The mystery of the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher…

by ⋅ 63 Comments

While writing about Julian Bunn’s carroty crib ‘otaldy’ yesterday, it struck me that I haven’t properly posted much about the mystery of the Voynich’s cipher for some time.

To which the right reply is: errr, what mystery are you talking about, Nick? I’ll explain…

At the start of “The Curse of the Voynich”, I noted that the Voynich Manuscript’s cipher…

…appears almost childishly simple, the kind of thing any competent code-breaker armed with pencil and paper would expect to crack in a summer afternoon.

All the same, despite a century’s worth of lazy summer afternoons since Wilfrid Voynich swooshed it out of the Villa Mondragone, none of the legions of cryptologers who has tried to crack it has found so much as a vowel, a consonent, a digit, a comma or a full stop. So much for it being simple!

To a modern cryptogram solver’s eyes, the Voynich appears to be an aristocrat (i.e. with the ciphertext divided up into words) rather than a patristocrat (i.e. with the ciphertext unhelpfully divided up into fixed blocks): and its relatively small number of high frequency symbols makes it seem very much like a simple substitution cipher, with a handful of occasional special symbols creeping in. Really, there seems no reason that it should be anything but a simple substitution cipher. But it’s not! Pause for a second to think what the presence of a phrase such as page f78r’s “qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy” implies… yup, if that’s written in a cipher, it’s definitely not a simple cipher.

From an historian’s point of view, if the radiocarbon dating of the vellum accurately reflects the age of the cipher itself, it would predate the first known polyalphabetic cipher (Alberti 1467) by 25 or more years. The famous castles in the Voynich’s nine-rosette page clearly seem to have the swallow-tail merlons familiar from 14th and 15th century, pointing to a European (possibly even Northern Italian) origin. Historical logic would therefore seem to imply that that it could only use the kind of simple cipher tricks found in European ciphers in the 14th or early 15th century. But it doesn’t!

To a manuscript historian, words written in the Voynichese alphabet contain a number of shapes familiar from medieval manuscripts: for example, aiir and aiiv are page references to the third (‘ii-recto’) and fourth (‘ii-verso’) page of the first (‘a’) quire, and we see these appear throughout the text. Similarly, the letter pattern ‘4o’ (which I’m sure was a scribal shorthand used in 14th century Northern Italy, possibly in legal documents) appears at the start of many Voynichese words. But their curious usage statistics (-iv words massively outnumber -ir words, for example) tell us whatever these letter groups are, they are not what they seem!

The mystery of the Voynich’s cipher, then, is that everything obvious about it is just plain wrong.
* It looks simple to crack, but it isn’t!
* It looks like an ‘aristocrat’ simple substitution cipher, but it’s not!
* It looks too early to be particularly sophisticated, but it is!
* It looks like a mid-to-late 14th century European technical text, but it’s not!

So, what we have here is a right old Gordian knot, exactly the kind of thing you’d have thought Intellectual Historians such as Professor Anthony Grafton would be queuing around the block to bring their Massive Historical Brains to bear upon. They love historical paradoxes, because all it normally requires is subtlety, nerve and quickness of mind to bring whatever unspoken assumption or presumption happens to be blocking the logic to the surface – the fine hairstrand holding the whole knot in place. “The merest of snips and my work is done! Bwahaha… and back to Princeton I go“.

At least, that’s how the Intellectual History script is supposed to go. In reality, the Voynich Manuscript laughs at people’s puny attempts to untie its cipher’s tangly knot: it’s smarter – in fact, much smarter – than that.

Specifically, anyone who tries to pitch the whole postmodernist it’s-a-hoax-so-it-is brick at the Voynich’s shiny windows deserves to be shot, basically for not taking something so clever seriously. Look, guys, Voynichese has so much structure on so many levels, it’s almost fractal: only gibberish generated by a computer could ever exhibit such a convoluted set of rules.

Ultimately, then, the mystery of the Voynich is why any explanation has to satisfy such an apparently paradoxical set of multidimensional constraints. Lord knows I’ve tried to do this (and I remain convinced that what I presented in “The Curse of the Voynich” will turn out to have got 90% of the way to the right answer, even if the last 10% is still unbelievably hard), but it’s a rare Voynich researcher who faces these full on and still manages to be productive.

Do you? 😉

The Carrot Museum takes on the Voynich Manuscript…

by ⋅ 8 Comments

Errrm…. yes, really. A few days ago, I discovered that the online Carrot Museum has a page dedicated to early depictions of carrots in manuscripts and paintings, which also includes a rather disbelieving section referring to alleged depictions of carrots in the Voynich Manuscript.

To add to the confusion, it turns out that medieval writers often got carrots and parsnips confused, so even if a Voynich root does look somewhat carrot-like to you, it might actually still be a parsnip and yet be referred to as a carrot. Or vice versa. All we can be certain of is that if the linked text does turn out to encipher some kind of carrot-related secret, it won’t be about ‘seeing in the dark’ (that came courtesy of the second world war’s Dr Carrot).

I ought to point out that the Carrot Museum’s virtual curators didn’t sprout this whole leafy conjecture on their own: rather, they relied heavily on Julian Bunn’s Voynich Attacks website, which has its own carrot-related page. The backstory there was that, while hunting for cribs in the Voynich Manuscript, Julian noticed that one particular label appears beside three separate plants all with carrot-like roots (one of which is helpfully painted orange), and wondered whether the label might somehow encipher “carota”. (Note that though Julian labels the label “okae89”, it’s “otaldy” in EVA).

It’s a good observation, particularly because the carrot-like plants are in the pharmacological section of the Voynich Manuscript which historically has attracted the least research interest (don’t ask me why, I don’t know). Anyone who wants something to work on within the Voynich sphere really should put some time into going over the two pharma quires, I’m sure there’s plenty else there that nobody has yet noticed.

However, at this point I have to caution any Voynich newbie rubbing their thighs with cryptological excitement at the thought of a carroty crib, that we currently have… zero evidence that Voynichese text is a simple letter-for-letter substitution cipher. So, even if ‘otaldy’ does genuinely encipher ‘CAROTA’ in some way, we can be pretty certain that ‘o’ does not simply encipher ‘C’, ‘t’ does not simply encipher ‘A’ etc.

All the same, Julian’s carrot crib may well prove to be a step in the right direction, you never know. You might even say that the past’s bright – the past’s orange! 😉

Esther Molen’s Voynich Manuscript f116v theory…

by ⋅ 42 Comments

I recently received a note from independent Dutch researcher Esther Molen describing her Voynich theory: she was happy to see it given a post of its own, so… here it is!

* * * * * *

Here is my [Esther Molen’s] translation and ideas.

The Voynich Manuscript is mainly written in medieval Latin in combination with medieval French and medieval Italian. I conclude this from the research I did on the last page (f116v).

In order to make it easier for the reader to understand this translation I decided to transliterate the words into Latin and add the missing letters between brackets, followed by a translation in English.

Transliteration in Latin:

po(ti)s Leber fomen(to) a(d)iutas sero

michi con(atus) ola labo d(e) mil(le) cod(ex) e(t) c(e)t(e)ru(s) ceu e(t) poi cad(o) m(i)

sis magic(u)s myst(i)c(u)s uis alch(imi)a magica

arar(e) cust(o)s rus valde n(ae) ubi er(o) is(t)o n(a)m us(u)a(r)is mi quaestio

Translation in English:

Cherish Liber for he has the power to help you with sowing.

In an attempt to accomplish a desire, I worked on the book of a thousand vegetables and then the rest of the remaining part fell into my hands and

exists of magic, mystic, the magical properties of alchemy.

Everywhere you plough the fields intensely, you will truly keep me in a good condition for that I may be used by someone for inquiries.

Conclusions:

From the first sentence of the transliteration and of the translation we can see that the writer speaks about Leber, an archaic form of the Roman deity Liber, and that he tells readers to cherish him for he has the power to help with sowing. If we look at the references on pages 231 and 232 of Llewelyn Morgan’s book Deity of Patterns of redemption in Virgil’s Georgics, we can read that both Diodorus and Plutarch identified Liber with the God Dionysus, the son of Zeus and Persephone. This Dionysus was believed to be the pioneer of both ploughing and sowing which is also consistent with the last sentences where the writer speaks about ploughing the fields.

From the second sentence we can conclude that since the writer is talking about ‘the book of a thousand vegetables’ all the plants or part(s) of the plants in this manuscript can be used as food. We can also conclude that since the writer had the intention to write about a thousand vegetables he wanted to add more vegetables than the ones that are currently included in the manuscript or there are quite a few pages missing from this manuscript. Either way this means that the writer must have been well known with sowing – perhaps he was a farmer.

If we have a closer look at the idea that this manuscript was written for inquiries concerning sowing and ploughing in combination with the illustrations of the ten months in the manuscript, starting with March and ending with December, we can conclude that this represents the Roman calendar which is attributed to Romulus. This calendar was ten months long beginning with March and ending with December. The winter months were not included because there was no agricultural work due to the weather conditions. This would be consistent with the Roman deity Liber.

From the third sentence we can conclude that the remaining part of the manuscript exists of magic, mystic and the magical properties of alchemy and not the six sections as many researchers thought. We can also conclude that the variation in handwriting style throughout the entire manuscript is due to the fact that this part fell into the hands of the writer and therefore was written by someone else.

If we look at the last sentence then we can conclude that the writer had the intention to share his knowledge with others. Something most ancient and medieval writers wanted. They wished to pass on their knowledge.

Another fact according to the translation is that since the writer knew what the content of the total manuscript was, this last page is part of the total manuscript and was not added at a later stage.

Unfortunately we can also conclude that the writer did not leave his name or the place of his origin on this page but if we look closely at the language the writer used than there are two things that stand out, which are:
– the use of the letter q in magiques (magicus) and mystiques (mysticus)
– the use of the words aiuti (adiutas) and chesta (quaestio)
While the use of the letter q as mentioned above is clearly of French origin, the second two words are obviously Italian. This narrows down the origins of the writer.

Please let me know what you think!

If you would like to have more information about my current projects than check out my LinkedIn page.

An obfuscation of Voynich novels…

by ⋅ 17 Comments

A few days ago, I hurried my seven year old son to the back door to see a crowd of twenty or more crows spectacularly circling and cawing furiously at a pair of magpies who had presumably transgressed some unwritten bird law. Of course, though, the correct collective noun isn’t a ‘crowd’, but (rather delightfully) a ‘murder‘ of crows.

What, I wonder then, would be the right collective term for a set of Voynich novels? Though I’ve settled for “an obfuscation” here, doubtless you’ll have your own ideas. 🙂

Anyway, here are five relatively new Voynich novels I’ve been meaning to mention to you for a short while…

* (2011) The Cadence of Gypsies – Barbara Casey

“On her 18th birthday Carolina Lovel learned that she was adopted and was given a letter written in an unknown language left to her by her birth mother. After years of research she travels to Italy on a mission to find the truth about her past.”

* (2012) The Book of Blood & Shadow – Robin Wasserman

“Desperate to prove [her boyfriend Max’s] innocence, Nora follows the trail of blood, no matter where it leads. It ultimately brings her to the ancient streets of Prague, where she is drawn into a dark web of secret societies and shadowy conspirators, all driven by a mad desire to possess something that might not even exist. For buried in a centuries-old manuscript is the secret to ultimate knowledge and communion with the divine…”

* (2012) Vaults of Power – Diane Echer

“When her twin is kidnapped in Southern France, Robyn Gabriel has six days to steal the precious Voynich manuscript from a bunker-like library at Yale University and break its code– […] The Federal Reserve can’t allow that. Now, they want her dead.”

* (2011) In a Celandine World – Catherine Thorpe

“The truth is going to come out. A truth that has long been forgotten. A truth that was concealed in a manuscript in the 12th century. An impossible truth. A dangerous truth that will blow Willow’s secret wide open—leaving her scrambling to save the only man she could ever love.”

* (2012?) The Voynich Cypher – Russell Blake [announced but not yet released]

“When a sacred relic is stolen from its subterranean guarded vault, Dr. Steven Cross, amateur cryptologist living in Tuscany, becomes embroiled in a deadly quest to decipher one of history’s most enigmatic documents…”

I already have the first two to read & review, though I must confess I’m finding it difficult to get into the Cadence of Gypsies, possibly because it’s aimed at a Teen / Young Adult audience. Oh well – I’ll let you know how I get on. Wish me luck! 🙂

Incidentally, I just noticed that the ebook version of In a Celandine World is free at SmashWords until February 15th 2012, so if you’d like to be entertained by Catherine Thorpe’s Victorian Knot-garden-inspired time-shifting paranormal Voynich romance, feel just as free to click on the link! 🙂

London Rare Books School 2012 – including a session on historical ciphers…

by ⋅ 13 Comments

Just so you know, I’ll be contributing a session to the London Rare Books School 2012, which is a yearly study week (this year running from 25th June to 6th July 2012) held at the University of London around Senate House, and intended to broaden participants’ exposure to the widely varied aspects of the history of writing. Myself excepted 🙂 , it has a stellar line-up of tutors covering a great diversity of subjects and eras: it’s a splendid thing, that almost anybody with a wide-ranging interest in history would benefit from (really, it’s a snip at £600).

My section, covering the early modern growth of ciphers, codes and shorthand, is provisionally titled “Writing for privacy, secrecy, brevity and speed“. The tentative session summary runs like this:-

“This session discusses many of the ways in which writing systems have been adapted to meet secondary needs such as privacy (cryptography), secrecy (steganography), brevity (shorthand) and speed (tachygraphy). It uses examples ranging from antiquity through to the 17th century. It also discusses practical issues of transcription and decryption that historians and researchers may well need to tackle if presented with an unusual historical text. It concludes with discussion of some well-known unbroken historical ciphers.”

Over the next few months, I’ll be assembling (both physically and conceptually) the source material for this, and so will blog here about various aspects as they take shape. One particular thing that has already struck me is that few people grasp the difference between privacy and secrecy: for example, what happens in a marital bed is private (i.e. not public, but condoned – it’s ok that others broadly know that it’s going on, even though they don’t know the precise details), while a spouse’s illicit affair is secret (not public, but condemned – knowledge of its existence is what needs to be concealed, far more than the precise details).

This also (roughly speaking) helps conceptually differentiate between cryptography (private writing) and steganography (secret writing): with crypto, the core model is that others know of a crypto-text’s existence but are technically unable to read it, while stego’s core model is that people aren’t even aware of a stego-text’s existence [even if they can see the document carrying it], and so aren’t even trying to read it.

How does this help us? Well, my position on the inscrutable Voynich Manuscript has long been that its drawings (such as its plants and nymphs) are intended to misdirect and distract us, rather than to inform us: it is therefore at least as much a stegotext as a cryptotext. Hence using industrial-strength statistical tools to try to cryptologically crack its crabby carapace is probably futile: ultimately, Voynichese is an array of simple ciphers carefully folded inside a steganographic blanket, much as Brigadier John Tiltman said decades ago, and it was designed for showing as much as for concealing. Something to think about.

Anyway, I’m very much looking forward to giving my session, and may even see one or two of you there!

First Voynich theory of 2012…

by ⋅ 28 Comments

To get 2012 rolling, I thought you might like to know that Walter Grosse has just started an English-language blog about his Voynich Manuscript theory.

Briefly, he proposes that each Voynichese ‘word’ super-verbosely enciphers a digit, based purely on the number of letters it contains. So, the first six words of page f1r (in EVA: “fachys ykal ar ytaiin shol shosy”) is f.a.ch.y.s [=5] y.k.a.l [=4] a.r [=2] y.t.a.i.i.n [=6] sh.o.l [=3] sh.o.s.y [=4], i.e. “542634”. By then assigning (somehow) a set of Greek letters to each verbosely enciphered digit, Grosse generates a list of permuted words, and then chooses the one that makes most sense. In this case, “542634” turns out to be two 3-letter words (“542” and “634”), which he reads as σαν ετι, i.e. “As yet”.

Inevitably, though, it seems (from other posts) that he’s experiencing difficulty applying this same ambiguous cipher-breaking methodology to other pages, because he has posted lists of permutation tables followed by the rather dour phrase “0 possibilities”.

In some ways, it’s fascinating to see how old ideas keep coming round in slightly different guises. Brumbaugh similarly converted Voynichese to digits (though not so extraordinarily verbosely, it has to be said), and tried to salvage text from the resulting digit stream, though ultimately accepting somewhat grudgingly that the digit stream was not meaningful. Claude Martin travelled much the same path as Brumbaugh, proposing instead that it was constructed from a deliberately nonsensical digit stream. In my opinion, both Brumbaugh’s and Martin’s digit stream theories explained nothing whatsoever about the nature and structure of Voynichese, and so have nothing to commend them: and σαν ετι I don’t see any reason why I should think differently about Grosse’s superverbose digit stream theory. Sorry to have to point it out, but “it’s like that, that’s the way it is”.

So there is also a depressing fatalism to Voynich theories: that if you wait long enough, someone will inevitably build a contemporary doppelganger of William Romaine Newbold’s ink-craquelure Latin shorthand pareidoiliac theory, or indeed any other theory you may have already seen. Feeling desperate to see yet another Hebrew Voynich theory? Have no fear, like London buses there’ll doubtless be one along any minute. As my grandfather used to chortle, “Aldgate East, Aldgate aht!” 😉

Does the ‘Voynich = migraine’ theory make your head hurt too?

by ⋅ 37 Comments

In the pub after the Kingston Round Table of Inventors meeting this evening, a nice guy from Kingston Uni told me that he had recently had two “dry migraine” attacks, and that he was waiting for the results of the follow-up CT scan. This reminded me that I had a German Voynich explanation (i.e. not quite a theory, or perhaps a meta-theory) to post about here…

In Gerry Kennedy & Rob Churchill’s book, they float the hypothesis that the Voynich Manuscript might possibly have been written by someone suffering a prolonged (months- or years-long) migraine attack; and point to the streams of stars and the repetitive series of nymphs as vaguely supporting (if far from smoking-gun causal) evidence. However, nobody (to my knowledge) really took the notion particularly seriously until German blogger Markus Dahlem decided to carry their conceptual baton a little further in the general direction of… Hildegard of Bingen.

Might the castle in the nine-rosette page actually be a representation of the Aedificium, the piously hallucinatory City of God drawn by Hildegard in her Zelus Dei or her Sedens Lucidus? Are the Voynich’s stars simply “showers of phosphenes” cascading wildly through Hildegard’s retinal circuits?

I saw a great star most splendid and beautiful, and with it an exceeding multitude of falling stars which with the star followed southwards … And suddenly they were all annihilated, being turned into black coals… and cast into the abyss so that I could see them no more.

To me, the fact that Hildegard is discussed by both Charles Singer and Oliver Sacks is no more than an expression of her outlierness: she not only had the repeated experience of migraine auras, but also had the literary imagination to stitch that into her religious worldview. Basically, I’m pretty sure that there is almost no real chance that the author of the Voynich Manuscript was a migraine sufferer.

And besides, Hildegard drew square merlons in her City of God, not swallow-tail merlons. D’oh! 🙂

Happy Voynich New Year 2012!

by ⋅ 15 Comments

A Happy New Year to all Cipher Mysteries readers, for it might well be a good year for historical cipher mystery research!

As doubtless most of you know, 1912 was the year when Wilfrid Voynich [very probably] bought the “ugly duckling” artefact now named after him from the Villa Mondragone in Frascati in Italy, making this year (in the absence of any specific dating evidence) its modern centenary.

Now, the media love centenaries (e.g. Charles Dickens’ 2012 bicentenary) because it’s news that they can project manage in advance; and so this Voynich Manuscript centenary is bound to inspire plenty of glossy magazine articles and perhaps even documentaries and films. In fact, I know there’s at least 22 minutes of new Voynich TV documentary coming this Autumn, because the director had me running round in an Italian heatwave to make it (though as normal, I’m not allowed to talk about it until it’s all announced la-la-la).

But how should we best celebrate a hundred years of patchy history, failed cryptology and hallucinogenic theorizing? [Well, apart from cracking its cipher, of course. 😉 ] The longstanding joke on Jim Reeds’ VMs Mailing List (before it lost both its momentum and its way) was that we’d all share a pizza to celebrate breaking the Voynich, with the slices loosely signifying the many contributions different people made. Yet as the decades have accumulated, this jokey pizza base has worn rather thin: the Voynichian collaborational camaraderie dwindled long ago, to the point that we now have little or no consensus on even basic aspects: the sweet taste of Voynich success pizza looks likely to elude us for some time.

All the same, I’ve long thought it would be really great if we could collectively do something for 2012, if only to stop lazy journalists and bloggers cutting-and-pasting the Wikipedia Voynich Manuscript article for the thousandth time. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if we could conjure up – however fleetingly – a real-world forum where well-informed, thoughtful people could, well, just talk sensibly and openly about the manuscript, its curious text, its odd drawings, its murky history, its codicology… a bit like a “Voynich pub meet” but to the nth degree…

And so it is with very great pleasure that I am delighted to announce that an international Voynich conference has been organized for 11th May 2012 at the Sala degli Svizzeri at the Villa Mondragone itself, no less. The organizers are Claudio Foti (author of an Italian Voynich book) and Voynich researchers Michelle Smith and Rene Zandbergen: even though booking for attendees doesn’t open till 1st February 2012, would it be forward of me to hope that I see many of you there?

It’s entirely true that I’ve agreed to give one of the presentations: but don’t let that put you off 😀 , there are plenty of high-calibre attendees who may well be speaking too, such as (though none of these are yet confirmed):-
* Rene Zandbergen – long-term Voynich researcher, & creator of the excellent voynich.nu
* Greg Hodgins – carried out the recent vellum radiocarbon dating
* Joe Barabe – performed the ink and paint analysis for McCrone Associates
* Paula Zyats – Assistant Chief Conservator at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
* Rafal Prinke – expert on the history of alchemy (and all kinds of other wonderful stuff)
* Philip Neal – long-term Voynich researcher and Latinist (translated many Kircher letters)
* etc

I don’t yet know if the whole day is going to be podcasted, webinared, or Twitter hashtagged. Frankly, I hope that it is, because I do appreciate that not everyone can afford to take a couple of days off from their working life to engorge (on fantastic Italian food) and engage (in Voynich-related chat). All the same, all credit to Messers Foti, Smith & Zandbergen for making this splendid thing possible – and let’s hope that it encourages someone with sufficient leverage to convince the Beinecke curators to allow a multispectral scan for Paula Zyats to announce at the conference… wouldn’t that be great! 😀

Voynich colour inference, a sure path to madness…

by ⋅ 25 Comments

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…?

by ⋅ 28 Comments

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?