instrumentorum Liber”, who you may remember mentioned on Cipher Mysteries and in The Curse (p.129 & p.141). Sadly, my favourite Fontana drawing (the rocket-powered rabbit on a skateboard, folio 37r) is missing from the set, but plenty of other splendid ones make up for that omission. 🙂

BibliOdyssey’s description of Fontana’s book included a reference to a great little paper by University of Toronto history professor Bert Hall to which I’ve been meaning to post a link here for a while: “Writings about Technology ca. 1400-ca. 1600 A.D. and their Cultural Implications” (1979). Hall outlines his own odyssey into the history of science 1400-1600, and how many of the technical / scientific manuscripts from the 15th century he examined effectively fell halfway between drawing and describing:-

When I first began to examine the documents I am discussing, I noticed that the more interested a particular text was in mechanics or architecture, the more likely it was to be profusely illustrated. As I studied them further, I realized that I was approaching them with the wrong presuppositions. I did not have in hand a group of illustrated texts, but rather a group of pictures with running commentaries.

Many of the “texts” (and that word is now to be understood as having quotation marks) from Kyeser to Ramelli, including Leonardo, are very nearly “picture-books” of technology with verbal comments. At times, the primacy of the picture is made unmistakably clear, as for example in a German work of the 1430’s [Vienna, Waffensammlung des kunsthistorischen Museums, MS P 5014] which dispenses with text altogether.

Note that MS P 5014 is also mentioned on p.166 of “The Enigmatic Water Wheel” by Bradford P. Blaine, as “a German manuscript of ca. 1437” that contains a drawing of a water-powered mill-arrangement to power a wooden pipe boring machine. Incidentally, the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna is famous for owning (then losing in 2003, and then regaining in 2006) Benvenuto Cellini’s exquisite salt cellar (valued at £36m) – “Waffensammlung” means Weaponry Collection, though I don’t know whether this MS reference is current.

Upcoming crypto talk by Lawren Smithline…

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Just in case you thought my recent list of upcoming talks was too UK-centric, here’s a nice one from the US…

A while back on Cipher Mysteries, I mentioned the 200-year old challenge ciphertext sent to Thomas Jefferson by UPenn maths professor Robert Patterson. But in a PhysOrg.com article (linked from the Daily Grail), there’s news of a lecture being given at the University of Oregon by Lawren Smithline (the person who finally cracked the transposition cipher) at 4pm Tuesday 26th January 2010, in Room 100 of Willamette Hall, 1371 E. 13th Ave., Eugene OR. Free admission.

(As always, please drop me a line if you happen to go along.)

SCRIPT 1.2 – special Voynich section…

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Web-journal SCRIPT (est. 2009) aims to publish articles / videos / pictures / (OK, pretty much anything, really) on “abject textual forms including: code arrays, asemic writing, graffiti, tattoos, and any other marginal(ized) scripted utterance“. Unsurprisingly, for its next issue the editors have put out a call for roughly-5000-word up-to-the-minute belletristic commentaries on the Voynich Manuscript and similar cryptotexts:-

While almost certainly undecipherable (various master WWII code-breakers and modern computers have tried), the Voynich manuscript — a.k.a, the Beinecke Library’s “MS 408” — has arguably more value in abstraction than it would in translation. A word-filled but language-less text; a collection of empty signs; a simulacra of simulacra — one can accept that texts like this may forever remain origin-less and undeciphered. But as such, they offer textual culture something unique: words and text abstracted from the weight of functional representation, semantics, and the other duties language routinely performs. As such, these cryptotexts can be seen as a form of literary abstraction that, like other forms of asemic art, puts a great deal of tension on the graphic/text binary and challenges readers to reevaluate their relationship, and conception of, each.

Articles on, and artistic treatments of, the Voynich manuscript itself are welcome as are those concerned with other failures of cryptanalysis and other texts/language systems that remain undeciphered and/or untranslated.

Doubtless you already know whether or not you are interested…

The editors’ apparent position – that the VMs is probably indecipherable, but that we stand to learn a lot about how we look at such linimal objects from our reaction to them – is something I’m broadly sympathetic to. However, to me the greatest value of the VMs comes from the complicated historical journey we face to reconstruct its fragmented conceptual origins. That is, trying to work out why its meaning continues to evade us should help us to understand the limits of modern thinking and knowledge when applied to difficult historical problems.

All the same, I rather suspect that lumping the Voynich Manuscript in with meaningless writings (whether consciously asemic or not) would be a category mistake: what lies beneath its shiny cryptographic surface is most likely hyperrationality, not anti-rationality or irrationality… three very different things.

Interesting history talks for early 2010…

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Here are some upcoming events that Cipher Mysteries readers might well enjoy:-

  • A nice little bit of codicology to start with: Dr Kathryn M. Rudy, “Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a Densitometer” – 5.30pm, 20th January 2010, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Research Forum South Room. Free.

    “Medieval manuscripts carry signs of use and wear. The priest repeatedly kissed the canon page of the missal, leaving his greasy nose print behind. The devotee regularly touched the image of Mary out of veneration, but inadvertently rubbed the paint off the vellum. Medieval readers of books of hours and prayerbooks – the largest surviving category of late medieval books – often held their manuscripts open for reading by resting their thumbs at the lower corners of the opening. The more often that readers used a text, the darker the thumbprints became.”

  • A talk on the Antikythera Mechanism by Professor Mike Edmunds at the Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society – 7pm, Wednesday 26th May 2010, MANDEC, Higher Cambridge Street, Manchester. Free (but “a donation is requested“).

    “What may well be the most extraordinary surviving artefact from the ancient Greek world was discovered just over a century ago. Found in 1900 in a wreck off the coast of the Mediterranean island of Antikythera, the device contains over thirty gear wheels and dates from around 100 B.C. Now known as the Antikythera Mechanism, it is an order of magnitude more complicated than any surviving mechanism from the following millennium, and there is no surviving precursor.”

  • A talk on ‘Cosmography and Cartography in the Renaissance: Their Relationship Revisited‘, by Dr Adam Mosley – 5pm, Thursday 15th April 2010, Warburg Institute, London. (Free)

    This is part of the ‘Maps and Society’ series of lectures at the Warburg: you may remember Adam Mosley from the review here of his “Bearing the Heavens” book on Tycho Brahe’s research community, so should be very interesting!

  • Professor Michael Farthing –  “Nicholas Culpeper: London’s first general practitioner?“ Gideon de Laune Lecture: 6pm, Wednesday 28th April 2010, Apothecaries Hall, London. Not sure whether or not this is only open to Society of Apothecaries members!

“That’s Life, Samara Brooks”…

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Here’s something a bit unexpected: a teen novel built around school rivalries, DNA testing, the Voynich Manuscript and the Phaistos Disc. Due to come out in February 2010, could “That’s Life, Samara Brooks” be the first properly crossover Voynich-themed book to add to the Cipher Mysteries Big Fat List? I’ll be sure to get a copy along the way… and will let you know. 🙂

Incidentally, Google Books also returns a hit for “Voynich” in Frank Portman’s (2009) similarly-genred children’s book “Andromeda Klein“, but I suspect that the VMs will turn out to be less central to the plot there. Just in case there are any completist Voynich teen novel collectors out there. 🙂

“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…

Some online herbals…

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Blogger of the visually bizarre BibliOdyssey has a number of nice online herbal scans you might well enjoy: each page has a brief description of the related manuscript and links to other places you can read more about the subject, while each picture links to its own Flickr page (which is handy).

  • ‘Arzneipflanzenbuch‘ [BSB Cod.icon. 26], Augsburg circa 1525. Herbal with lots of eccentric roots (sounds familiar, eh)
  • Hieronymous Braunschweig’s Distillerbuch, Strasburg circa 1500. Distillation manual, with plenty of alchemy, chemistry, botany, medicinal tips, etc.
  • Rembert Dodoens’ Cruydeboek, Belgium 1554. Hugely popular herbal built on Leonhard Fuchs’ equally famous herbal (but with many additions).
  • Tacuinum Sanitatis, 15th century copy owned by the Bibliotheque Rouen. An extremely nice-looking herbal book of medicine with herbal bits, exactly the kind of high quality artefact the Voynich Manuscript plainly isn’t.