The New Mayflower & Wilfrid Voynich…

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Yesterday, a set of random clicks somewhat akin to Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon (or do I mean “Six Degrees of Roger Bacon”?) took me to the Voynich Monkeys archive of the main Voynich Mailing List: there, I learnt to my considerable surprise, that one of the premises in London formerly used by Wilfrid Voynich is now the New Mayflower Restaurant (on Shaftesbury Avenue).

OK, I’ve probably been to at least half of the restaurants in and around Chinatown over the years: but I’ve been to the New Mayflower probably ten times – it’s a nice place.

If you’re going there, I highly recommend (hopefully they still do it) the chilli crab – very tasty indeed (if a bit messy, it has to be said). A big thank you to my chess-playing friend Neil Bradbury for recommending it, particularly the basement part of the restaurant.

Of course, it’s a little strange to think that I’ve eaten so many times in what was Voynich’s former bookshop – but historical London’s a bit like that, full of slightly unnerving coincidences! 🙂

The Voynich Translation – Chapter 1

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Back in 2003, the (Paleo) Ideofact blogger (William Allison) reminisced about having once jointly compiled a list of meaningless dissertation titles, such as “The Semiotics of (En)Gendered Archetypes: A Contextual Deconstruction of the Voynich Manuscript.”  His pleasantly-meandering blog train of thought quickly sped on to the possibility of Voynich fiction, continuing…

Later, I thought of writing a few detective stories centered on a career grad student who promised for his dissertation a translation and analysis of the manuscript. Never got around to it, though — maybe in my retirement.

Now there’s a challenge, I thought… so, six years on, here’s my version of how Chapter 1 might go…
[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!]

* * * * * * *

The Voynich Translation

Chapter 1 – “Lesser Fleas”

7.07pm: Mrs Kurtz tapped Graydon Warnes Harvitz II sharply on the shoulder, waking him from his open-eyed slumber. “Stop sucking the end of your pencil so loudly“, she wheeshed through gritted teeth, “it’s disrespectful”. Vaguely nodding in approval, Graydon looked around at the empty chairs beached by the day’s ebbing tide of students – disrespectful to whom, he wondered? Perhaps she-of-the-library could see people that he couldn’t, he mused, possibly the ghosts of dead Yale grads, haunted by their own unfinished dissertations – a virtual “Skull and Bones” society? And look, over in the far corner, might that be dear old Montgomery Burns himself? Yesssss.

As the fug of dead presidents began to fade from his mind’s eye, Graydon’s own awful situation lurched back into sharp focus – of how to decipher the murderously intractable Voynich Manuscript for his PhD. All of a sudden, the purgatory endured by the library’s wraiths, endlessly waiting for long-stolen books to be returned to the stacks, seemed painfully close at hand. His boastful prediction (that this would be easy-peasy for someone as bright as him) had come back to haunt him.

All the same, his whole adventure had started brightly, zipping through all the literature on “The World’s Most Mysterious Manuscript” (so ‘P. T. Barnum’, wouldn’t you say, and isn’t there a Voynich Theorist born every minute?) Yet within a month, he had been reduced to trawling all the works of fiction appropriating the manuscript (typically as a tedious millennia-crossing conspiratorial MacGuffin). Then finally, not unlike an air crash survivor having eaten the seat-covers and the corpses of the other passengers before moving on to the dreaded airline food, Graydon had slurped his way messily through all the Voynich webpages. And the less said about that low-roughage diet the better.

Once the inevitable research euphoria had subsided, he had slid downwards into a bit of a decline – for if you don’t know what your subject is about, how can you read any secondary literature? He felt less like a Yale polymath than an intellectual vacuum cleaner, sucking up all the marginal detritus left over by other scholars, trying in vain to rearrange the collected dust and mites into patterns that would endure longer than a single big sneeze. And so the years had passed – not quite a decade, but far too long by any reasonable measure.

Eating and shaving less (but drinking and swearing more), Graydon began in time to resemble his fearsome alcoholic grandfather Mani Harvitz, the semi-legendary Allied code-breaker who as a young man had worked with John Manly and Edith Rickert breaking German diplomatic codes in World War I.

Once, he had mused whether his own grandfather might have looked at what Wilfrid Voynich had called (rather optimistically, it has to be said) “The Roger Bacon Manuscript”? Graydon had tirelessly gone through all that group’s archived correspondence, finding only that the brilliant young Mani, newly emigrated from Europe, had something of a huge schoolboy crush on the no-less-stellar Miss Rickert.

But this was merely symptomatic of the Mandelbrot Research Maze Of Doom he was stuck in, where each dead-end you go down sprouts off an infinite number of smaller dead-ends for you to recursively waste your time on. He found himself humming Augustus De Morgan’s rhyme “Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,: And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum‘. Graydon wished he didn’t know that this was in turn based on a rhyme by Jonathan Swift: his mind had become crammed with a near-infinite constellation of similarly useless fact-bites, all held in interplanetary hibernation, eternally waiting to arrive at an unseen off-world colony.

And now he had just ten short days to prepare a presentation for his supervisor about all the dramatic progress he had claimed to have made over the past six months, when all he actually had to show for his efforts was a pencil dangling from his unkempt, beardy mouth. Perhaps… perhaps that was his subconscious’ way of telling him to take up smoking again?

Lesser fleas, he thought to himself as he removed the pencil and took a closer look. Because he preferred harder pencils for note-taking (laptops gave him back-ache), he had a “2H” rather than an “HB”. The Pencil Code (all the way from 9H to 9B via HB ) was over a hundred years old, yet still sounds like a legal-ese sequel to The Da Vinci Code. More linked trivia tumbled out of his tangled skein of memory: pencils themselves were made of graphite, not lead (that was a 400-year-old misunderstanding, you don’t actually have “lead in your pencil”). But before the pencil came along, people had often used red lead to mark things…

That was it: the red lead drawings on page f55r of the Voynich Manuscript. The only other remaining construction marks (which had generally been so assiduously removed by the author, it would appear) were the horizontal lines drawn on f67r2, under a kind of odd-looking circular calendar with a starfish design in the centre: these lead lines were definitely symptomatic of something… but of what?

f55r-red-lead

Yes, these were the real deal – they were what his subconscious mind was telling him to examine right now, what he needed to be thinking about for his looming presentation. But what did they mean – and how on earth might such an incidental detail possibly help him translate the Voynich Manuscript?

Graydon’s mind raced through his Wikipedia-esque web of details – “red lead” A.K.A. lead tetroxide, better known to classicists as ‘minium’, from which we get ‘miniature’, a medieval style of small picture with lots of red finish. And what was that paper he’d never quite got round to reading? Yes, J. J. G. Alexander’s (1983) “Preliminary Marginal Drawings in Medieval Manuscripts“: that, and the ten thousand other cul-de-sacs to park your car in for a day he’d one day hope to read.

But the important point about f55r was that it was plainly unfinished. If red lead had been used to sketch out the shapes, then this was probably one of the last pages added: yet why would the author, so meticulous and rational in so many other ways, have left this one page in this state? Perhaps he/she had died (or had just given up, as Graydon had wanted to do so many times) before completing it?

Hold on, he thought – given the first page and the last page, perhaps we can use the changes in handwriting and in the cipher system between them to try to reorder the pages inbetween, to reconstruct the document’s construction order, and its flow of meaning… For the first time in perhaps even a year, his mind felt on fire, alive with the possibilities: he felt he was glimpsing something extraordinary, subtle and deep…

And that was when he saw Emm for the very first time, as she walked over to his desk to kick him out of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library for the night. She was extraordinary, like a long-haired Halle Berry but with piercing, intense eyes, eyes that could slice watermelons.

“That’s odd”, he said, “I didn’t know supermodels worked in libraries”.

“That’s odd”, she deadpanned, parroting his tone, “I didn’t know they let bears handle manuscripts.”

“Oh, the beard thing? Yeah, my barber died and I never found a replacement.”

“Woah, the ’90s must have been a really tough decade for you. Anyhoo, it’s time to kick your bear ass out of the library.”

Graydon blinked. He didn’t know if this conversation was going really well or really badly. “Hi, I’m Graydon Harvitz”, he said, “I’m…”

“…’the eternal Voynich grad’, Mrs Kurtz told me already. Is it true they’re hoping to get rid of you next week?”

“Well, they’re certainly going to try – perhaps it’ll be third time lucky.”

She paused, looking him up and down in the way a butcher would look at a freshly-hung carcass. “That would be a shame – Mrs Kurtz would miss you”, she said with half a smile, turning to walk away. “Though not your pencil sucking.”

“And your name is…?”

“Call me Emm – I’m the new cleaner.”

She was a cleaner? Errm… what? “Do cleaners like to eat lunch?”

“We’re always starving. Tomorrow should be good, because they’ll be kicking you out at noon – a French film crew will have your precious manuscript for the afternoon.”

A French film crew?

* * * * * * * *

Update: the story continues with Chapter 2 (“Game On”)…

Indus script & Markov models…

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According to this recent Wired article, Rajesh Rao, a computer scientist from the University of Washington, has run a Markov chain finder on the 1500-odd fragments of (the as-yet-undeciphered) Indus script – and has ‘discovered’ that it is “moderately ordered, just like spoken languages“.

Well, ain’t that something.

In a depressingly familiar echo of the ‘hoax’ debate over the Voynich Manuscript, the most important result is that it argues against Steve Farmer’s (2004) case that the Indus fragments were merely “political and religious symbols“, i.e. not a language at all, but just odd visual propaganda of some sort.

Language is a tricky, evolving, misunderstood, dynamic artefact that typically only has meaning within a very specific local context. The failure of linguists to “crack” the Indus fragments (all of which are very short) is no failure at all – we are massively disadvantaged by the passing millennia, and cannot easily trace the structure within the flow of ideas (the perennial intellectual historian hammer).

Having said that, what I read as Farmer’s basic idea – that researchers have for too long looked for a definitive script grammar as an indicator of advanced literacy – is an excellent point. And so the notion that Indus script analysts should perhaps be instead looking for some kind of arbitrary / non-formalized explanation (a confused model, rather than a complex one) is sensible. My opinion is that Farmer is overplaying his skeptical hand, and that the script is very probably communication (as opposed to mere decoration) – but is it written in something we would recognize as a language? Apparently not, I would say.

Incidentally, Indus script uses roughly 300-400 symbols (depending on how you count them), with the most frequent four symbols making up about 21% of the texts: inscriptions (many on potsherds, also known as ostraca) are all short, with an average length of only 4.6 symbols. All of which makes the script completely unlike known languages – but all the same, what is it?

Perhaps Rajesh Rao’s Markov models will reveal some kind of pointers towards its hidden structure, towards the truth – but as to Rao’s suggestion that they may well yield a “grammar”… I suspect not.

PS: Farmer cites Gabriel Landini & Rene Zandbergen’s paper (funny, that), though points out that Zipf’s Law is an ineffective tool for differentiating language-based texts from non-language-based texts. Just so you know…

4th Bellaso cipher toppled, Tony Gaffney strikes again!

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That man Tony Gaffney has been at it again, shooting yet another cryptographic tin can down off Giovan Battista Bellaso’s fence: this time, it was Bellaso’s 1564 challenge cipher #7’s turn to fall.

What was particularly sweet about #7 was that it was a completely different type of cipher to the others Tony had previously broken: rather than being some kind of reciprocal rotating cipher (i.e. reciprocal = a cipher that both encodes and decodes, and rotating = a cipher alphabet whose order rotates every letter, every plaintext word, or every ciphertext word), this one was a fairly fiendish digram table (i.e. a table of pairs of letters).

Of course, you’d need a really substantial piece of ciphertext to stand any chance of filling out the contents of any such table: but because Bellaso wasn’t that sadistic, he used the same table he included in his book. The difficulty was therefore not so much of reconstructing the table, but of reconstructing the ksyphrase driving the table (i.e., the phrase permuting the rows and columns).

As regular Cipher Mysteries readers should know by know, classical (i.e. puzzle-based rather than statistics-based) code-breakers such as Tony look for words in the ciphertext with unusual properties, and see if they can use those to lever their way in. Here, the fact that nearly every word has an even number of letters is a strong indication that this is a digram-based cipher: and in Bellaso’s table (where each row of digrams is horizontally offset by one place relative to the row above it) the group CMYLDLELRL in line 4 of the ciphertext would appear to fall mostly along a diagonal.

Assuming that Y was “unlikely to be in the keyword or in the message“, Tony then “compared each of the 10 digrams in its row with those in their diagonals” – this let him hunt for candidate words to fit this basic kind of consonant-vowel-consonant pattern. “cifra” matched the first three pairs; “fantasie” matched the first four pairs; but by far the best 5-digram match for the group was “altramente“.

“This gave me a few rows and columns – the rest was a lot of trial & error & cups of tea & cigarettes!”

Post-caffeine and post-tobacco, here’s the resulting Italian cleartext that Tony ended up with – it appears to be explaining how to aim your cannon so that it hits the target:-

serom pera ilfestcon doi  sopresetireve  c onlavite perpe tova ilcanone
QMOSDAHSOM CULRMENEESFMBT QUXRQBRHORRGIA NTEECFTLRL HSXOIARETT CUNOEGED
postoasegnn ousire delapaia faretirar e ilchanoneil quale sedeveretirar
HDXMPTQMXGES TBQEOE FOCFHUBG LAOERMOMODIACUNSEOEEIOCDMDCMIA QMFOTOOERMOMOD
inproporti onesetutiri inalto stsognache nel retirasecali chonlacoda
EMXRHLOTRM EEQBRHRRORBF EMCMRE MUQUXGNGSB EDCROERMOMQMNOCH NSEECFNEFT
altramente dariaeo to d alsegnosetutirai baso bis na* elacoda retiran do
CMYLDLELRL FTOUPEGURE FRCMQMXGQRRHRRORPU ALQU AEQCECYECENGFBPL OERMOMEB FM
siassen ?da viran doperdrito bisognaseretiripesdritto etintutitreiquesuicasi
QEQHQMESTFT TLOMESFMHSZBOURE AEQUXGQHOARHORHOQBXFRBRE RHEMRURMYLBUMDQBTLNOQE
leretebisognache sesttiri noequal menteperchhe calan dounarotada rialap
CGOERLAEQUXGNGSB QMMURMOU EGMRPOCDDFYHHTOANSSB NOCFESFMEUOBRAFFPLOUCMHR
ladaquellaban da
CFFTMDCECFALESFT

* YE = Il Signor Iddie, “The Lord God” (as per the table below – so almost certainly an error)
? An odd number of letters in this group (so almost certainly a typesetting error).

If you then insert plausible-looking spaces, you end up with text looking like this:-

Se rompera il fest con doi sopre se tireve con la vite perpetoua il canone
posto a segnn ousire della paia fare tirare il chanone il quale se devere tirar
in proportione se tutiri in alto st sogna che nel retira se cali chon la coda
altramente dariaeo to d'al segno se tutirai baso bis na ? el a coda retiran do
si assen ? da virando per drito bisogna se retire pes dritto et intuit tre I que
sui casi le rete bisogna che sesttiri no equalmente perchhe calando una rota dari
alap lada quella banda

As you can see from the final table (below), the keyphrase driving the row and column permutations appears to be “BARTOLOMEUS / PAN FILIUS”.

   B  A  R  T  O  L  M  E  U  S  C  D  F         G         H
P  pb pa pr pt po pl pm pe pu ps pc pd pf        pg        Ph
   aa ea ia oa ua A  aa ae ai ao au A  accio     altra     ancore
A  ah ab aa ar at ao al am ae au as ac ad        af        ag
   ab eb ib ob ub B  ba be bi bo bu B  benche    che       che
N  ng nh nb na nr nt no nl nm ne nu ns nc        nd        nf
   ac ec ic oc uc C  ca ce ci co cu Ch cosa      como      della
F  ff fg fh fb fa fr ft fo fl fm fe fu fs        fc        fd
   ad ed id od ud D  da de di do du D  debba     detto     doppe
I  id if ig ih ib ia ir it io il im ie iu        is        ic
   ae ee ie oe ue E  ea ee ei eo eu E  esso      essendo   essere
L  lc ld lf lg lh lb la lr lt lo ll lm le        lu        ls
   af ef if of uf F  fa fe fi fo fu F  forsi     fusse     finche
U  us uc ud uf ug uh ub ua ur ut uo ul um        ue        uu
   ag eg ig og ug G  ga ge gi go gu G  gratia    grave     grato
S  su ss sc sd sf sg sh sb sa sr st so sl        sm        se
   ah eh ih oh uh H  ha he hi ho hu H  abaiamo   avunto    hanno
B  be bu bs bc bd bf bg bh bb ba br bt bo        bl        bm
   ai ei ii oi ui I  ia ie ii io iu I  imperio   impo      impoche
C  cm ce cu cs cc cd cf cg ch cb ca cr ct        co        cl
   al el il ol ul L  la le li lo lu L  leqli     liquali   lettera
D  DL dm de du ds dc dd df dg dh db da dr        dt        do
   am em im om um M  ma me mi mo mu M  molto     modo      mondo
E  eo EL em ee eu es ec ed ef eg eh eb ea        er        et
   an en in on un N  na ne ni no nu N  non       nostra    nella
G  gt go gl gm ge gu gs gc gd gf gg gh gb        ga        gr
   ao eo io oo uo O  oa oe oi oo ou O  oltra     ogni      ognicosa
H  hr ht ho hl hm he hu hs hc hd hf hg hh        hb        ha
   ap ep ip op up P  pa pe pi po pu P  per       pero      perche
M  ma mr mt mo ml mm me mu ms mc md mf mg        mh        mb
   aq eq iq oq uq Q  st st st st qu Q  quali     quella    questa
O  ob oa or ot oo ol om oe ou os oc od of        og        oh
   ar er ir or ur R  ra re ri ro ru R  quato     quando    qualche
Q  qh qb qa qr qt qo ql qm qe qu qs qc qd        qf        qg
   as es is os us S  sa se si so su S  signor    signoria  scritto
R  rg rh rb ra rr rt ro RL rm re ru rs rc        rd        rf
   at et it ot ut T  ta te ti to tu T  scrisse   tutto     tanto
T  tf tg th tb ta tr tt to tl tm te tu ts        tc        td
   au eu iu ou uu V  ua ue iu uo uu V  vostro    vero      una
X  xd xf xg xh xb xa xr xt xo xl xm xe xu        xs        xc
   br dr gn lt nq X  pr rl rp rt st X  vostra    le vostra lquate piu
                                        Sig       lettere   presto
Y  yc yd yf yg yh yb ya yr yt yo YL ym ye        yu        ys
   ch fr gr mn nt Y  rc rm rs sc tr Y  Il Signor Le cose   Me
                                        Iddio     passano   racemande
Z  zs zc zd zf zg zh zb za zr zt zo zl zm        ze        zu
   cr gl lm nc pn Z  rd rn rt sp tr Z  habiamo   havemo    fatime
                                        recevute  apiacer   raccom.

All in all, I think this was another excellent result for Tony G., cracking an altogether harder challenge cipher than the previous ones – classy stuff, very well done! 🙂

Edith Rickert’s & Margaret Rickert’s papers…

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As a brief follow-up to yesterday’s post on Edith Rickert, I wondered whether her papers might be in the University of Chicago archives – and indeed here they are. For any Voynich researcher who just happens to be passing by, you might consider looking through Box 1 Folder 8 (for correspondence) and Box 10 Folder 13 (for photographs of her family – not important, but nice to see all the same).

The U. of C. also holds the papers of her younger sister Margaret Rickert: she specialised in medieval illuminated manuscripts (there’s a 10-page paper on her in the 2005 book “Women Medievalists and the Academy“) and worked as a code-breaker in WWII, just as her older sister had done in WWI. She’s briefly mentioned in the First Study Group minutes – one from 1944 that notes she “accompanied WFF [William Friedman] at Phila[delphia] in 1923 to hear Newbold. Cannot add anything else“; and another that notes she attended a 31 August 1945 FSG meeting. Box 1 holds her notes on various manuscripts: might she have taken notes on the Voynich Manuscript? My guess is no, that the small range of poor quality reproductions of Voynich Manuscript pages available at that time probably dissuaded her from getting interested in it as an art history puzzle. But you never know until you look!

Of course, John Matthews Manly’s papers are there too (the link has a nice summary of his life, including his famous “cigar” story) – I’ve summarized the Voynich-related ones here already, but would also note here that his Series II of folders related purely to cryptographic correspondence.

Edith Rickert and the Voynich Manuscript…

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An off-blog email exchange about the Grolier Club (where Wilfrid Voynich’s estate bequeathed eight boxes of papers relating to his book business in America) nudged my memory about a minor player on the 20th century Voynich stage…

When Voynich researcher Richard SantaColoma visited the Grolier Club back in May 2008, he trawled through these boxes (Box 6 in particular) for anything unexpected: he very kindly wrote up his notes and passed them on to the Journal of Voynich Studies, which posted them on its website.

There are some scans of letters (and extracts of letters) sent by William Romaine Newbold: and Ethel Voynich’s handwritten notes on Voynich botany: but probably the most interesting thing is a set of short research notes from Anne Nill’s ring binder in Box 6.

On page 2, there’s an August 1917 letter from ‘Edith Richert’ to Wilfrid Voynich, asking: “I should be glad to know your reasons for believing that the symbols vary according to their position. I have my own reasons. I should like to see whether they agree.”

WMV replied (in September 1917) that “I have no reasons for believing that the symbols vary to their positions, as I know nothing about cipher. But it was the opinion of two or three European professors.”

I was particularly struck by this clear-sighted observation (by Richert and the European professors): thanks to modern computer transcriptions, this kind of thing is now plain to see – but all the same, this was only 1917.

Who was this “Edith Richert”? Actually, this was Edith Rickert (1871-1938), who worked at the University of Chicago, and worked very closely with our old friend John Matthews Manly, co-authoring numerous books with him, and spending sixteen years on “a monumental undertaking of scholarship, critical analysis, and data collection” – a critical edition of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.

john-matthews-manly-and-edith-rickert-smallJohn Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert, 1932

There’s much more on their working relationship on this U. of Chicago webpage here. However, exhausted by the epic scale of what they were trying to achieve, Rickert died just before publication of the first volume: though Manly lived long enough to see the project completed, he too died soon afterwards.

What I find slightly unnerving is that what Manly and Rickert were attempting to do for the Canterbury Tales (detailed palaographic and codicological analysis, examining every page of every manuscript in person looking for otherwise unseen clues to its secret history) is precisely what we are trying to do for the Voynich Manuscript. But all the same, it took them (and a funded team of graduate students and collaborators) 16 years, and the effort pretty much killed them both. Hmmm… makes you wonder how much of a chance of success we actually stand, doesn’t it?

The punchline here is that Manly and Rickert actually worked together breaking World War One codes – yes, she was an Allied cryptologist. There’s much more on her life here, and a copy of the book “Edith Rickert: a memoir” (1944) by Fred Millett is online here.

But, hold on a minute! I normally don’t like counterfactual histories, but… if William Romaine Newbold hadn’t wrecked the credibility of our “Roger Bacon Manuscript”, what are the chances that Manly and Rickert in 1924 might have instead chosen that as their subject for study in preference to Chaucer? Really, who’s to say?

Some more Voynich-inspired artworks…

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According to Pittsburgh-based Chilean artist Alberto Almarza’s blog profile, he “meticulously blurs the boundaries between consensus and potential reality, creating a bridge between the realm of matter and that of inner vision.” All of which rather reminds me of the Jim Morrison quote: “There are things known and things unknown and in between are The Doors“.

Anyhoo, given Almarza’s interests and self-proclaimed liminality, it was starkly inevitable that he would one day pick up on the Voynich Manuscript (as indeed he just has). Even so, I think it’s fair to say that the form of his preliminary sketches (“Voynichus Conifralias”) seems far closer to the draughtsmanlike excesses of the Codex Seraphinianus (though without its whimsical distorted rationality thing, admittedly).

Luigi Serafini’s beautiful objet d’art strikes me as an infinite postmodern jest, an internally evolved architecture of a private language, with too many arbitrary degrees of separation for us to tease out any of the tortuous tweening stages. And what of its striking parallels with the Voynich Manuscript? Having probably grown in similar ways, I say, both ended up broadly as unreadable as each other.

Incidentally, recapitulation theory famously tried to claim that ontogeny [how an individual develops] recapitulates phylogeny [how species developed]. Though this is scientifically incorrect, its internal confusion might help points to the confusion within Voynich Manuscript research – do people look for a macro-level / species-level phylogenetic explanation when they should be looking for a micro-level / individual-level ontogenetic explanation?

Almarza certainly has excellent technique: but to grow his own Voynich Manuscript or Codex Serafinianus, I suspect he would need not a seed, but a weed – something almost with its own will to live that develops almost by itself, despite extensive authorial rational pruning. Surely what is most remarkable about both these texts is not their mad structure, but their lack of construction marks, hmmm?

Mercantesca, Leonardo, and the Voynich Manuscript…

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A new day dawns, bringing with it a nice email from Augusto Buonafalce in response to my post on Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘x’-like abbreviation for ‘ver‘ (as recently mentioned by Edith Sherwood).

buonafalce_verbuonafalce_ver_normal

Augusto points out that if you remove the plain diagonal line in the reflected version, what remains appears to be similar to a ‘b’… but isn’t. In the 15th century “mercantesca” script, this particular ‘b’-like shape was used to denote ‘v’: Leone Battista Alberti suggested (in his Tuscan grammar) that this shape should be more widely employed to help tell ‘v’ apart from ‘u’. Specifically, Alberti’s ‘b’-like shape looked like this:-

buonafalce_b

Now, mercantesca hasn’t really been discussed in the context of the Voynich Manuscript before (Google returns no useful hits, while even the old VMs mailing list archives appear to be silent), which is something of a shame – for if arch-Florentines such as Leonardo, Alberti, and even Michaelangelo used it, mercantesca must surely have been as close to the beating heart of the Quattrocento project as the much-touted (but very different) ‘humanist hand’.

(The ‘humanist hand’, you may recall, is an upright, formal script that was a conscious revival of an earlier script – which is why dating the Voynich Manuscript based on supposed similarities with the the humanist hand alone is so contentious.)

While the formal humanist hand was used mainly for writing in Latin, the informal mercantesca (which flourished from 1350 to 1550, peaking around 1450-1500) was used mainly for writing in the vulgar tongue: when written well, it is sometimes called ‘bella mercantesca’.

There’s a reasonable literature on this which a Voynich researcher with palaeographic leanings ought to have at least a reasonable look through.:-

  • Orlanelli, G. ‘Osservazioni sulla scrittura mercantesca nel secoli XIV e XV’, in Studi in onore di Riccardo Filangieri (Naples 1959) I, pp.445-460
  • Irene Ceccherini (Firenze): La Genesi della Scrittura Mercantesca. (summary of 2005 poster session)
  • Albert Derolez, The palaeography of Gothic manuscript books (2003)

Having said that, it is perhaps the 45 volumes of the CMD (the Catalogue of Dated Manuscripts) produced over the last 50 years that need checking here, particularly the CMDIt (the Italian section), I suspect. A proper palaeography research challenge is something I’ve been meaning to post about for a while: but that’s definitely a job for another day…

Stuff to be thinking about! 🙂

Decode the Voynich Manuscript in Only Five Years…

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(Here’s a guest post by Voynich researcher Marke Fincher that I’ve edited to Cipher Mysteries house style – I hope you enjoy it!)

Let’s say you want to do something really crazy, like decode the Voynich Manuscript. What… you do? Well, good luck to you! And to help on your way, here are some handy (but hard-earned) rules of thumb that might just help you achieve what nobody else has managed in five centuries…

(1) Don’t waste time on very well-trodden ground

  • Don’t make assumptions. Don’t make assumptions about what it can or can’t be. One of the reasons the Voynich Manuscript remains unsolved despite all the brilliant minds that have worked on it is probably due to similar assumptions. Keep your mind open – there has to be a first for anything which is by definition unprecedented.
  • Get more facts, as well as different types of facts. It is always a good use of time to go out and “get more facts”, by which I mean: get more detail, qualify (and quantify) what you know / expect / suspect / predict, study entirely new areas and learn more about what the VMs actually is.  If you try to link the different areas of your knowledge together, in due course better fitting hypotheses will emerge naturally.
  • Strong disproof is more useful than weak proof. It is far easier to prove what the Voynich Manuscript isn’t than to prove what it is. Keep a list of “it can’t be X because of Y” statements,  but check through them periodically. Don’t spend ages studying what it “could be”,  just study what it is (and what it is not) i.e. don’t spend too much time trying to fit your pet hypothesis to the facts.
  • The drawings aren’t just window dressing. Study the images as much as you study the transcriptions.  You should check and relate what you learn from the transcription back to the real thing as much as possible.  Check any suggestive text results manually against the images & vice versa.

(2) Appreciate the rational patterning underlying ‘Voynichese’

  • Get a good working grasp of Voynichese. One good pragmatic way to achieve this is (a) to learn the EVA transcription system and (b) to transcribe an entire A-language page and an entire B-language page for yourself. Once you’ve done this, you should start to see that the countless patterns at play within the text are not (despite what some linguists like to claim) really like the ones you find in normal languages.
  • Look for differences in system between pages. As far as these patterns go, some pages show similar rules at work, while others exhibit important differences – be warned, ignoring these differences between different system variants is undoubtedly a Very Bad Idea. Do your best to categorise the VMs pages into what you think are consistent sections (hint: these may not actually be on currently adjacent pages). Futhermore, it’s another Very Bad Idea to analyse large sets of pages without first satisfying yourself that the same system is at work throughout those pages.
  • Determine which letters are usual and which are unusual. Take the time to compile a study of the unusual and rare symbols, especially the unusual gallows variants and “bench” symbols. Might these shapes hold clues to the function of the regular symbols of which they appear to be variants?

(3) Look at the patterns inside words

  • Study symbol order preferences and rules within words.  There is more evidence of the nature of the system at work here than anywhere else.   It is one of the best places to start to get a feel for the thing.
  • Study repeating sequences (but NOT in terms of whole words).  Introduce some flexibility/fuzzyness to your matching of sequences or you’ll not see it all (but not too much, or you’ll go crazy).
  • Study the extent of “anagrams” within the vocabularies and contrast with known languages.
  • Study the extent of “words within words”. Similarly, look at the hierachical nature of Voynichese word formation.

(4) Look at the patterns between words

  • Study the relationships between words.  They are not like “real” words. Don’t just study vocabularies, word-lists and generative grammars in isolation.  Relate those structures and rules to what appears on actual pages (i.e. study them in context) and you will see a lot more of what is going on.
  • Be wary of coincidental relationships.  Contrast the real patterns with coincidental ones by randomizing the word order and repeating the analysis.
  • Adjacency relationships exist across spaces.  Study these and always be aware of them. Be extemely wary of spaces and assumptions of what they are there for.
  • Study the ‘families’ of similar words. Do they just look the same or do they operate similarly as well? There are also vital things to learn here about variation in Voynichese.

(5) Look at the positions of words inside paragraphs, lines, and pages

  • Study the position within the line and paragraph that ‘words’ appear.  There are plenty of unusual happenings here that any reasonably comprehensive explanation would need to cover.
  • Repeat any analysis that you do on the VMs on real-world language samples. Contrast the results and try to understand the differences you find. Many “unusual properties” of the VMs turn out to be properties of known language as well!  🙂
  • Pick some of the hardest properties to explain and target those first. Systems which match the easier properties of the VMs to recreate whilst ignoring the more perplexing and problematic properties aren’t really very helpful.  The more unusual the property, the more it probably has to say about the actual system at work.

(6) Transcriptions can hide problems, not just expose them

  • Check your transcriptions. There are errors (of course) but also many situations where the transcribers were uncertain of what to record, or glossed over unusual or awkward details in the actual text.  There are also details not captured in any of the current transcriptions which could well turn out to be crucial.
  • Repeat any analysis methods you use on multiple transcriptions. Compare and contrast the results.

(7) Be patient – this whole process takes an awfully long time!

  • Once you get going, five years can pass by in a flash. So be warned!

Two more Renaissance challenge ciphers cracked!

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Once upon a time (twenty years ago, back when I still had hair), I used to play for Hackney Chess Club in the London League: after most matches, the team would decamp to Brick Lane for a late night curry and a swift-ish couple of pints. Happy (if somewhat calorifically excessive) days. 🙂

And so it has recently been a thoroughly pleasant surprise to encounter another Hackney player from that same era (Tony Gaffney) engaged in his own historical cipher odyssey – applying his devious problem-solving instincts to crack long-unbroken ciphers, such as the 1564 Bellaso challenge cipher #6 (described in detail here a couple of weeks ago).

Incidentally, I asked Tony if he had a reasonably current photo of himself I could put on my blog – sorry but no, came the reply. And so I sent him a quick sketch of how I remembered him from all those years ago, to see if much had changed:-

tony-gaffney-sketch

“That’s like looking in a mirror – only the hair’s too short“, came the reply. So, here’s my best guess as to what (the fairly reclusive) Tony Gaffney looks like circa 2009:-

tony-gaffney-sketch-v2

Hmmm… it does make me wonder whether there is some kind of karmic balancing law at play in the universe, a zero sum game by which every inch of hair I lose has to reappear on someone else’s head (Tony’s, specifically). But I digress!

As expected, having cracked 1564 #6, the indomitable Mr Gaffney rapidly moved onto Giovan Battista Bellaso’s other challenge ciphers. Could he beat the inevitable crypto pack & make the next crack?

The answer was an emphatic yes: Bellaso’s 1564 challenge cipher #2 was next to fall. Tony’s starting clue was the third word (SDARGBFSTRS), an eleven-letter word with the same first letter and last letter. Having tried out ‘equinotiale‘, a series of crossword-like puzzles then offered themselves up for solving, leading eventually to the following plaintext (and once again, note that Tony cannot read Italian):-

dal circolo equinotiale versoil nostropolo artbt
RSX OSIUBPD SDARGBFSTRS BXDADRR HCIALBLDSA ODFMA
451 5123451 45123451234 2345123 4512345123 34512
sescopra asaipiu terrache acqua etdaldeno circolo verso
ERIMAIEU XAURHPG BSEHTUNR UMIFS SFOTRRRCE OSIUBPD GTIDB
45123451 4512345 34512345 12345 451234512 5123451 51234
ilpolo btarti sescopra asaipiu acqua chetera dicoche verso
RRICXE XETLCN ERIMAIEU TDXNFRC XOGBO TMTAXDS ORUBORO CSEIE
234512 512345 45123451 2345123 45123 4512345 1234512 34512
ilnosnrro poloartico sono nelemontagne etsoto lemontagne
SSGBACILB FERBSHAQTC ECCE HRXOFBIETNHR RELACC QRBEGCSQFX
123451234 1234512345 4512 451234512345 512345 4512345123
grande cavernosita nenedi acqua etventi etverso elpolo
MEUFSS OUBXDIDLQCS ITFXRN TULGU SFAOGCN XCGTIDB SPFERB
451234 51234512345 512345 23451 4512345 3451234 451234
antartico none cosi
XIETLCNNE GBIT NEDP.
451234512 3451 1234

With help from Renaissance cipher historian Augusto Buonafalce, this yields Bellaso’s thoughts on why there is more land towards the North Pole than towards the South Pole:-

dal circolo equinotiale verso il nostro polo artico se scopre assai piu terra che acqua et dal deno circolo verso ilpolo antartico se scopre assai piu acqua che terra dico che verso il nosnrro polo artico sono (ne) le montagne et soto le montagne grande cavernosita nenedi(piene) acqua et venti et verso el polo antartico non e cosi

From the equinoctial circle towards the Arctic pole there is exposed much more earth than water and from said circle towards the Antarctic pole there is exposed more water than earth because towards our Arctic pole there are the mountains and underneath the mountains large caves full of water and winds and towards the Antarctic pole it is not so.
(Translation & enciphering/typesetter error corrections courtesy of Augusto Buonafalce)

Not content with having solved two of Bellaso’s challenge ciphers, Tony then turned his attention to the 1564 cipher #1: once again, an unusual short sequence was enough of a clue to get him started. In this instance, he noticed the palindrome DABAD in the ciphertext, and wondered whether that might be his old friend PROPORTIONE (which you may recall helped him solve 1564 #6). The cipher system turned out to employ ten alphabets changing not with every letter but with every word.

diptdexloxarsoxdicoxchexlepetoxesemprexconformexa
PSDLPQNSDMXLNEAUPHFBXDUCOHUHCLDXCXPMBXERMGXMCOTFO
1      2  3    4    5   6      7       8        9
lasuaxcausaxdbxlarmaxlungaxdastaxinesaxsonoxpiunumerax
HOENOIPGMFGLPGNSHIXHMRCSDXAUTMATBOQUASCBLPLDMUIOIPXBUE
      10    1  2     3     4     5     6    7
departexunitexchenonxsonoxnelacortaxetuicrtusxunitaxpote
STAPCETFNUXFSIPNRHBHLICXCNTPSHGDINHMOMCQULMCNADRPATBLIBU
8       9     10     1    2         3         4     5
ntirestxdelepalexdiferoxetdilegoxprocedexperchexaierxno
QBOMUABCXHOHNROHDTUHXBNETESHUTNMFBDAQSRSICREPNRLUSQFNTD
        6        7      8        9       10     1    2
nresistibxdelcircoloxdicoxfinitixadinfinitumxnulamxese
TIPLRLNRUMGORUQLUEREAUPHFBGOQOBOCRXGPUGPGCFQDOIGQPETDT
          3          4    5      6           7     8
xproportionemxlafiguraxsfericaxnonaxprqncipiioxdxeldia
FBDABADFXAUSGIXGSTAMEGLIRQFSOUNTDTHMFLISUQFQQEAUBUPHOS
 9            10       1       2    3          4
metroxaprincipioxetfinex.
RUBMICRNAGPTGNGLDXDHUOXE.
      5          6

With a few typesetter corrections and words reconstructed (because many doubled letters in the plaintext were converted to single letters, introducing a certain amount of ambiguity that you have to read Bellaso’s clues to resolve), this almost certainly originally read something closer to:-

Di ptde lo arco dico che le petto?(l’efeto) e sempre conforme a la sua causa db l’arma lunga d’asta in esa sono piu numera de parti unite che non sono nela corta et uicrtus unita potentirest delle palle di ferro et di lengo procede perche aier non resistib del circolo dico finite ad infinitum nullam esse proportionem la figura sferica non a principio del diametro a principio et fine.

Interestingly, inside this Italian plaintext is embedded a phrase in Latin (which I have highlighted above) that Google notes as appearing in a 1957 article by Bruno Busulini called “Introduzione a una storia e filosofia del calcolo infinitesimale” (Introduction to a history and philosophy of infinitesimal calculus): and so seems highly likely to me to be Bellaso quoting approvingly from someone else’s Latin book on calculus. Next time I’m at the British Library, I’ll try to get a copy and see where the quotation originally came from…

Once again, my hearty congratulations go out to Tony Gaffney for solving these cipher mysteries!