Historical Ciphers Archives - Page 64 of 136

01Feb 2014

Alas, Willen Styn is not the Somerton Man… :-(

A splendid “Do Not Bend” document envelope arrived here a few minutes ago (courtesy of the lovely people at the National Archives of Australia), containing the Form of Application for Registration #24041 for a certain ‘Willen Styn’ I mentioned a few days ago.

Alas, cutting straight to the chase, he’s not our Unknown Man: though he had grey eyes and was of medium build, he was only 5′ 7½” tall and had – definitively enough – a quite different left thumb-print (assuming the fingerprint chart on p.207 of Gerry Feltus’ “The Unknown Man” is correct 🙂 ).

According to the form dated 17th July 1919, this Dutchman was born in Amsterdam in 1894; signed his name “W. Stijn” (which presumably Aliens Registration Officer Hewitt miscopied or misheard as “Styn”); had arrived on the ship Port Albany from Cardiff; was working as a fireman; and lived at “15 Lord St, Penarith” (which doesn’t seem to exist, so I suspect should actually have been ’15 Lawson St, Penrith’), not too far from Penrith’s present-day Museum of Fire (one hour west of Sydney).

From all the other apparent typos on this single page form, I’d also guess he will turn out to be “Willem Stijn”. But regardless, he’s not our (unknown) man, I just thought you’d like to know. Oh well! 🙁

Incidentally, there seem to be good archival records of NSW firemen 1884-1955, so there may be more about firefighter Stijn in the Personnel record books in Western Sydney Records Centre in (dare I say it again) Kingswood. Let’s just hope it doesn’t come to that, eh? :-p

31Jan 2014

Review of Dominic Selwood’s “The Sword of Moses”…

by nickpelling ⋅ 1 Comment

I’ve got a lot of time for Dominic Selwood: his 1999 (non-fiction) book Knights of the Cloister: Templars and Hospitallers in Central-Southern Occitania, c.1100-c.1300 painted a detailed, evidence-based picture of the Knights Templars across a properly historical and social background. It is not, as he points out, “light relaxing reading”: but remains a fine counterpoint to the more militaristic / political / conspiratorial accounts of the two Orders, well worth looking at.

Just so you know: back in 2001, I went to a lecture of his at the (now long-slumbering) Canonbury Masonic Research Institute, and later asked him by email about Templar artificial alphabets that were used for signing their proto-‘cheques’. Unfortunately, he replied that “All my notes from my research were thrown away by accident by the staff where I used to work“, (though he may still have some images on slides).

At that time, he had just completed a PhD at Oxford (and occasionally played in a band called The Binmen!) and was then starting the work as a barrister that would occupy him for the next five years: and so I was intrigued to discover a few weeks ago that he had just published a novel called The Sword of Moses (the Kindle version is currently only 62p, which is a steal).

Oddly, this also seems to have necessitated drinking some Johnny Depp-stylee potion, as can be seen from the dramatic physical transformation he has undergone:-

Either that or the novel was written by his evil twin, it’s hard to tell. 😉

Anyway, if you even remotely know how books in the historical-artefact/modern-threat/sassy-hero genre run, you’ll be at home immediately (think Ark of the Covenant, international mercenaries, bombs, assault weapons, etc): and the main character (Dr Ava Curzon) is a kind of passive-aggressive ‘Jane Bond’ / Lara Croft ex-spook-now-sassy-archaeologist hybrid, probably with half an eye towards Angelina Jolie in the film version (as per normal). And if you can find a genuinely empathetic or believable character anywhere in the mix, you’re far more observant than I am: but that’s hardly much of a criticism, as it is industry standard fare for the genre.

The most obviously notable feature, though, is the sheer scale of the book. Not just the chunky page count (792 pages!), but it is very much as though Selwood has collided two or three already biggish novels together, and welded the wreckage together into a fatter, lumpier composite: Ethiopian churches, Iraq, Knights Templar (who, it seems, are still going strong, bless ’em), Masons, MI6, Russian gangsters, Israeli spies, London/Kent Neo-Nazis, necromancy, John Dee, etc all play their respective part (though the Voynich Manuscript only gets a cameo, it has to be said): and even dear old Aleister Crowley gets more than a nod.

Really, this all comes across to me as though Selwood’s Writing Ambition was in a gladiatorial fight to the death against Editorial Control, where only the former was wielding a sword. By which I mean that even though he writes pretty well, whenever his story’s fire starts to flicker a little, he anxiously hurls yet more geopolitics and history onto its flames: but that rich burning smell ultimately comes across as one of insecurity, not of confidence.

For me, though, the most interesting feature of “The Sword of Moses” was the history – the book clearly sits atop the heaped spoils of Selwood’s lifetime’s connoisseurship of alt.history strands. And what I think transforms the whole enterprise into something epic is something that I think emerges from the text only indirectly: his personal micro-crusade against junk history.

Honestly, he seems to be saying, why do novelists invest so much time filling their genre books with historical nonsense, when the real deal is even more excruciatingly complex and intriguing, if you just bother to get your stupid superficial noses out of Wikipedia? And so he goes out of his way to get the history properly right, again and again: mightily impressive, densely entertaining, heavily intertextual stuff.

And so when it comes to the idea that forms the historical backbone of his novel, it’s his idea of a proper shocker: that the Old Testament has polytheism and even ritual sacrifice embedded in it (which is indeed entirely true). But… but… but… this is also where it all goes a bit Pete Tong.

The horrible, dull truth is that exposing the ritualistic layers codicologically embedded in plain sight within The Bible (and having a super-evil necromancer to bring them to some kind of twisted life) just isn’t much of a surprise any more. The Dan Brown sincere flattery crowd (as in “imitation is…”) of novelists have kind of strip-mined the genre: and for all their dodgy historical faults, in the list of their crimes against readers Bad History comes a distant third behind Empty Characterization and Mile-Wide Plot Faults.

So… while I like Dominic and have terrific admiration for his historical sensibilities and indeed writing ambition, I finished his book feeling that he set out on his novel-writing quest to solve the wrong problem. Having myself read far too many books in this genre over recent years than is properly healthy, I’d agree that he really isn’t tilting at windmills – that Bad History is an endemic problem in fiction in general. But he’ll have to work somewhat harder with his next novel to help readers care whether Dr Ava Curzon lives or dies, because frankly I never quite managed that piece of reading magic, sorry. 🙁

30Jan 2014

Swedish Zodiac Killer Z32 theory…

by nickpelling ⋅ 16 Comments

A few days ago, I had a nice email from two Swedish engineers called Henrik (Henke) Sundberg and David Thelin: surprisingly, they claimed that they had worked out the details of the Zodiac Killer’s 32-character “map cipher” (also known as “Z32”).

The first thing I did was to put up a new page describing the Z32 cipher, something I’ve been meaning to do for a few years: as normal, I tried to cover the raw factuality and basic observations rather than out-and-out theories and speculation.

The short version is that the letter-shapes in the Z32 cipher look nearly exactly the same as the (famously solved) Z408 cipher, which makes it seem very much as though it too is a homophonic cipher, though with different letter assignments (deciphering it using the Z408 key doesn’t seem to yield anything sensible). Unfortunately, 32 characters (made up of 29 different shapes, i.e. only three appear more than once) wouldn’t normally be anywhere near large enough for a homophonic cryptogram to be cracked, unless you had some significant additional information to work with. (Hint: a cipher key would be a good start. 🙂 )

However, in this case there was some other extra information: a roadmap of the San Francisco Bay Area with a “Zodiac Killer” shape centred on Mount Diablo, and a note saying “The Map coupled with this code will tell you where the bomb is set. You have untill next Fall to dig it up“. A second “little list” letter (posted a month later) give a further clue: “PS. The Mt. Diablo code concerns Radians 4#inches along the radians“.

Sundberg and Thelin’s theory (described in this PDF file) is that it’s in fact a very scientific cipher, as much a stegotext as a cryptogram.

From this, they extract the phrases “C3H3”, “Octane”, and “North of West”, while “HCEL(Zodiac)PW(triangle)” reminds them of how the molecule HClO3 looks, centred around the Zodiac symbol. From which they deduce that they need to look 1 inch (i.e. 6.4 miles) along a vector due West from magnetic North.

Guys, guys… I’m really sorry, but I think you’ve got it wrong. Nobody in their right (or indeed wrong) mind would concoct a chain of reasoning based around a vague resemblance to a particular molecule in order to encode a unit vector. Even dear old Jessica Lee wouldn’t do that, much as she likes chemistry and ciphers.

Look: the Zodiac Killer wasn’t some evil scientific genius, he was a sick, unhappy man with a grudge against the SFPD (probably a surrogate for his sick unhappy relationship with his abusive, distant father) on a gun-powered external power trip, a (literally) vain attempt to right the perceived wrongs in his personal life. I don’t even think he knew properly what a “radian” is, because he doesn’t use the term correctly in his note.

27Jan 2014

Why I think the d’Agapeyeff cipher is diagonally transposed…

by nickpelling ⋅ 7 Comments

A pragmatic starting point for the d’Agapeyeff cipher is to sequentially replace its digit pairs with letters, i.e.

** .1 .2 .3 .4 .5 6. _0 17 12 16 11 --> A B C D E 7. _1 _9 _0 14 17 --> F G H I J 8. 20 17 15 11 17 --> K L M N O 9. 12 _3 _2 _1 _0 --> P Q R S T 0. _0 _0 _0 _1 _0 --> U V W X Y

If you then “re-flow” those letters into a 14×14 grid, many of its oddities are to be found in the final right hand column:-

[ 0] J B L O P B P D K D P I O N [ 1] D I I L N M K C K K I I L B [ 2] D J M L N P J I E M J J J R [ 3] C E E K C K J O J J D B L Q [ 4] O I C L J I M K E K N O D O [ 5] D O O C L G B M B K K G K D [ 6] C J L K D M C L O K C C C X [ 7] I K P P N C O N E D O E B S [ 8] B B O P O P I P G J D E J F [ 9] E M B D I K L N B L D P K R [10] E B D N N P M O I P K E G I [11] M M O L M D B G B E B M J Q [12] G C L L G G M L O N J L K M [13] G N B L M J K D J I O K B Q

The ‘X’ (’04’) right at the end of row #6 is highly suspicious: at least one person before me has suspected that this might somehow be a padding ‘X’ appended to the end of the (pre-transposition-stage) plaintext to bring it up to a 14×14 multiple.

However, I think that the three ‘Q’ (’92’) symbols in the same rightmost column are even more suspicious: this symbol occurs exactly three times in the cryptogram, and only ever in this column. I think these are even more likely than the ‘X’ to be the final three letters of the plaintext, appended to pad it up to 14×14 = 196 characters in length.

In fact, I’m now almost certain that the correct starting point for cryptanalysis should be the diagonal transposition of the 14×14 grid, which transformation would flip all these oddities across onto the bottom (final) row of the transposed grid, leaving (presumably) a 14-column transposition cipher to solve:-

[ 0'] J D D C O D C I B E E M G G [ 1'] B I J E I O J K B M B M C N [ 2'] L I M E C O L P O B D O L B [ 3'] O L L K L C K P P D N L L L [ 4'] P N N C J L D N O I N M G M [ 5'] B M P K I G M C P K P D G J [ 6'] P K J J M B C O I L M B M K [ 7'] D C I O K M L N P N O G L D [ 8'] K K E J E B O E G B I B O J [ 9'] D K M J K K K D J L P E N I [10'] P I J D N K C O D D K B J O [11'] I I J B O G C E E P E M L K [12'] O L J L D K C B J K G J K B [13'] N B R Q O D X S F R I Q M Q

Here I’ve highlighted the two tripled letters (“LLL” on row #3′, and “KKK” on row #9′): here LLL is on a row with 6 L’s (so it’s hardly surprising that it ended up as a tripled letter post-transposition), while KKK is on a row with 4 K’s. Here are the overall letter instance counts for the cryptogram:-

.K .B .J .L .O .D .M .I .C .P .E .N .G .Q .R .F .S .X 20 17 17 17 17 16 15 14 12 12 11 11 9 3 2 1 1 1

It’s interesting to compare this set with the letter frequency table of the text mini-corpus taken from d’Agapeyeff’s “Codes and Ciphers” (which I also generated recently). If you normalize that to 196 characters, here’s what you would expect to see in the cryptogram:-

.E .T .A .I .O .S .N .R .H .D .L .C .U .M .F .P .W .G .Y .B .V .K 25 18 15 14 14 14 13 12 11 .8 .7 .6 .5 .4 .4 .4 .4 .4 .3 .3 .2 .1

From this, it looks as though K probably –> E, while B/J/L/O/D seem likely to go to T/A/I/O/S. What I’m thinking here is that if this is right, all we need to solve it is to generate a moderate number of best-guess substitution values and feed those into a transposition cipher solver, i.e.:-
(a) guess that K –> E
(b) generate the 5! = 120 permutations of B/J/L/O/D –> T/A/I/O/S
(c) assign plausible values to the remainder of the used letters (in matching descending frequency order)
(d) feed the 120 versions of the transposed 14×14 grid into a reliable columnar transposition solver

My prediction is that even though this will still be wrong, getting the 6 most popular letters right (i.e. 20 + 17 + 17 + 17 + 17 + 16 = 104 characters, ~53% of the cryptogram) and possibly some of the others (by chance) will allow the transposition solver to get us close enough to the answer, that we can tell from its output what the correct transposition order is. Does that sound reasonable?

PS: if the final row is partly artificial, it may be a good idea not to feed that into the transposition solver, i.e. only try to solve a 14×13. Incidentally, a very good freeware cipher solver Windows application is CryptoCrack, but more about that another day… 🙂

26Jan 2014

d’Agapeyeff Digraph Frequency Table…

by nickpelling ⋅ 2 Comments

I’ve been trying to break the d’Agapeyeff challenge cipher this week, a process that I (along with several other cipher commentators, although opinions differ etc etc) strongly suspect will involve solving a 14×14 transposition cipher and a substitution cipher simultaneously.

A plausible-sounding way to try to do this would be to model the distribution of digraph frequency counts in English texts, and then for a given transposition compare an ordered table of its digraph frequency counts against that model. However, when I tried this with some test text (taken from d’Agapeyeff’s book), the English digraph frequency values given on the Internet weren’t even close.

I initially looked at getting a corpus of British English text to generate a proper digraph frequency table: but that proved to be difficult and expensive, with the bother of licenses and licence fees to deal with. But then I thought… why not use d’Agapeyeff’s book “Codes and Ciphers” itself as the corpus? Sure, it’s on a much smaller scale, but it would surely be more statistically representative of the cryptogram’s plaintext than the complete works of Shakespeare (which are often included in English corpora, presumably on the principle of what-the-heck-let’s-throw-it-all-in-can-it-really-hurt?).

Even though the book’s text looked nice and clean to my eye, OCR’ing it turned out to be completely unsatisfactory: and so I was delighted to find a page put up by regular Cipher Mysteries commenter Menno Knul containing a lot of text from “Codes and Ciphers” (thanks Menno!). After a bit of tweaking (fixing some typos, removing foreign language quotes, removing confusing cipher / code passages, etc), I then ended up with a reasonably workable d’Agapeyeff mini-corpus to plug into a trivial C digraph-counting programme.

So, here are d’Agapeyeff’s top 50 digraphs from the text of “Codes and Ciphers” (but with spaces, punctuation, spaces and numbers removed), together with their frequency percentages in descending order. I’ll be using this table before very long to try to break his cipher, fingers crossed they’ll do the trick!

TH,3.23744%
HE,2.80072%
IN,2.03171%
ER,1.89246%
AN,1.50321%
ES,1.41460%
RE,1.39245%
ON,1.21523%
NT,1.20257%
ED,1.20257%
ST,1.19624%
EN,1.14561%
SE,1.10447%
EA,1.08548%
TE,1.05383%
TI,1.04750%
ET,1.02851%
ND,1.01269%
IS,0.99370%
OF,0.98104%
TO,0.95889%
OR,0.94940%
AT,0.92725%
AS,0.92725%
IT,0.87978%
HI,0.83547%
LE,0.82598%
NG,0.81648%
AL,0.81648%
HA,0.80699%
AR,0.80699%
SA,0.73104%
SI,0.71838%
VE,0.70255%
RI,0.69623%
CO,0.69306%
SO,0.68673%
ME,0.67724%
EC,0.67407%
DE,0.66774%
RA,0.60129%
RS,0.59496%
RO,0.59179%
DI,0.59179%
TT,0.58546%
OU,0.58546%
TA,0.58230%
BE,0.57597%
US,0.54432%
IC,0.52850%

24Jan 2014

Somerton Man thread round-up…

by nickpelling ⋅ 155 Comments

Researchers and commenters have been asking me lots of questions about the Somerton Man over the past few weeks, so I thought I’d round up a load of stray threads in a single post. Hence the following may be a bit bitty, but it is what it is, I hope it’s helpful!

1. Pakies

I asked Derek Abbott why he included the only-sporadically used Pakies guest book in his Somerton Man primary source material page. Was it simply the presence of the Nosovs and Hellmuth Hendon? His reply:-

[Hellmuth] Hendon is there who was linked to [Joseph Saul Haim] Marshall. Also Xavier Herbert is there who is linked to [Alf] Boxall. Also a Russian ballet troupe is there. […] Of course, there is zero hard evidence that [Jestyn] was connected to Marshall….but it seems plausible. […] The bottom line is [that] the Pakies guestbook could be useful for drawing up an interconnectivity map.

2. Jestyn Handwriting

Derek Abbott has closely compared the Jestyn handwriting and signature on Alf Boxall’s book with Jessie Thomson’s handwriting and signature and says “it is a definite match. No doubt about that.” He has also shown me a 1940s autograph book where Jessie Harkness copied (most of) a stanza from Omar Khayyam (“[…]Fill the cup that clears / today of past regrets and future fears / Tomorrow? Why tomorrow I may be / Myself with yesterday’s sev’n thousand years.“). It looks to be the same hand (though slightly more free-flowing than in Boxall’s copy).

3. The Jestyn “E”

I asked Derek Abbott about the “E”. He replied:-

You will notice the signature is in a fountain pen and the ink of the E is darker. This says to me that she was trying to write an ‘e’, but the ink splodged at bit, so she reworked it into an ‘E’ to make it clearer. […] And she does do her capital E’s in a way that would make it read JEstyn.

I also asked Gerry Feltus what he thought had happened with the “E”:-

I noticed the lighter writing on the name JEstyn just after I first saw it and I was going to refer to it in my book. I tried to find a suitable explanation and I thought maybe she had previously written the poem in the book and handed it to Alf. Alf then may have asked/suggested she sign it and it was done with a different pen. Maybe! It was too confusing so I left it out.

Was the “E” original? Yes, according to Derek Abbott:-

As for Boxall adding the E himself later, I don’t think so: 1. He didn’t know how she wrote her capital E’s and 2. The fountain pen ink matches (I’ve seen the original).

3. The Jestyn Drawing

I asked Gerry Feltus about the drawing at the front of Alf Boxall’s Rubaiyat: he was sure it was printed, not drawn. But I’ve looked at a few other Rubaiyat editions, and none seems to have anything quite like that. So, Gerry is sure it’s part of the book, but I’m still somewhat unsure quite what to make of it. Here’s the top part of it from near the end of the ABC documentary:-

4. The Jestyn Pronunciation

The 1978 ABC documentary voice-over pronounced “Jestyn” to rhyme with “Test In”, which is how John Ruffles (who heard Alf Boxall pronounce it, according to Derek Abbott), Gerry Feltus, and indeed online commenter “daughter of Jestyn” all say it was pronounced. Right now, my suspicion remains that Jessie – for whatever reason – may well have first introduced herself to Alf Boxall as “Jess Styn”, which he heard as a single word. Maybe that’s right, maybe it isn’t (don’t shoot me, that’s how hypotheses work): hopefully we will find out one way or the other before very long…

5. NAA

The Willen Styn WW1 document I mentioned the other day has now been scanned and posted to me by the NAA. It’s apparently quite small: we’ll have to wait for the mail pixies to wing it halfway around the world, see what it says…

6. Adam Yulch’s Laundry Mark Index

This wandering librarian blogger wondered (in 2011) whether someone had tried comparing the Somerton Man’s laundry tag to Adam Yulch’s index of 100,000 American laundry marks. Haven’t followed this up myself, but it might be interesting, thought you’d like to know. 🙂

7. Ronald Francis’ Copy In The Car

According to Gerry Feltus, “Ronald Francis” and his wife specifically requested that his real name not be published. He is a very elderly gentleman, and may even have passed away by now.

23Jan 2014

Some nice WW2 pigeon pictures…

by nickpelling ⋅ 5 Comments

It’s been a bit quiet on the WW2 pigeon cipher front (the GCHQ Historian has been working hard to try to find some Typex rotor wiring diagrams for us, but so far without any luck, *sigh*), but I thought you might like to see some nice action shots of pigeons and pigeon handlers from WW2 archives.

H98.100/4278 Shows two of the crew of an Australian Lancaster Squadron with their pigeons before leaving for a raid on Berlin – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

(The remainder of the photos were taken by Army photographer H. J. Nott.)

H2000.200/418 A.T.S. woman being shown how to release a pigeon – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/419 Attaching a message to a bird for dispatch – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/420 Officer in the field writing a message for dispatch by pigeon – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/421 Releasing the pigeon – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/422 Last flight of B.L.A. war pigeons – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/423 Releasing pigeons in the field – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/424 Attaching message cylinder to pigeon’s leg – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/424 Attaching message cylinder to pigeons leg (closeup) – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/425 “Premier” the pigeon arriving home with a message – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/426 Showing A.T.S. woman how to attach a message – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/427 Birds arriving back in lofts after training flight – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/428 Message transferred from pigeon to dispatch rider – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/430 Loading pigeon into special container for dropping over occupied territory – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/431 Pigeon dispatch riders on the road – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/432 “Tommy” the pigeon (NURP.41.DHZ56) being awarded the Dicken medal for distinguished war service – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/432 “Tommy” the pigeon being awarded the Dicken medal for distinguished war service (closeup) – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

And finally, a couple of photos by H. J. Nott that appeared in a story reported in the Ottawa Journal, 12 January 1945, p.2:-

Canadian corvette, H.M.C.S. “Mayflower”, was given an unexpected chance to help speed the victory. The tired pigeon carried important information from a French patriot regarding gun emplacements and flying bomb platforms. It was sent aboard the “Mayflower” which broke wireless silence to send the information in code to shore authorities. The picture at the left shows the pigeon being passed in a bag from the tug to the Canadian corvette, and the one on the right shows the well-bred and mannerly visitor taking its ease by a porthole of the wardroom on board the “Mayflower”. Lieut Douglas Marlen, Halifax, was senior officer of the convoy, and the message written in French was translated by Sigmn. Andre Belland, Montreal.

H2000.200/434 Pigeon being passed from British tug to Canadian corvette – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

H2000.200/433 Weary pigeon resting on board the H.M.C.S. Mayflower, the ship sent its message on in code – Argus Newspaper Collection of Photographs, State Library of Victoria.

21Jan 2014

A Brand New New World / Nahuatl Voynich Manuscript Theory…

by nickpelling ⋅ 72 Comments

The American Botanical Council (who neither I nor many of you had heard of before this week) are celebrating their 100th issue of their quarterly peer-reviewed journal “HerbalGram” (it says in this press release here) by publishing an article revealing the hitherto undecrypted herbal secrets of the Voynich Manuscript.

The two authors, Arthur O. Tucker Ph.D (“botanist, emeritus professor, and co-director of the Claude E. Phillips Herbarium at Delaware State University“) and Rexford H. Talbert (“a retired information technologist formerly employed by the US Department of Defense and NASA“) found themselves so inspired by the similarity between the plant drawn on the Voynich Manuscript’s f1v and xiuhamolli / xiuhhamolli “the soap plant depicted in the 1552 Codex Cruz-Badianus of Mexico [on f9r]” that they concluded that the Voynich Manuscript must not only be post-Columbus, but also post-Conquest Nueva España (i.e. after 1519-1521).

Voynichese, they believe, is therefore nothing more than a New World polyglot studded with “loan-words […] from Classical Nahuatl, Spanish, Taino, and Mixtec“, but which is overwhelmingly in an “extinct dialect, keeping much of the Voynich Manuscript’s secrets intact… for now.”

So… does this all reduce to nothing more than an “ethnobotanical cold case”; and if it does, have these two plucky independent authors actually cracked it? In the interests of open-mindedness and fair debate, you might want to flick through their paper for yourself here before you read the rest of my article dismissing their historical naivety and overhopeful botano-centricity.

What, you already think I’m being unfair to their abductive logic? For a start, if “abductive logic” isn’t a sixty-dollar term that means nothing much more than “generating hypotheses sufficient to explain observations” (and normally only a carefully-selected subset of observations to boot), I wasted my time studying logic at University.

I hate to start out by pointing out the ridiculously obvious here, but here in Voynich Research Land, we’re already up to our necks (and gasping for anguished breath) in plausible-sounding hypotheses that similarly seek to explain other carefully-selected observations. Selective abductivity is the disease, not the cure, and what they’ve done is terrifically selective.

The proper Intellectual History methodology (of which their methodology is the palest of shadows) is to take on board the sum-total of all the evidence across all the different analytical historical domains, and only then try to construct abductive hypotheses that explain the whole lot simultaneously. Here, the two authors found themselves driven towards a post-New Spain New World origin by a single apparently persuasive piece of evidence, and then rippled through the consequences of what that would have to mean for that portion of the rest of the evidence they allowed themselves to consider.

What they didn’t consider: the demonstrably 15th century vellum in play (radiocarbon dating), 15th century digit shapes (in the quiration), 15th century number forms (in the quiration), 15th century contractions (on the zodiac roundel hand) and 15th century parallel hatching (in several drawings). So, that’s evidence from the domains of codicology, palaeography, and Art History immediately consigned to their great big wastepaper basket of Not Examined Here Stuff.

However, the way that they bracket these multiple classes of evidence is to say “but such spurious claims [of pre-Rudolfine origins] have channelized scholars’ thinking and have not been particularly fruitful“. In fact, what has held back Voynich research most over recent decades is the set of spurious claims of post-Columbine origins (e.g. John Dee, Edward Kelley, Cardan grille hoaxes, sunflowers, etc), of which these authors’ paper is merely the most recent example. For when you bracket out evidence from multiple parallel research domains, you’re setting yourself up for a fall.

Another thing that annoyed me was that even though they tentatively identified Voynichese as Nahuatl, they nowhere mentioned John D. Comegys (twin brother of Cipher Mysteries regular James Comegys), who for years has championed a Nahuatl Voynich link. Even Kircher & Becker’s ridiculous book identified Voynich as a polyglot ~~mess~~ mix of “l’allemand, le suédois, le néerlandais, le latin, l’anglais, avec quelque notions de gaélique et de nahuatl“, and hence dated the object to “entre 1570 et 1610”. Hence it doesn’t seem to me that Tucker and Talbot even attempted any kind of literature review beyond a grudging scrollthrough of Wikipedia (ha!) and voynich.nu.

They also seem unaware of the light painter / heavy painter debate (i.e. they naively take it as read that all the paints the manuscript presents are original, despite the evidence to the contrary), and the bifolio reordering debate (i.e. they naively take it as read that the foliation is original, despite the evidence to the contrary). Oh, and they seem completely unaware of the post-1990 debate over the Voynich “sunflowers”, with their account starting and stopping with Hugh O’Neill in 1944.

They also bracket out the “medieval German script” on f116v (which they consistently mis-spell as “Michiton Olababas”) as a freestanding mystery, apparently unaware that Voynichese letters are embedded within both this and the marginalia at the top of f17r (which I found in 2006 with a UV blacklamp, but which were later photographed by the Austrian documentary makers in 2009).

Many other things annoyed me (their treatment of the Codex Osuna, the “maiorica”, etc, etc), but I’ve got to 850 words already and that’s more than enough annoyance for one post. But one last aside…

What I came to hate about the Voynich mailing list was that some time around 2006 it had subsumed the trendy-but-ghastly management meeting notion that “there’s no such thing as a bad idea” (usually said in a dippy, please-don’t-be-a-hater voice). Actually, if you have a whole array of basic physical evidence to work with, yes there definitely is such a thing as a bad idea. And the sooner people putting forward such bad ideas get to take their fingers out of their ears and stop saying la-la-la at all the thousands of pieces of ‘inconvenient evidence’ they’d rather bracket to tell their story, the sooner we’ll get to hear some good ideas instead.

In short, I would be delighted (and would indeed be the first to cheer) if Tucker and Talbot had put forward a good idea. But I think they have failed to do so in numerous different ways, all of which were easily avoidable.

15Jan 2014

Errors in the Voynich Manuscript…

by nickpelling ⋅ 29 Comments

If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Voynich hoax ~~muppet~~ advocate, stop reading this right now, otherwise you’ll only get yourself all cross and bothered, and you’ll forget to take your medication or something else just as bad.

The rest of you, particularly those who have looked at Voynichese with a bit of care and close attention, should already understand that there are lots of patterns present there, all at the same time and on many different levels: and that any sensible explanation for the internal structure would need to give a reasonable account of these numerous simultaneous patterns. In short, it’s not enough to say ‘a clever table could generate them‘: there’s far more going on than just that.

At the same time, it’s well known that there are very few apparent corrections within the Voynichese text itself; while I’ve also presented a fair bit of evidence in the past that indicates that the text was copied onto the page (say, by one or more scribes copying from wax tablets), rather than composed on the page per se. What kind of account could tie all these diverse observations together?

Today’s proposed explanation is that Voynichese may well be even more heavily structured than we tend to accept, and that copying errors (of which I think there will prove to be plenty) were simply left intact on the page rather than corrected. As opposed to the Tamam Shud cipher (which appears to have an entire line crossed out!), I suspect that here the principle will turn out to be far closer to Omar Khayyám’s well-known:

“…The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it…”

Literary aside over, let’s look at the first paragraph of a typical Voynich page (I was looking at f111r the other day following an email by Torsten T, but more or less any would do just as well) and where I’m reasonably sure the copying errors are to be found on it:-

In Takahashi’s transcription:-

kcholchdar. shar. aiip. chepchedy. […]
doiin. sheeky. okeey. okeey. qeeal. […]
dsheedy. lkeedy. chckhy. lchedy. qo[…]
saiin. oteedy. qokeey. daiin. oke[…]
saiin. sheekshy. ol. shedy. chok[…]

Error #1: I don’t believe that “aiip” is correct. Rather, what I think happened here was that the downstroke of the “p” gallows overlapped the terminal upstroke of an “n”, probably on the wax tablet. Hence, I suspect this should read “aiinp”. Philip Neal has long pointed out that words ending in gallows characters are unusual and tend to be found on the top line of pages and paragraphs: I suspect that this is a typical example of that phenomenon.

Error #2: I don’t believe that “oiin” would ever be correct Voynichese, i.e. it’s just a miscopied “aiin” (of which there are many examples to be found on just about every page), hence this should probably read “daiin”. Curiously, though, the instance stats of aiin-family groups change between A pages and B pages: aiin appears 5x more often than ain in A pages, but only 1.6x more often in B pages.

Error #3: “akeey” (as it appears on the page, though Takahashi-san has autocorrected it to the more plausible “okeey”) should almost certainly be “okeey”. Basically, the (ok:ak) and (ot:at) instance ratios are both about 100:1, which brings copying errors to my mind rather than rare linguistic features.

Error #4: “qeeal” just looks wrong (it’s the only instance in the whole VMs). But then again, there are only 4 “qoal”s and there are no “qochal”s or “qoshal”s at all (which surprised me a little bit, but hand-building Markov models of Currier A and Currier B is a job I’ve been putting off for too long). There are plenty of “qokal”s (228) and “qotal”s (72), as well as a few “qopal”s (3), “qokeal”s (5), and “qoteal”s (2). Again, these last two look like potential copying errors (i.e. qokeal -> qokal, qoteal -> qotal)

Anyway, that points to (I think) a likely four copying errors out of 56 words (or 338 characters), i.e. an average of roughly one every 14 words (or, alternatively, one per line), which – I think – is probably a pretty good figure for a scribe copying a ciphertext. At some point, I ought to repeat the exercise on a bigger sample, see if the error rate holds true (and for both Hand 1 and Hand 2, etc).

13Jan 2014

Barack Obama and the Somerton Man…

by nickpelling ⋅ 6 Comments

What has Barack Obama got to do with the Somerton Man (an unidentified man found dead on a beach south of Adelaide in 1st December 1948)?

The surprising answer (as of a couple of days ago) is that people have tried adapting the same South Australian birth certificate (that of a certain David Jeffrey Bomford, born in Adelaide in 1959) to undermine or falsify both of their histories.

Obama Mama

The story about President Obama’s faked-up Kenyan birth certificate is well-known, though I don’t believe it has yet been definitely told anywhere. What happened is that a group of conspiracy theorists (known in the United States as “Birthers”) asserted before Obama’s election in 2008 that he had been born in Kenya (not Hawaii), and so was ineligible to be elected. All that was preventing their taking him to court was the lack of any supporting evidence…

So when, in mid-2009, digital photos of what appeared to be Obama’s Kenyan birth certificate appeared, Birthers (specifically Orly Taitz) were quick to rush them to court to submit appropriate motions for his disqualification etc. However, the suitably-embossed and plausibly-aged document shown in those images was (of course) a hoax.

KenyanBCPunkster

A while later, the creator of the fake document apparently surfaced as a commenter answering questions about the whole affair on the Free Republic website, under the pseudonym “KenyanBCPunkster”. So, without further ado, let’s try the obvious question first: why would he (I’m using “he” for convenience here, but I don’t actually know either way) do such a thing? His answer:-

It was after having been exposed to the whole “Birther” saga.

I watched as people would get the Birthers all worked up claiming they had finally found the smoking gun that would finally end the Obama candidacy, only for that smoking gun to never materialize. Like the Hawaiian birth certificate with Obama’s name as Barry Soetoro that some blogger claimed GOP operatives had got their hands on in Hawaii, the Michelle Obama tapes that Editor Korir claimed to have, etc.

One day I saw a “Birther” lamenting that they knew Obama was born in Kenya, but they just didn’t have the smoking gun.

I thought, what if they had one? If only for a little while. Then I thought what a smoking gun might look like. So I spent an afternoon one day and created it. Never having any idea that it would go as viral as it did. I figured it’d create a bit of a rumble in the blogosphere and then quickly die out.

(He also denied having been paid for making the fake document, or for posting on the Free Republic website.)

How he made it was also quite straightforward: “after a lengthy image search for [sensible-looking mid-20th century colonial] birth certificates” on Google Images, he found one that had been uploaded to a Bomford family tree website. Though it was from South Australia (specifically Adelaide) rather than Kenya, it was close enough to work with.

He then used the fields on that form as a starting point for creating his own Kenyan birth certificate-like document, filled the blanks out with an old typewriter (I think), added a plausible-looking embossed seal, aged it (probably with cold tea or something similar), and messed around with it for a bit until it basically looked the part. He added in another comment:-

I left some fields out that were in the original in order to make it better fit the aspect ratio of an 8-1/2 x 11 inch sheet of paper. I also used some of the same information for debunking purposes. Such as the “5733,” and the book and page numbers at the bottom. I kept the names of the registrar and district registrar, changing only their first initials. I made up the entire name of the deputy registrar to make it a Kenyan name.

So, what the guy did apparently was neither hugely sophisticated nor time-consuming: and by retaining details from the original certificate (such as the registrar’s surname etc), he pretty much ensured that it would be exposed before very long (as indeed it was). But, as he pointed out, it went far more viral than he thought. Sometimes these things just do – for example, it doesn’t take much of a geek angle for a page to get randomly Slashdotted, you just can’t tell in advance.

There was only one tiny bit of historical research he did, which was to pick a date (17th February 1964) “just after the time Stanley had filed for divorce from Obama Sr“. But Google helped him figure that out at speed, so that weren’t no big thang: his other comments betray a fairly nuanced understanding of US politics and politicians, so the rest he already knew.

Did the prank all go according to plan? Well… no, not really. When asked, he replied:-

[…] the one thing that has caused me to regret having done this […is that…] there are some out there who are so completely unhinged from reality that they actually believe that David Bomford’s birth certificate, that had been sitting on the Bomford family website for years before all of this, is the “fake.” […]

I only came here to set the record straight because I couldn’t believe there were people so gullible that even at this late date they’re still trying to claim it’s real even though I intentionally made it easy to debunk by most anyone who wasn’t completely detached from reality.

Incidentally, the nicest put-down from the 3500-post thread was when he was asked “Now why don’t you do something good with your talents?” His deadpan reply:-

I do.

Just so you know, the original David Bomford birth certificate image looked like this (though when the story went viral, it had to be taken down to prevent the server overloading), which I got from here:-

I Just Met A Troll Called “Maria”

So far so TL;DR. But compared to KenyanBCPunkster’s efforts, our recent Somerton Man hoaxer was a little more… Photoshop-centric, let’s say.

“Maria” (who posted the link to the image, and whose IP address has also been used to post comments to the blog under the name “Janice”, make of that coincidence what you will) did none of the tricky things that KenyanBCPunkster did to make his fake feel like a suitable historical artefact: in fact, what we’re looking at is a fairly crude bit of digital editing without much finesse.

However, what she (I assume “she”, but again I have no idea either way) did do reasonably well was to weave together the dates and places that people (and indeed trolls) would dearly like to be true about the secret history linking the Somerton Man and Jessie Harkness.

For instance, the age (41) and place of birth (Moscow) of the unnamed father were consistent with the Somerton Man and with Jessie’s recently-revealed ability to speak Russian: while the child’s year of birth (1942) was consistent with the year Jessie Harkness started at nursing school, etc. Its details dovetailed well enough with the facts to give it the immediate buzz of a real (but lost) thing, while the redacted grey rectangles helped it feel like something suppressed and slightly dangerous.

When I received it on Saturday morning, I approved it straightaway, and then took my son to his final ice skating lesson at Hampton Court Palace. (We got there early, and ended up having a lively discussion about which statues were old and which were modern, all very apposite.) I came home, looked at the alleged birth certificate full screen and saw immediately that it was a BFF (“Big Fat Fake”). *sigh*

But the whole experience led me to a horrible realisation. The thing about trolled hoaxes is that they encourage you to see what you want to see: and to my surprise, it turned out that what I actually wanted wasn’t a solution to the Tamam Shud cipher, but to be freed from waking up every morning to an blog inbox of sweary, unhappy, fake-id, delusional, nonsensical trolled comments, most of which come from individuals who plainly know better but choose to act worse. Shame on you.

In general, my own view of history has long been that only one question – “What happened?” (by which I mean what physically happened, as opposed to “what was going on in a particular individual’s head?”) – actually demands any attention, and any evidence that brings us closer to answering that question is a good thing.

Yet having said that, if trolls are prepared to fake evidence to support their wishful or delusional agendas and narratives, perhaps we should all give up and walk away. As I sometimes say, if you see a car about to crash, why jump inside it?

« Previous 1 … 62 63 64 65 66 … 136 Next »

Category Archives: Historical Ciphers