Curious runic cipher found on a Cincinnati fence…

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A few days ago on an ‘AboveTopSecret’ online forum, user ‘NerdGoddess’ posted links to photos of a curious runic cipher her boyfriend found on a piece of paper on his fence not long before, and asked if anybody could decrypt it.

Of course, the fact that the cipher half comprises eleven miscellaneous shapes (letters & runes, all different) plus a dot would seem to make reliable decipherment unlikely, unless it just happens to be extremely close to an existing cipher alphabet. Similarly, the thirteen digits seem pretty non-specific (phone numbers and Swiss bank accounts aside), apart from the way that the first three (‘463’) are the same as the last three (‘364’) reversed.

All the same, her post provoked fourteen pages of responses (probably even more by now) ranging from the sensible to the speculative to the downright opportunistic:-
* Maybe it’s a mixture of various Futhark runic alphabets?
* Maybe it’s a phone number concealed by someone called Amy?
* Maybe it’s related to the Rushville Runestone?
* Maybe it’s written in a gang cipher?
* Maybe it’s Gnommish (from Artemis Fowl), Enochian, hobo, Roma or Pavee markings?
* ‘Dump your loser boyfriend, baby, and go out with me instead’ (Ha!)

Incidentally, the Rushville Runestone has its own nice (but thoroughly solved) cipher mystery story: found in woods near Rushville, Fairfield County, Ohio in 1972, it turned out to be a physical copy of some runes shown in a hand-drawn picture illustrating Neil Shute’s novel “An Old Captivity” (1940), and saying “Haki / Hekja”.

Back to Cincinnati: and I have to say it’s clear to me that when we look at this ciphertext, we’re supposed to think ‘cipher runes‘, in particular based on either the Elder Futhark…

…or the Younger Futhark…

Having said that, it’s basically a lousy fit for any of them. If you optimistically pick & choose letters from whichever Futhark alphabet you futharking well like, about as close as you can get is “f h e n [A] . s h [H] d t [?]”. Which is my cryptographic way of saying ‘not even close’. Put it this way: it wasn’t a runic purist who left this message. 🙂

All the same, I quite like the way that the letters seem (if you reverse them) to spell out AMY, which is why several people have proposed that the author of the note was someone called Amy, perhaps leaving her phone number in a mysterious (and steganographic) way: but there’s one last theory that hadn’t (last time I looked) yet been proposed.

You see, the other interesting thing about the digits is that few of them repeat, and all of the numbers 1-9 appear. So… what if these digits are the key to a transposition cipher? That is, what does the bottom line become if its shapes are transposed in the order given in the top line? Here’s what it looks like before transposition (admittedly not 100% sure)…

…and after transposition…

The nice thing about doing this is that the dot gets transposed to the very end of the cipher, which would seem to provide weak confirmation we’re going in the right direction. But… what does it say? If you squint, does it say “TO MY WITCH WA.”? Curious, and very possibly wrong, but perhaps this might be enough to help someone to recognize the kind of cipher being used here and to decrypt it more reliably. Enjoy!

H. C. Reynolds – possibly in Auckland Hospital?

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I’ve done a bit more digging on our ever-elusive “H. C. Reynolds”, and thought it was time to post a quick update.

Firstly, though there was indeed an “H. C. Reynolds” playing golf in Murray Bridge in the late 1930s (and he would almost certainly have played some away matches at Glenelg Golf Club, perilously close to where the Unknown Man died), it seems that this particular Harry Reynolds was still alive in December 1953 when his son Graeme Campbell got engaged to Christobel Jane Taylor (ref#1, ref#2). So it seems we can basically rule him out. 🙁

All of which reduces our scope back to the only two remaining leads of any substance: (a) Reynolds’ relatively brief employment on the SS Manuka and RMS Niagara (1917-1918), and (b) the birth (and apparent death) of a Horace Charles Reynolds in Tasmania, who may or may not be the same person.

However, a few days ago I realized that seaman Reynolds almost certainly had structured employment, because the Manuka and the Niagara were both owned by the same company, the Union Steam Ship Company of New Zealand – though this was taken over by P&O in 1917, it retained its own identity and archives. Searching the New Zealand Maritime Index (a database maintained by the Bill Laxon Maritime Library) yielded three interesting hits relating to seamen’s sick pay in 1916-1917 and 1918-1919 for “Reynolds, H.” (1, 2, 3).

It seems tempting to infer that this was the same person, and indeed very tempting to speculate that Reynolds contracted influenza as part of the 1918 pandemic and was incapacitated in New Zealand – the records relate to sick pay to an “H Reynolds”, and the virus was most devastating to young adults (paradoxically, because of their strong immune systems). However, the pandemic only properly hit Australia in December 1918 while the last sight of Reynolds we have is in April 1918, so none of this is in any way certain as yet.

All the same, because this money was paid out as sick pay in New Zealand, it seems highly likely to me that the recipient would have been admitted into a New Zealand hospital: and with the major port there at the time being Auckland (which is where the Niagara docked), I’d predict the place to look next would be the admissions and discharges register for Auckland Hospital.

Luckily, the NZ government’s Archway archives portal points us to the Auckland Hospital Register of Patients Admission and Discharge, first series, Vol. 3 (1918-1920) (ref: R20388997), shelfmark “YCAB 15266 4/a D”. This is a “heavy, bound volume” in the Auckland Regional Office (close to Auckland Airport), and contains exactly the kind of meaty information we’re hungry for:-

Register number, ward, date of admission, name, address, sex, age, occupation, malady, nature of operation (if any), date of operation, result (relieved, cured, incurable, died), date of discharge or death, number of days in hospital, married or single, if married number of children, nationality, if child or married state father’s or husband’s occupation, length of time in New Zealand, name of medical practitioner, religion, amount owing at date of discharge, remarks.

It’s not clear whether these records are indexed (my guess is that they probably are), but I strongly suspect that there will be an entry in there for late April, May or June 1918 for 2nd Mate H. C. Reynolds admitted off R M S Niagara, possibly with influenza. Who will be the first to find it? Do we have any Cipher Mysteries readers in NZ?

The Ultimate Christmas Game… the Phaistos Disk?

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In a recent Cipher Mysteries post, I mentioned Peter Aleff’s theory that the Phaistos Disk was based on Senet, an Ancient Egyptian board game. All very fascinating… but something about it all triggered an old memory, one I couldn’t quite put my finger on. However, when yesterday I did finally manage to find what I had been reminded of – Mehen – it set a much larger train of thought in motion, that might point to a new Phaistos Disk board game theory. I’ll try to explain…

Five thousands years ago, board games started as Pharaonic courtly pursuits, only becoming accessible to a wider audience three thousand (!) years later when the idea of abstract gaming spread through the Roman upper middle class. With that basic framework in mind, Aleff theorizes that the Ancient Egyptian game Senet (a rectangular race game with pawns and various hazard squares) morphed – millennia later, and by routes entirely unknown – into the relatively modern Game of the Goose (a spiral race game with pawns and various hazard squares): Aleff proposes ingenious ways in which the spiral structure of the Phaistos Disk somehow fits into that mysteriously missing multi-millennia lineage. All the same, just about the only fragment of supporting near-evidence of the modern game’s ancient parentage comes from a throwaway line in Molière’s (1668) “The Miser”:-

La Flèche: Item: a trou-madame table, a draught-board, with the game of mother goose, restored from the Greeks, very agreeable to pass the time when one has nothing else to do.

Well… that’s one theory, with a lot of speculation to back-fill an inevitably enormous historical gap. But what I don’t really like about it is the lack of any cultural mechanism by which ideas were carried down the centuries. We have plenty of evidence of various Roman versions of Senet, such as Duodecim Scripta and Felix Sex (Lucky Sixes), which developed into a game called Tabula, which then developed (eventually) into modern Backgammon. The problem? These all use rectangular boards, very much like Senet and very much unlike the spiral Phaistos Disk. If you believe – wearing your Anthony Grafton-like Intellectual Historian hat – that ideas flow through time, it’s hard not to conclude that these particular ideas aren’t really flowing past the Phaistos Disk.

Yet as every X-Files-ophile knows, for every thesis, there’s an equal and opposite antithesis (let’s not talk about ‘syntheses’, they do complicate things so): so here’s my own theory. Of course, I doubt it’s new, and I’m entirely aware that there’s more than a whiff of Gavin Menzies to its intuitive leapery, but I’m generally pretty comfortable with it, feel free to disagree all you like. 🙂

While I think that Aleff’s basic idea – that the Phaistos Disk is probably a courtly board game for the Minoan palace set – is sound, I suspect the braided historical strand of games he’s trying to tie it into is the wrong one. In my opinion, if the Disk is the board for a race game such as Senet, it is far more likely to have derived from a quite different Ancient Egyptian race game, a spiral race game called Mehen (Mehen = “coiled one”, a serpent god who protected Ra at night).

Fascinatingly, there are numerous spiral Mehen game boards still extant: this illustrated list on the Jocari site is an exceptional resource. Aleff would be right to point out that these contain many more sections than the Phaistos Disk: but for me, the big question is: what happened next? Did Mehen – a game which seems to have flourished 3000BC to 2300BC during the Old Kingdom – just disappear, or might it, like Senet, have then morphed into other spiral race games on an equally winding passage through the centuries?

Fast forward to the present, and we can see a quite different race game based around snakes and hazard squares: yes, I really am referring to Snakes and Ladders. This has a direct Indian parentage going back to at least the 16th century under the names Moksha Patamu, Gyanbazi, etc: the V&A Museum has a nice game board here. According to this site, Harish Johari’s book “The Yoga of Snakes and Arrows” claims:

The origins of this game appear to be found in 2nd century BC documents from India. Some historians point out that the game may be a variation of the ancient game of dasapada played on a 10×10 grid.

Dasapada (10×10) and ashtapada (8×8) were both race games which it is reputed that Gautama Buddha would not play in the 5th century BC. Apparently, Ashtapada was played on a square board with crosses on certain squares: though intriguingly, the game’s race did not – according to famous board-game historian H. J. R. Murray – proceed in the kind of boustrophedon (alternate rows go forward and backwards) order we now associate with Snakes and Ladders, but in a spiral pattern, moving clockwise to enter/capture a castle and then anticlockwise to return. (Though here’s a link to a dissenting opinion on this that doubts Murray’s certainty.)

Of course, you’ve already worked out where all this is, errrm, racing towards: that the Phaistos Disk probably fits not into the whole Senet…Backgammon game development line, but into an entirely different line moving from [spiral snake race] Mehen to [spiral race] Ashtapada/Dasapada to [boustrophedon race] Moksha Patamu to [boustrophedon race] Snakes & Ladders.

Perhaps the “snake” in the modern game was some kind of long-standing memory of (or some long-lost cultural reference to) to the Egyptian snake god Mehen, or perhaps just the snake-like Mehen game board: I don’t know, but wouldn’t it be nice if it were true?

Ultimately, however, I can’t prove a single thing of this whole tenuous chain (you know that, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise). And there’s the the awkward issue of the awkward gap between Phaistos and India to fill: how did idea in place A travel to place B?

The Menzies-like lateral ‘bridging’ step is the observation that it’s entirely possible that the Minoans were trading with India circa 1500 BC. For instance, chapter 17 of Gavin Menzies’ Bronze Age speculatiathon “The Lost Empire of Atlantis” (called “Indian Ocean Trade in the Bronze Age”) wonders whether the ancient Indus civilization’s port of Lothal (built around 2400BC) was connected with the Minoans (hint: Menzies concludes ‘yes’). However, my suggestion is rather more modest in scope than Menzies: it’s merely the story of a single idea, travelling with the flow of Bronze Age trade traffic.

Ultimately, for the Minoan palace elite, was the Phaistos Disk the ultimate board game, insofar as (like Mehen) might it have been a way of improving your odds in the afterlife? And if we now play Snakes & Ladders, are we not merely recapitulating 16th century Jain morality but also travelling in time on the back of a serpent to the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt? When our counter lands on a snake, is it Mehen we’re landing on? Just a thought!

A Happy Cipher Mysteries Christmas to you all! 🙂

Announcing “The Blitz Ciphers”…

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A few weeks ago, some new ciphertexts pinged on my Cipher Mysteries radar: the story goes that they had been found just after WWII in wooden boxes concealed in the wall of an East London cellar that German bombing had exposed. Hence I’ve called them “The Blitz Ciphers”, but they’re probably much older than the 1940s…

They were handed down to the discoverer’s nephew (the present owner), who now finds himself caught between a desire for relative anonymity and a desire to know what they say. So far, he has been good enough to release three tolerably OK photos from a much larger set he took: but will these be enough for us to crack their cipher?

[Of course, despite the story’s plausibility, I have to point out that this might conceivably still be a hoax designed to make cryptographic fools of us: but if so, it’s such a classy job that I really don’t mind. 🙂 ]

Description

Generally, the Blitz Ciphers’ writing appears to have been added in two hands: a larger, paler, more calligraphic presentation hand, and a smaller, darker, tighter annotation hand. While the presentation hand serves to establish the content and layout structure, the annotation hand is restricted to supplementary paragraphs and additional short notes apparently explaining key letters or terms.

Broadly speaking, the text on the first page (the ‘title page’, above) seems to have been laid down in three sequential phases:-
* #1: the circular ‘boss’ / ‘plaque’ and the two large paragraphs – large presentation hand, brown ink, quite faded in places.
* #2: the third large paragraph at the bottom – mid-sized annotation hand, brown ink.
* #3: the annotations to the other paragraphs – small-sized annotation hand, darker ink.
This general construction sequence seems to hold true for the other pages too.

The second page we have contains two curious diagrams: one a drawing of an octagon (though note that there is a square missing from the lines connecting all the vertices of the octagon), and the other an abstract tree-like representation of something unknown.

Our third page contains a large “John Dee”-like 20×20 square table, where each grid square contains individual cipher letters. The table has an array of red dots gridded within it, where each of the 16 internal red dots is surrounded by a letter repeated four times in a 2×2 block. Red dots near the sides all have two dotted square characters on the edge beside them, apart from a single one near the top right, suggesting a possible copying error. There is also a single correction (near the top left of the 20×20 table) made in the presentation hand.

The support material appears to be handmade paper (I don’t have access to them to look for a watermark, sorry!), while the inks for the two hands appear to be quite different. Though I can’t prove it, I suspect that the larger presentation hand was written using a quill pen (suggesting genuine age or some kind of ceremonial presentation aspect) while the smaller annotation hand was written several decades later with a metal nib. They could possibly have been written by the same person using different pens, but differences between the two hands argue against this.

My initial dating hunch was the first layer could well be 16th century and the second layer 17th century: but having said that, the whole thing could just as well be much more recent and instead have been deliberately written in that way to make it appear ‘venerable’ and old-looking. (More on this below.)

The Blitz Cipher Alphabet

The letter forms are clear, distinct, and upright: the presence of triangles, squares and circles and various inversions perhaps points to a cryptographer with a mathematical or geometric education. It’s closer to a demonstration alphabet (designed for show) than a tachygraphic script (designed for repeated large scale use). Here’s the provisional transcription key I’ve been working with:-

Despite some apparent ambiguities in how to parse or transcribe the various cipher shapes used, the fact that the 20×20 table has only a single letter in each cell is a fairly strong indication that each table cell contains a single cipher glyph, suggesting that about 50 distinct characters are in use. The text has a language-like character frequency distribution, with “:” [E] being the most frequently used character (the “tilted Jupiter glyph” [B] and the “joined-up-II glyph” [D] are #2 and #3 respectively). The “Greek phi glyph” [S] often appears at the start of lines and paragraphs.

I’ve shown all this to some cipher historians and codebreakers for their early reactions. Glen Claston notes that “the alphabet is based on the types of symbols used by astrologers, with a few I recognize as alchemical symbols“, though – inevitably contrariwise – I suspect this might well be a coincidence arising from the simple shapes and symmetries employed. Peter Forshaw suggests parallels with some geometric cipher shapes used in Della Porta’s “De furtivis literarum notis“, though Tony Gaffney similarly cautions that such “shapes were very common back then, the numerous ‘ciphers of diplomatic papers’ in the British Library are full of them“.

The Blitz Cipher System

As with the Voynich Manuscript, the peaky frequency distribution probably rules out complex polyalphabetic ciphers (such as Alberti’s code wheel and Vigenere cipher): yet it doesn’t obviously seem to be a simple monoalphabetic substitution in either English or Latin (but please correct me if I’m wrong!)

Unlike the Voynich manuscript, however, I can’t see any obvious verbose cipher patterns significantly above chance: so the main techniques left on the cryptographic smorgasbord would seem to be:
* a homophonic cipher, like the Copiale Cipher (but if so, the encipherer didn’t flatten the stats for “:” [E] very well)
* a nomenclator cipher (i.e. using symbols for common words, like “the”, “Rex”, or “Mason” 🙂 )
* an acrostic / abbreviatory / shorthand cipher.

All the same, there are some intriguing patterns to be found: David Oranchak points out that “‘SBDBlDMDBl’ is an interesting sequence, since it is length 10 but only consists of 5 unique symbols.” I suspect that the presentation hand uses a slightly different enciphering strategy to the annotation hand, which possibly implies that there may be some kind of homophone mapping going on. The fact that there is also an annotation applied to a single letter [c] on the title page may also point to a nomenclator or acrostic cipher.

Personally, I’m intrigued by the circular ‘boss’ at the top of the title page: this has three letters (C, M and E) calligraphically arranged, i.e. the two dots of the colon have been separated above and below the M. To my eyes, this looks suspiciously like a cryptographic conceit – might it be the case that “:” (E) is in fact a kind of letter modifier? For example, it might encipher a repeat-last-letter token (if the text had a lot of Roman numbers), or perhaps a macron-like “overbar” superscript denoting a scribal abbreviation (i.e. contraction or truncation). Something to think about, anyway!

As for the plaintext language: if this was indeed found concealed in an East London cellar, English and Latin would surely be the main suspects, though Tony Gaffney tried Latin and couldn’t find any kind of match.

Blitz Cipher Theories & Hunches

If you’re expecting me to start speculating that these documents were from a 16th century Elizabethan secret society frequented by John Dee and/or William Shakespeare, sadly you’ll be quickly disappointed. Similarly, though I concur heartily with Glen Claston that these genuinely intriguing ciphertexts may well ultimately prove to be high-ranking 18th century Mason or Freemason ciphers, it is just too early to start saying. We simply don’t know as yet enough of the basics.

What I personally have learned from the tragically fruitless, long-term debacle that is Voynich Manuscript research is that speculative theories are almost always a hopeless way of trying to decipher such objects. Hunches are cool and useful, but they need to stay restrained, or everything goes bad. Please, no theories, let’s try to crack these using the proper historical tools at our disposal!

Alchemy decoded, finally…?

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Like many people, I’ve always vaguely wondered how the alchemical ‘code’ worked: that is, how the abstruse (and indeed playfully indirect) language of alchemy mapped onto actual things and processes in the real world. Even though the early 20th century saw a succession of natural philosophers and historically-minded empirical physicists who attempted to decode the rather confused alchemical canon, a century later the quest to reveal meaning in its alembics, retorts and green lions seems somewhat quaint to most people.

And so it is with great pleasure that I can point you to a modern document that I suspect may well have done just that (to a certain degree, at least). The Book of Aquarius‘s 56 chapters claim to reveal the answer to many long-standing open questions about alchemy, perhaps none more central than: “What Is The Stone Made From?”

You may, as I was, already be generally familiar with some of the puzzling and paradoxical riddles around this mysterious prime material, a number of which the Book of Aquarius’s anonymous author gleefully quotes in Chapter 14:-

“This Matter lies before the eyes of all; everybody sees it, touches it, loves it, but knows it not. It is glorious and vile, precious and of small account, and is found everywhere.” The Golden Tract Concerning the Stone of the Philosophers, by An Anonymous German Philosopher, 16th – 17th Cen. (?)

“Know that our Mercury is before the eyes of all men, though it is known to few. When it is prepared, its splendour is most admirable; but the sight is vouchsafed to none, save the sons of knowledge. Do not despise it, therefore, when you see it in sordid guise; for if you do, you will never accomplish our Magistery—and if you can change its countenance, the transformation will be glorious. For our water is a most pure virgin, and is loved of many, but meets all her wooers in foul garments, in order that she may be able to distinguish the worthy from the unworthy.” The Fount of Chemical Truth, by Eirenaeus Philalethes, 1694 AD

“When you shall be acquainted with the causes of this disposition you will admire that a Matter so corrupt should contain in itself such a heavenly like nature.” Verbum Dismissum, by Count Bernard Trevisan, 15th Cen.

“Our substance is openly displayed before the eyes of all, and yet is not known. […] our water that does not wet the hands.” The New Chemical Light, by Michael Sendivogius, 17th Cen.

“There is something which everyone recognizes, and whoever does not recognize it will rarely, perhaps never find it. The wise man will keep it and the fool will throw it away, and the reduction comes easily to the man who knows it.” A Magnificent and Select Tract on Philosophical Water, by Anonymous, 13th – 17th Cen. (?)

What, then, is “our water”, this curiously familiar substance that is openly displayed everywhere (for Sendivogius was no fool) and that does not wet the hands, yet the fool will see it as corrupt and discard it? The book’s rather surprising answer: urine. In fact, to make the Philosopher’s Stone, you should – it claims here – start with a litre of early morning urine, and progressively reduce it down in a sequence of stages over a period of months.

Now, even though I happen to think (for example) that Fulcanelli was a literary hoax (however highly cultured and well-informed) and that almost all alchemical texts after Michael Sendivogius fall closer to a kind of gold-crazed Ponzi scheme, I do actually find a lot of the information presented in the Book of Aquarius deeply satisfying and historically sensible (well, up to chapter 30, anyway).

[And in fact chapter 31 on perpetual lamps also covers a lot of interesting historical material collected by Ellen Lloyd I hadn’t previously seen, even though I’d blogged about them here, here and here before. It has to be said, of course, that Lloyd’s assessment that these are “alien technology” may well turn out to be a tad strong. But I digress!]

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying “omg this works” or anything: but rather, that the book’s surprising rationalization of how alchemy was supposed to work within its historical context does chime well with an awful lot of what I’ve read and thought about the subject over the years.

If you want to know more, or even fancy trying to use urine to create your own Philsopher’s Stone, I should perhaps point out that there’s a reasonably active online forum of people trying to do just this. Though I personally doubt that Nicolas and Peronelle Flamel are lurkers there, perhaps the Comte de Saint-Germain occasionally drops by for a chat, who knows? Eternal life can be such a bore… 😉

Voynich colour inference, a sure path to madness…

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Here are a couple of items for you that turned up this week. In my (thoroughly unexalted) opinion, I think both demonstrate something I’ve been arguing for years: that trying to infer things about the Voynich Manuscript based in its colours is, sadly, a sure path to madness.

Why? Well, ever since Jorge Stolfi pointed out the disparity between the Voynich’s various paints (in terms both of the range of painting materials used, and of the degree of skill employed) and suggested that a “heavy painter” may have added his/her paint much later (say, a century or more), there has been significant doubt about how much paint the manuscript originally had – really, which paints were (deliberately) original, and which were (speculatively) added later? And given that there is now strong evidence that many of the bifolios and even quires were scrambled several times over the manuscript’s history (apparently by someone with no understanding of the system) and yet nearly all the paint transfers appear to be between pages in their current order, it seems that a great deal of the Voynich Manuscript’s paint was added later on in its life by someone who similarly didn’t understand what it was saying.

It would therefore seem highly likely that the Voynich Manuscript was even more of an “ugly duckling” in its original ‘alpha’ state than Wilfrid Voynich realized – a particularly plain-looking artefact. As a result, I think that trying to reconstruct the mental state or attitude of the author based mainly on the colours used but without an in-depth grasp of the codicology is an approach that surely has ‘big fail’ written all over it.

Yet some aspect of human nature drives people to persist in employing this wobbly methodology. And so my first exhibit, m’lud, is something that popped up on Scribd this week: a 22-page document by Joannes Richter called Red and Blue in the Voynich Manuscript. I can do no better than give a sample quotation:-

The illustrations seem to follow a strange color convention, in which the primary color bright yellow is missing in all flowers. This is an uncommon practice in a manual for herbal flowers, as statistically there should at least be one singular flower colored in a yellowish paint. A missing color yellow (amidst an abundance of red, blue and green) for flowers suggests to consider the idea of a religious document, which had to be encrypted to avoid conflicts with the Church. In the Middle Age the primary color yellow had been used as a traitor’s color and an evil symbol.

Well… given that you already know my views, I needn’t add anything to this at all: I’ll just think my opinion really hard for a couple of seconds for you… … … so there you have it. But all the same, if you want to know more about how this fits into Richter’s research on the ancient androgynous sky-god Dyaeus, I can do no better than refer you to his blog Spelling Thee, U and I. Eerily, this turns out to be an anagram of “Need Pelling Hiatus“, make of that what you will. 🙂

My second exhibit is from Lincoln Taiz (Professor Emeritus in the Department of Molecular, Cellular & Developmental Biology, Sinsheimer Labs, University of California) and Saundra Lee Taiz, whose ideas I first flagged here back in March but who have now published their paper in Chronica Horticulturae, Vol 51, No. 2, 2011. Essentially, despite having countless herbal and pharmacological pages to work with in the Voynich Manuscript, they’ve instead focused their horticultural attention on the ‘balneological’ quire 13, with all its curiously-posed water nymphs and funny coloured pools.

Their working hypothesis is that quire 13 visually expresses the ideas in “De Plantis” by Nicolaus of Damascus, who lived two millennia ago. Ultimately, they somehow infer that in this particular section, the Voynich Manuscript’s “…author depicts a philosophical scene in which women represent vegetative souls located within the very marrow of the plant, driving the processes that make plants grow and reproduce.” Errrr… sorry, but I just don’t think you can build that lofty a tower on top of the use of the colour green in Q13.

And here’s why: if you codicologically reconstruct the original page order of Q13 (as best you can), I’m 99% sure that f84v sat facing f78r in the original gathering order. Here’s what they looked like:-

Voynich Manuscript, f84v placed next to f78r

Here, one set of pools is blue and faded (my guess: original paint), yet the other is green and vivid (my guess: heavy painter, added a century later by someone who had no idea about what the text meant or signified). Yet all the Taizes’ inference chains here are based on the – probably much later – green-coloured pools. As for me, I simply don’t think there’s any significant chance that any historical or horticultural reasoning based on this green colour will have any validity: but feel free to make up your own mind.

Amirdovlat Amasiatsi & the Voynich Manuscript…?

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Over the last few months, I’ve had some interesting correspondence with Thomas Spande, whose starting point was observing that the ‘Voynichese’ script seemed to have similarities with the medieval Armenian aybuben (‘alphabet’ – its first two letters are ‘ayb’ and ‘ben’). Several other people have proposed this, most recently ‘amandajm’ and ‘Lgh’ on the discussion page for the Voynich Manuscript Wikipedia page: there was also a mysterious “Voynich Armenian Experiment” back in 2000 which seems to have arrived fractionally too early to be picked up by the Wayback Machine; and another mention in the archived Wikipedia talk page.

However, I’m basically sure we can rule out oddly-written Armenian (and indeed all other it’s-an-oddly-written-but-real-language theories) because of the Voynich Manuscript’s peculiarly idiosyncratic word distribution: apart from a small number of high-frequency words, relatively few words or phrases repeat across the whole manuscript, making it a poor match for any real language, whether written directly or even in an simple substitution cipher. This is an extraordinarily deep observation, one which even now few people really grasp the power of: it sits behind Elizebeth Friedman’s 1962 comment that all attempts to interpret the Voynich Manuscript as a simple language and/or a simple cipher were “doomed to utter frustration”. Ignore this at your peril!

All the same, what Thomas Spande dug up next was, well, really rather good. He discovered that a particular fifteenth century physician called Amirdovlat Amasiatsi was working in Constantinople for the Ottomans (i.e. just after its fall in 1453), and that he wrote a large number of books in Armenian. [I added a Wikipedia stub page about Amirdovlat, but note that this still needs a lot more detail to be useful]. The best English-language book on him appears to be “Amirdovlat Amasiatsi: A 15th Century Armenian Natural Historian and Physician” by S. A. Vardanian (1999), though at £144 or so for a second-hand copy, it’s a tad beyond my modest means. 🙁 There are also various studies by John Gueriguian based on his study of Amirdovlat’s books, perhaps most notably “Amirdovlat’ Amasiats’i: His Life and Contributions” in the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 3 (1987) pp. 63-91.

What was nice about Amirdovlat was that despite being chief physician to Mehmed II, he was not at all elitist. In fact, he specifically wrote books in Armenian so that ordinary people could benefit from what he had learned: e.g.
* 1459: Usumn bzhshkutyan (The Study of Medicine)
* 1459: Akhrapatin (Pharmacology)
* 1474: Girk ramkakan (Popular handbook)
* 1478-1482: Angitats anpet (Useless to the Ignorant)
* ????: Vasn nshanats hivantin, zgenats yev zmahun (On the patient’s signs of life & death)

The 25 chapters of Amirdovlat’s book on pharmacology describes the properties of plenty of drugs: yet even this was dwarfed by “Useless to the ignorant”, which listed the properties of no less than 3700 drugs, arranged in (Armenian) alphabetical order. He was a serious-minded yet communicative man, widely read and clearly with a deep passion for medicine. But could he have had anything to do with the Voynich manuscript?

On the positive side, I would very much like to read more about Amirdovlat: though admittedly Galenic, his brand of medicine seems to run very much parallel to that found in the European herbal tradition, the brightest lamp post we tend to look under for our Voynichian lost keys. I also think that when the Voynich is finally deciphered, its contents will almost certainly turn out to be grounded within numerous existing textual traditions (though perhaps not quite in the ways that we expect), and so building up a fuller picture of the range of contemporary textual herbal traditions has to be a good thing. As a result, I can see why Thomas Spande considers Amirdovlat to be a possible source for (and perhaps even author of) the Voynich Manuscript.

On the negative side, I personally think it would be extraordinarily surprising if the Voynich Manuscript came from beyond the European mainland (specifically the Northern Italian peninsula, or possibly Savoy at a stretch). Its alphabet seems to appropriate a large number of 14th century Latin-like tropes; its nine-rosette castles seem to point to Italy, Switzerland or Southern Germany (Sicily at a push); it has Occitan-like zodiac marginalia; its final page handwriting seems like a late 14th-century Savoyard hand; its crossbowman seems to have European clothes; and so forth. I’ll happily grant you that all of these could conceivably be wrong simultaneously… but I’m reasonably confident that they’re not.

Of course, there are two basic Voynich camps to choose from: one that thinks we know enough basic factuality to rule out almost all speculative theories with a high level of confidence, and another that thinks we don’t, that almost everything is still in play. Of the two, I’m in the former camp: but you have to understand that it’s a bit draughty and empty in here… I’m sometimes surprised that canvas walls are able to echo so effectively, but there you go, it is how it is. So, which camp are you in?

“I want to report a murder” – Otto Kinzel rocks the Zodiac…

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If you happen to like both technical-minded heavy metal and cipher mysteries, I might possibly have a hot tip for you (thanks to Phil Strahl’s blog). Otto Kinzel has released an album on Bluntface Records called “I want to report a murder”, where every track is based on features or events in the Zodiac Killer cipher case.

Kinzel has even done a 7-minute video of the title track “I want to report a murder”: but you might want to to skip past the first atmospheric 1 minute 28 secs of video intro and get with the metal…

PS: if you’re reading this as an email & the video didn’t get embedded, here’s the direct link to the video on YouTube. Enjoy!

Phaistos disk update…

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Just to break up the monotony of far too many Unknown Man posts in a row 🙂 , here’s Anthony Svoronos’ great long list of Phaistos Disk speculative theories and wobbly decipherment attempts, together with his own notes on what he suspects it is. Peter Aleff [#47 on Svoronos’ list] recently left a comment here asserting:

There is plenty of evidence that it recorded the path of a board game similar to the Egyptian Snake Game and Senet, and surviving in today’s children’s Game of the Goose. See http://www.phaistosgame.com/volume1.htm. Enjoy that surprising story, as well as the almost self-explanatory title page of the combined volumes 1 and 2 at phaistosgame.com/phaistos1booktitlepage.htm that shows the reconstructed gameboard and will be published next Spring.

The Phaistos Disk as board game, eh? Well, Fernand Crombette suggested this some decades ago, so that is not in itself a new idea. But we shall see next Spring, I guess!

But that’s by the by: I actually wanted to post about another Phaistos Disk-related story entirely. When I was recently looking for sources on other ancient artefacts with similar symbols (e.g. the Arkalochori axe, seal fragment HM 992, etc), I found the following proper cipher mystery story in a greek ceramic website selling repro Phaistos Disks:

A very peculiar find was made in 1992 in a basement in Vladikavkaz, North Ossetia: A fragment of an apparent copy of, or draft for the Phaistos disc, with the symbols incised with a stylus rather than imprinted. It is uncertain whether this artifact is genuinely ancient, a good faith modern copy of the Phaistos disc, or a bad faith attempt at forgery. The house in the basement of which the fragment was found was built in 1880. Allegedly, the object was recognized as a fake and returned to its private owner.

There’s a picture of this “Vladikavkaz Disk” on p.16 of Il disco di Festo: Un calcolatore vecchio di 4.000 anni by Rosario Vieni on Antikitera.net, a site whose description even non-Italians can read: “Il portale Italiano dell’Archeologia Misteriosa“. Vieni’s theory (that the Disk is some kind of ancient calculator) at #60 on Svoronos’ list.

Or, you might prefer Jerome Eisenberg’s THE PHAISTOS DISK: A ONE HUNDRED-YEAR-OLD HOAX? paper, which also has a picture on p.6 of the PDF. Like Svoronos, Eisenberg includes a multi-page appendix of decipherment attempts. Having said that, I’m a bit suspicious of Eisenberg’s readiness to classify the Vladikavkaz Disk fragment as a hoax simply on the basis that it resembles a handmade version of a disk he also thinks is a hoax. Though it is true that people do occasionally use hoaxes & fakes to make fools of us all, I suspect history usually does an even better job, by helping us make fools of ourselves. Caveat decryptor!

Finally, Word Geek’s Diana Gainer concludes her own Phaistos disk roundup by saying: “You know, some of the proposals that people have come up with are so far out, I wouldn’t be surprised if one of these days somebody claimed that Bigfoot wrote it as a love letter to the Loch Ness Monster!” Such nonsense! Everyone knows that Loch Ness Monsters can’t read, tcha… 😀

H. C. Reynolds’ family…?

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Up until now, most of my historical research has been based on the Renaissance, so I haven’t had any great need to look at the kind of databases and tools people use for genealogy (which tends, unsurprisingly, to focus on the last couple of centuries before the pervasive haze of history obscures all practical vision). So, I thought I’d have a go at seeing what I could find from online newspapers about our mysterious Mr. H. C. Reynolds, though doubtless experienced genealogists would be 100x more effective than me…

I quickly found one particular “H. C. Reynolds” doing his thing in Melbourne. Trove (digitized Australian newspapers online) throws up a birth announcement from 24 April 1920 from the Argus in Melbourne:

REYNOLDS (nee Evelyn Ivory). –On the 12th April, at Sister Wain’s private hopital, Hoddle street, Elsternwick, to Mr. and Mrs. H. C. Reynolds, of 80 Tennyson street, St Kilda–a daughter (Norma Mavis).

The Argus similarly reported that (presumably the same) H. C. Reynolds was made a fellow member of the Australasian Institute of Secretaries (Inc.) on 25th May 1939. But its entry for Wednesday 30 August 1950 would seem to rule him out:-

Mr. H. C. Reynolds, secretary of Smith Mitchell & Co. Ltd., is retiring at the end of this week, after 28 years’ service. He will be succeeded by Mr. H. N. Martin, who has been an accountant for many years.

Alternatively, Trove also throws up a quite different “H. C. Reynolds” whose 1940 Chrysler Imperial Sedan (number plate BU-054) was stolen in late 1947: he was the proprietor of the Phoenix Hotel, 82 Flinders Street, Melbourne (which is due to be demolished next year and rebuilt as apartments 29 storeys high). However, this was presumably also the same H. C. Reynolds who transferred a hotel licence for Phoenix Hotel Co not long before 27th April 1950, so we can almost certainly rule him out too. We can also rule out the eminent visiting American zoologist Dr H. C. Reynolds who specialized in the reproduction of marsupials (no, I’m not making this up) and who visited Tasmania in 1954. 🙁

Finally, our mysterious man might possibly be the “H. C. Reynolds” who was a member of Murray Bridge Golf Club (SE of Adelaide), and who qualified for the club championship in July 1939. Curiously, “Harry Reynolds” (presumably the same man) is mentioned on the website as one of the club’s “chief planners” when it moved locations in 1945, so the club may still have records or some collective memory of what happened to him. Perhaps someone could contact the club and ask them if a club historian or archivist happens to know what happened to Harry Reynolds? Just a thought!