Voynich Quire 20 notes…

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Though the Voynich Manuscript has many unusual and interesting sections, arguably the most boring of the lot is Quire 20 (‘Q20’). This comprises a thick-ish set of six text-only bifolios (though with a central bifolio missing), where just about every paragraph has a tiny drawing of a star/flower/comet shape attached to it.

Tally all these up, and you find that Q20 as it now is has between 345 and 347 stars (two are slightly questionable). This is intriguingly close enough to the magic number 365 for some researchers to have speculated that this section might actually be an almanack, i.e. a one-paragraph-per-day-of-the-year guide. It is also close enough to the similarly resonant number 360 for some (and, indeed, often the same) people to speculate whether the section might be a kind of per-degree astrology, i.e. a one-paragraph-per-degree judicial astrological reference. If neither, then the general consensus seems to be that Q20 is some kind of secret recipe / spell collection (there were plenty of these in the Middle Ages).

Yet the problem with constructing an explanation around 365 stars, as Elmar Vogt pointed out in a 2009 blog post, is that Q20 ticks over fairly consistently at about 15 paragraphs/stars per page, and we have four pages missing from the centre: hence we would expect the grand total to be somewhere closer to 345 + (15 x 4) = 405, which is far too many. Of course, the same observation holds true for 360 per-degree paragraphs too.

You could try – as Elmar subsequently did – to start from a count of 365 (or indeed from 360) and hold that as a constraint to generate plausible codicological starting points (i.e. by answering the question “what kind of ordering could be constructed that would be consistent with 360 or 365 starred paragraphs?”). However, you quickly run into the problem that the marginalia-filled f116v looks very much as if it was originally (as it now is) the final page of the quire, which (in my opinion) is also supported by the large, final, unstarred paragraph on f116r, [which, incidentally, I predict will turn out to hold the most informative plaintext of the whole book, i.e. stuff about the author]. And if you accept that f116 was indeed probably originally the end folio, then you run into a bit of a brick wall as far as possible shufflings of Q20 go.

All the same, here’s an interesting new angle to consider. Cipher Mysteries reader Tim Tattrie very kindly left a comment here a few days ago, pointing out that the rare EVA letter ‘x’ appears in 19 folios – “46r, 55r, 57v, 66r, 85r, 86v6, 94r, 104r, 105r, 105v, 106v, 107v [NP: actually 107r], 108r, 108v, 111r, 112r [NP: ?], 113v, 114v, 115v” – which he wondered might suggest a possible thematic link between Q8, Q14 (the nine-rosette fold-out) and Q20. However, what particularly struck me about this list of pages was that (remembering that f109 and f110 form Q20’s missing central bifolio) every folio in Q20 has an ‘x’ except for the first folio (f103) and the last folio (f116), which are of course part of the same bifolio.

Could it be that the f103-f116 bifolio was originally separate from the rest of the Q20 bifolios? Even though f116v looks as though it really ought to be the back page of the quire, I have always found f103r a very unconvincing first page for a quire – with no introduction, no title, no ornate scribal scene-setting, to my eyes it seems more like a mid-quire page, which is a bit of a puzzle. In fact, of all the Q20 starred paragraph pages I’d have thought the strongest candidate for quire-initial page would be f105r, courtesy of its overelaborate split (and dotted, and starred) gallows, as per the below image. Just so you know, f105r also contains two of Q20’s four ‘titles’ (an offset piece of Voynichese text), one on line 10 and one on its bottom line, the latter of which crypto crib-fans may well be pleased to hear that I suspect contains the title of the chapter – “otaiir.chedaiin.otair.otaly” (note that the two other Q20 titles are to be found on f108v and f114r).

Interestingly, Tim Tattrie then pointed out that “f103 and 116 are linked as they are the only folios in Q20 that do not have tails on the stars“: which (together with the absence of ‘x’s) suggests that they were originally joined together, i.e. as the central bifolio of a quire. All of which suggests that the original layout of Q20 may have been radically different layout, with the f105/f114 bifolio on the outside of (let’s call it) ‘Q20a’ and the f103/f116 bifolio on the outside of ‘Q20b’, and all the other Q20 bifolios in the middle of Q20a.

Picking up where Elmar left off before, this is where almanack (365-star) and per-degree (360-star) proponents would somewhat enthusiastically ask how many stars this proposed Q20a gathering would have originally had. Because f103 has 35 stars, and f116 has 11 stars, Q20a has (say) 299 stars across five bifolios. Add in the missing f109/f110 bifolio, and the answer is terrifically simple: extrapolating from Q20a’s stars-per-paragraph figure, we’d expect the original quire to have had (299 * 6 / 5) = 359 stars – hence the likelihood is that Q20a contained some kind of per-degree zodiac reference, most probably along the lines of Pietro d’Abano’s per-degree astrology.

Having said that… the figures are extremely tight, and if the missing bifolio instead mimicked the f108/f111 bifolio (which, after all, it ended up physically next to in the final binding) rather than the overall section average (which may also be slightly lowered by the 11-per-page average of f105), it would have closer to 72 stars rather than 60, which would then bring the 365-star almanack hypothesis back into the frame. It’s a tricky old business this, nearly enough to drive a poor codicologist to drink (please excuse my shaking white cotton gloves, etc).

There are various other observations that might help us reconstruct what was going on with Q20a/Q20b:-

  • Helpfully, Elmar documented the various empty/full star patterns on the various Q20 pages, and noted that most of them are no more than empty-full-empty-full-empty-full sequences, with the exception of “f103r, f104r and f108r”, which he interprets as implying that they were probably originally placed together.
  • f105v is very much more faded than all the other pages in Q20, which I have wondered might have been the result of weathering: if f105 had been the outer folio of an unbound Q20a, then it could very well have ended up being folded around the back of Q20b by mistake for a while early in the life of the Q20 pages, which would have put it on the back page of the whole manuscript.
  • I still believe that the gap in the text in the outside edge of f112 was no more than a vellum fault (probably a long vertical rip) in the page in the original (unenciphered) document from which Q20a was copied, but that’s probably not material to any bifolio nesting discussion.
  • The tail-less paragraph stars on f103r seem slightly ad hoc to my eyes: I suspect that they were added in after the event.
  • The notion that Q20 originally contained seven nested quires (as per the folio numbering) seems slightly over-the-top to me: this seems a bit too much for a single mid-15th century binding to comfortably take.

What are we to make of all this fairly raw stream of codicological stuff? Personally, I’m fairly sold on the idea that Q20 was originally formed of two distinct gatherings, with f105r the first page of the first gathering (Q20a) and f116v the last page of the last gathering (Q20b). Placing all the remaining bifolios in Q20a to get close to the magic numbers of 360 and 365 is a hugely seductive idea: however, such numerological arguments often seem massively convincing for a short period of time, before you kind of “sober up” to their limitations, so I think it’s probably safer to note the suggestion down as a neat explanation (but to return to it later when we have amassed more critical codicological information about the Q20 pages).

Perhaps the thing to do now is to look at other features (such as handwriting, rare symbols, letter patterns, contact transfers, etc) for extra dimensions of grouping / nesting information within the Q20 pages, and to look for more ways of testing out this proposed Q20a/Q20b split. Sorry not to be able to come to a definitive conclusion on all this in a single post, but with a bit of luck this should be a good starting point for further discussion on what Q20 originally looked like. Tim, Elmar, John, Glen (and anyone else), what do you think? 🙂

Update: having posted all the above, I went off and had a look at all the ‘x’ instances in Q20 – these seem to have a strong affinity for sitting next to ‘ar’ and ‘or’ pairs, e.g. arxor / salxor / kedarxy / oxorshey / oxar / shoxar / lxorxoiin, etc.

Updated Cipher Mysteries home page…

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Just a quick note to say that I’ve been working behind the scenes for a few weeks on a revised Cipher Mysteries home page, incorporating a nice clickable list of what I think are the top unsolved cipher mysteries of all time, some of which you may not have heard of:-

  1. (–Top secret, yet to be announced–)
  2. The Voynich Manuscript
  3. The Anthon Transcript
  4. The Beale Papers
  5. The Rohonc Codex
  6. The HMAS Sydney Ciphers
  7. The Tamam Shud Cipher
  8. The D’Agapeyeff Cipher
  9. The Codex Seraphinianus
  10. The Dorabella Cipher
  11. The Phaistos Disk

Note that the HMAS Sydney Ciphers part isn’t yet live, because I haven’t written the post yet (probably later this week). 🙂  I may update the list later to insert the Vinland Map at #7, but that’s another story entirely…

Incidentally, the reason I ranked the Voynich Manuscript at #2 is because the top spot will be filled (hopefully fairly soon) with an awesome centuries-old cipher mystery I’ve been chipping away at for a while, one that will be eerily familiar to many CM readers. Don’t hold your breath, but I do think you’re going to like it a lot… 🙂

Benedek Lang’s Rohonc article in Cryptologia…

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I’ve waited a decade to find anything good on the Rohonc Codex (and don’t get me started on Wikipedia yet again), so it is with great delight that I read Benedek Lang’s April 2010 Cryptologia article “Why Don’t We Decipher an Outdated Cipher System? The Codex of Rohonc” that he kindly mentioned in a comment on this site a few days ago.

Despite the slightly clunky title, I think it is fair to say that Lang’s piece utterly replaces pretty much all the previous writing on the subject, and arguably moves the Rohonc Codex very nearly on a par with the Voynich Manuscript. Really, it is almost unnerving to find out that the RC suffers from precisely the same issues bedevilling VMs research:

  • wide possible date range (1530s [from the Venetian paper] to 1838 [when it was donated by Count Gusztáv Batthyány])
  • uncertain provenance (one possible mention in a 1743 inventory, but that’s it)
  • inability to narrow down the plaintext language (Old Hungarian? Latin? or what?)
  • apparently unhelpful drawings (probably representing a life of Christ, but offering very few cribs)
  • non-trivial cipher nomenclator / shorthand combination (in my opinion)
  • dominant hoax narrative (but which is at odds with the early dating of the support medium)
  • unsubstantiated links to murky historical figures (forger Sámuel Literáti Nemes rather than Dee & Kelley)
  • inadequate codicological and palaeographical analyses (by modern standards)
  • multiple hands contributing to the object’s construction (two in the case of the RC, it would appear)

To me, the RC and the VMs (and their complicated mad ecologies of attempted decryptions) seem like two expressions of the same underlying historical pathology – when the aspirational desire to reconstruct the what overwhelms the grounding need to look for the how. Hence I asked Benedek Lang the same kind of “Voynich 2.0” questions I try (in vain) to start from these days, to round out the parts of his article that are less obviously cryptological (yet still important). Here are his responses (very lightly edited)…

* * * * * * *

[NP] (1) Has anyone done a codicological analysis of the Rohonc Codex? That is, how confident should we be that the bifolios remain in their original gatherings/quires and nesting order and that no bifolios have been lost, and when was the cover added, etc? Are there any signs of multiple rebindings? Are there any fingerprints?

[BL] No fingerprints, but basically anyone can touch it in the library, and some people in the 19th century even made notes in it. There had been a little research regarding the watermark, which I largely confirmed with my own research, though this however says nothing about the writing itself (which might of course be a later addition). The beginning and the end of the book are quite destroyed, to the point that the first and last 20 pages are no longer bound into the book, hence their (19th century) numbering might well be wrong. I think the book is in its original binding, which is not a real binding, just a piece of leather.

(2) Has there been a systematic study of any apparent corrections by the author(s)? For example, I notice a line apparently crossed out in Figure 5, or is that just boxed for emphasis?

No, nothing. My impression is that the corrections do not say anything that makes sense to me, but I should perhaps pay more attention to this.

(3) Has there been a palaeographic study of the text itself? For example, might it have (Leonardo-style) been written right-to-left for convenience by a left-hander? And have the palaeographic differences between the hands been described carefully? For example, did all the hands form the letters in the same way?

No, nothing, although it would be good to know whether there really are two hands – as it appears to me – and whether the text was written by one left handed person (or two), or just in the other direction by a right handed person.

(4) Has there been a palaeographic study of the marginalia and (what appear to be) interlinear notes? As with the VMs’ 15th century quire numbers and marginalia, dating the folio numbers might give a far more limiting (if pragmatic) terminus ante quem – really, there ought to be _some_ internal evidence that can help improve on 1838, which in historical terms is practically yesterday.

These marginalia were made by one of the less clever late 19th century “scholars” who believed that they were able to decipher the text.

(5) Apart from the introduction of new symbols, are there any signs of evolution or development of the core writing system through the 450 pages? As new symbols are added, are they progressively more ornate (which would argue for them being improvised, rather than as part of a pre-existing system)? Furthermore, are there any places where a new symbol is added in a left-right textual context which recurs around a word earlier in the document? (This would again argue for a nomenclator being improvised during the writing process).

There are certainly some occasional changes – for example, one of the symbols (the winged one) becomes less ornate – but apart from this I do not see any systematic changes. It is also true that new signs are introduced when there is a new person in the text (Pilate, for example). But I have not done serious research into that question.

(6) Did the Battyhany family ever compile inventories of their library? Has anyone looked for provenance in this kind of way?

Yes! There are several partial inventories of this very large library, and some earlier Rohonc Codex scholars thought that a book entitled “Hungarian prayers” in a 18th century inventory referred to this book. However, I remain skeptical, for I would be more satisfied by an inventory entry along the lines of “a book with unknown signs”. Such a description, however, is absent from the catalogues, the last one of which is dated exactly 100 years before 1838, when the codex first appeared.

As a general comment, I’d say that the lacuna in your account of shorthand is between Tironian notae and Bright’s Characterie. In Italy, Quattrocento scribes built up local traditions of abbreviations, with “underbars” and (macron-like) “overbars” for contraction and abbreviation (there are even some of these in Alberti’s facade for Santa Maria Novella). Isaac Pitman’s history of shorthand also mentions (p.6) a (probably 16th century) “Mr Radcliff, of Plymouth” whose version of the Lord’s Prayer – “Our Fth wch rt n hvn : hlwd b y Nm” – looks rather like modern SMS txtspk! What links many of these, then, is that they were ugly systems of abbreviation mainly intended to capture charismatic sermons as they were spoken: and so Bright’s innovation was to make the strokes easy to write, rather like Greek tachygraphy (which, though it was used in antiquity and in the Byzantine Empire, never seems to have crossed over into Europe).

Thanks! I was not aware of that.

In this context, then, the Rohonc Codex’s awkwardly angular letter forms seem to me quite independent of the many post-Bright shorthands: and also seem to have nothing structurally corresponding to the characteristic underbars or overbars of Quattrocento scribal practice. Hence to my eyes, it seems unlikely to fall within any known shorthand tradition, save that of pure abbreviation / contraction.

Yes, I agree.

As with the Voynich, I think the most likely scenario for the Rohonc Codex is that it is formed of a combination of (specifically abbreviating  / contracting) shorthand and non-polyalphabetic cryptography (though it seems very likely that the VMs’ cryptographic aspect is many times more sophisticated than the Rohonc Codex’s): and it is this pairing when also combined with the lack of knowledge about the underlying language that makes it impractical to crack in a conventional way. In both cases, I suspect that the necessary first step will be to crack the history first!

Yes, but what can be done when almost nothing is known about its history? The Batthyány family might well have purchased it anywhere. In my mind, I imagine that it is a combination of a shorthand and a cipher, though lately however I am convinced that it is a consonant writing (due to a possible Turkish or Hebrew origin) and a cipher applied to that consonant language. (In fact, this is almost the same as saying that it is a cipher and a shorthand, because shorthands are usually composed of consonants.) I do not believe that it is a hoax because it is an ugly book, and I do not really know of any similar hoaxes from the pre-19th century period. I was, however, convinced that the Voynich Manuscript was itself a late 19th century hoax until I learned about its new dating. Hence I remain puzzled!

 PS: do you have a picture of yourself I could include in the post? Thanks!

Benedek Lang

* * * * * * *

So there you have it – the Rohonc Codex is very probably, as Lang’s piece implies, just as uncertain as the VMs. Yet where are the massed ranks of me-too US documentary-makers clamouring to go to Budapest to view it? Why can’t we hear William Shatner’s voiceover ringing in our ears? 

To me, the central mystery of the Rohonc Codex is therefore why its ‘ugly duckling’ cousin [the Voynich Manuscript] gets all the mad heresy theories when it’s the Rohonc Codex that has all the pictures of Christ. (Note to novelists & film companies: Budapest is much prettier than New Haven). Go figure!

Voynich pub meet – 5th September 2010, Wapping…

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OK, after the obligatory minor horse-trading, the next Voynich historical pub meet is now set for 4pm on Sunday 5th September 2010 at The Prospect of Whitby in Wapping. Philip Neal, Marke Fincher, and John Kozak are all on for this, and I hope to see several more of you other lovely Voynicheros appearing on the day as well.

Just so you know, the Prospect of Whitby sits high on most historical-London-pub lists because (a) it’s quite possibly the oldest London pub on the Thames, (b) 18th century smugglers and villains often met there (when it was called “The Devil’s Tavern”), (c) many of its fittings are made from reclaimed ships’ fittings, and most importantly (d) it opens on a Sunday. 🙂 There’s also a nice VideoJug video introduction to the pub here (though with a loud advert at the start). It’s a scant 10 minutes’ walk from the newly re-opened Wapping station, so if you put your postcode into the BeerInTheEvening page for the pub, it’ll pass you straight to the TfL journey planner (if not, remember that the Waterloo & City line doesn’t run on Sundays!) Note that Wapping also has the (just about as old) Town of Ramsgate, the Captain Kidd and the Grapes pubs just down the road, so has plenty of scope for that ancient British tradition, ye olde historicalle pubbe crawlle, shudde ye bee sadde ennoughe.

Incidentally, if I’ve read the Port of London Authority’s tide tables correctly, 5th September 2010 should see low tide at 17:00, which would be perfect for taking a beer down onto the shingle (rain permitting). So if you arrive late on a fine day and can’t see any huddled Voynicheros in the bar, upstairs, or the outside terrace, don’t forget to check beside the Thames too!

“So goddamn Voynich…”

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“Can you stop being so goddamn Voynich?” Dan shouted down the phone at her continued silence. “I’m sick of reading between your lines, playing guess-what-Marie-means like our whole off-line life is some afternoon quiz show. Since our shared New Haven hajj, you’ve been no fun – zero fun – and all I’m getting from you are stupid little clues that even the Cipher Mysteries guy wouldn’t be able to spin into a story. So… what’s the goddamn deal, Em?”

Across the Skypey quiet, he could hear her breathing tighten, hear her holding her head in her head, even hear her throat quiver with the tension. And then: “Jeez, Danski,” she lurched, “I feel like… like… that whole Quire 13 thing.”

“What, floating in a pool that can’t decide whether it’s green or blue?”

“No, damnit, like… like I’ve been turned inside out and… had a second creation phase added… similar but distinctly different from the first phase.”

“Christ”, Dan choked, “that makes me…”

“Yes, second phase co-author. And the scans say… it’s going to be a girl. Our girl!”

“I’ll give it to you to suck, FINISH HIM.” (yes, really)…

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When people suggest that the repetitions in the Voynich Manuscript might have arisen because of a delusional paranoid author, I do wonder if they have ever seen anything by angry, mad, disbarred lawyer Francis E. Dec Esquire? Here’s one of his staggering puppet communist Frankenstein computer gangster god rant letters performed by a voice actor courtesy of YouTube. Well worth watching right to the end, I’d say! 🙂

Really, could anyone square this kind of content with the calm, controlled, rational penmanship of the VMs? I don’t think so, sorry!

The secret history of Voynich chicken scratches…

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A recurring motif running through my own Voynich research is trying to grasp what happened to the manuscript over time. If you examine it carefully, you’ll find plenty of good reasons to think that its original (‘alpha’) state was significantly different to its final (‘omega’) state. My strong hunch is that if we were able to reconstruct how the manuscript looked in its original state, we would take a very different view on how it ‘worked’ or ‘functioned’ as an object – and so I keep on gently digging away at the marginalia and codicological clues, to see what subtle stories they have to tell us, what secret histories are betrayed by their presence.

Of course, to many (if not most) Voynich researchers this is just too arcane a way of looking at what (to their eyes) is simply a cryptological or linguistic conundrum. Each to their own, eh? But all the same, here’s a new angle to think about…

In a previous post, I discussed the so-called “chicken scratch” marginalia on f66v and f86v3, with a codicological aside that…

[…]if you reorder Q8 (Quire #8) to place the astronomical (non-herbal) pages at the back, and also follow Glen Claston’s suggestion by inserting the nine-rosette quire between (the reordered) Q8 and Q9, what you unexpectedly find is that the f66v and f86v3 chicken scratches move extremely close together. If this is correct, it would imply that the doodles were added very early on in the life of the VMs, probably earlier even than the fifteenth-century hand quire numbering (and hence probably early-to-mid 15th century).

However, I think this chain of reasoning can be extended just a little further. Why do these chicken scratch marks only occur on these two pages and nowhere else? I suspect that the most likely reason is that the two pages were not only (as I noted) “extremely close” to each other but also – at the moment that the chicken scratches were accidentally added to the manuscript opened out on someone’s (Simon Sint’s?) writing desk – were probably on two pages facing each other.

Yet the paradox here is about how this ever could have been, given that both marginalia are on verso pages.

Now, for normal two-panel bifolios, the assignment of “r” (recto) and “v” (verso) is unproblematic – the recto side is always the page nearest the front of the book, while the verso side is the page nearest the back. However, if you instead look at wider-than-two-panel bifolios and consider rebinding the panels along different edges, pages can change their orientation (facingness) and hence can change between verso and recto.

So, because f66v is part of a normal two-panel bifolio, for it to have originally been a recto page requires that it was on a wider bifolio that was trimmed down to two panels and then rebound… and there’s no obvious reason to think anything  like that happened. Hence, I think we can reasonably infer that if the two chicken scratch pages did originally sit side-by-side, f66v was on the left hand side of the pair.

Looking at f86v3, however, we see that it is on the back of the Voynich’s infamous “nine-rosette” drawing, which comprises a large 3 x 2 set of panels that fold out. Moreover, Voynich researcher Glen Claston has proposed that at some point in its history, this quire (Quire 14) sustained significant damage along its original binding crease (green, below) and so was rebound along a different fold (blue, below).

rosette-folding

And guess what? If you were to bind Quire 14 along the green line, make the big horizontal fold first (as it is now), and keep the blue fold internal (i.e. exactly the way it is now), the page which would sit right at the front of Q14 is (you’re way ahead of me) f86v3. And because f86v3 also has the Q14 quire mark (near the bottom right), this would give yet more support to the idea that the VMs was reordered and rebound before the quire numbers were added. Also, you can see the raggedy edge of the damaged binding on the left-hand side of f86v3:-

Voynich Manuscript f86v3 - 600x808

Now: I should add that a fair while back Glen Claston alluded to having three separate pieces of evidence that supported his claim that Q14 was originally folded and rebound along the green line, and it may well be that this whole chicken scratch argument was one of them. Well, I for one don’t mind playing catch-up with such a sharp brain as his. But hey, I got there in the end! 🙂

One nicety then becomes whether Q14 was bound into this position, or whether the whole codex was no more than an unbound set of gatherings in its early existence: but if the crease suffered significant damage (as seems apparent) when Q14 was removed from the codex, it must have been bound into position before being removed, surely?

All the same, there is one further problem to consider: if both sets of chicken scratches were added when the manuscript was open at a single page, then something must have happened to Q8 before then – because the f66v chicken scratches are on the back page of Q8 in its final order, not its original order.

This points to a number of hypothetical codicological timelines to evaluate, such as:-

Scenario #1

  • The manuscript is assembled. The two bifolios of Q8 are (relative to their current orientation) inside out and back to front, with f58v on the back page. Q14 is inserted immediately afterwards (but with the primary fold along the blue line). Q9 immediately follows (also with the primary fold different what we see now).
  • Q8 is reversed, leaving f66v on the back of the quire (next to f86v3)
  • The manuscript is bound with Q8 reversed
  • The chicken scratches are added
  • Q14 is removed (damaging the binding) and rebound with the other outside quires. Q9 is also rebound to be less “flappy”.
  • Quire numbers are added

    •  

Scenario #2

  • The manuscript is assembled. The two bifolios of Q8 are (relative to their current orientation) inside out and back to front, with f58v on the back page. Q14 is inserted immediately afterwards (but with the primary fold along the blue line). Q9 immediately follows (also with the primary fold different what we see now).
  • Q14 is removed and accidentally reinserted into the middle of Q8, placing f66v next to f86v3.
  • The manuscript is bound in this order
  • The chicken scratches are added
  • Q8 is reversed, leaving f66v on the back of the quire
  • Q14 is removed (damaging the binding) and rebound with the other outside quires. Q9 is also rebound to be less “flappy”.
  • Quire numbers are added

Personally, I’m rather more convinced by the first scenario (mainly because it seems a slightly simpler sequence) – but you may well have your own opinion. Still, at least it’s an issue that could be codicologically tested (by checking sewing stations, contact transfers etc). The secret history of chicken scratches! 🙂

Review of Brett King’s “The Radix”…

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I hate to admit it, but Brett King’s new book “The Radix” has very nearly pushed me over the edge as far as Voynich-themed novels go. OK, if you like your cipher mystery fiction spiced up with implausibly steel-chinned Secret Government Agency action heroes with PhD-level history credentials and who the US President just happens to owe a favour (basically Cotton Malone or Daniel Knox on overdrive), then maybe you’d like it. M-a-y-b-e. But if not, I strongly suspect you won’t, sorry.

It’s completely true that Dan Brown’s books leave me wanting to shoot the fumblingly-drawn main protagonists by the end of Chapter One, all the secondary characters by the end of Chapter Two, and the publisher by the end of Chapter Three (given that I see Dan as closer to Gavin Menzies than to Machiavelli, I’d rather cut his hands off than shoot him): and compared to that particular cultural nadir, I’m delighted to say that The Radix is at least reasonably well written. But all the same, I can’t think of a single book where I so badly wanted the bad guys – in this instance, Renaissance conspiracy fans, the evil Borgias’ evil descendants (did I mention they were evil?) – to kick John Brynstone (King’s hero)’s unbelievably buff butt down the road to Hell so very quickly (specifically, by page 17).

But then I thought, hold on a mo’… could it be that “The Radix” is actually some kind of postmodern-ish reversal-of-expectations gag – by which I mean, did King consciously make the protagonist so unlikeable, so implausible, and so unsexy because he wanted the bad guys to be, ummm, the good guys? Historically, it’s true that (for example) Lucrezia Borgia has been demonized for so long that even now it’s desperately hard for historians (even Sarah Bradford in her 2004 biography of Lucrezia, which I’m still halfway through) to untie every Borgia-damning knot that partisan writers have tied over the centuries: so could it be that King’s novel is merely Part I of some bizarre rehabilitatory Borgia anti-history?

Achhhhh… try as I might, I can’t really believe that King has a uber-revisionist angle in mind, given that his “Radix” is so close in spirit to a comic-book escapade (and not one of dear Alan Moore’s sardonic club-sandwich plots, with a beard-hair delight in each multi-layered bite) crossed with an airport novella, with John Brynstone so utterly 2d that his action sequences practically jerk from static box to static box. All of which makes it perfect for a Jason Statham vehicle for 2011, then? Alas, yes – which alone is probably a damn good reason why the film-of-the-book shouldn’t be made. Despite King’s agent’s best attempts, let’s all just hope divine justice prevails, shall we?

Though “The Radix” has doubtless been pitched at the cipher mystery beach brigade, my worthless personal opinion is that Cipher Mysteries readers looking for 2010 summer holiday fiction should instead plump for Enrique Joven’s completely antithetical “The Book of God and Physics: a Novel of the Voynich Mystery”, which manages to tell its own Voynich-themed story with nary a jutting jaw or a laws-of-physics-defying stunt. Of course, please feel free to read both and tell me if I’m just plain wrong – comment below, I don’t mind. 🙂

Voynich pub meet – Summer 2010…

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It’s coming up to that time of year when I invite UK Voynicheros [*] of all creeds (hoax, language, cipher, glossolalia, etc) to converge upon an historic London pub one Sunday afternoon for a not-at-all-formal chat about all things cipher-mystery-related over a couple of drinks, and perhaps to borrow or return some books from / to my own overstocked VMs / cipher library.

So, out goes the shout to (in no particular order) Philip Neal, Barbara Barrett, Marke Fincher, Tony Mann, Bunny, John Kozak, Peter Howard Mason, Keith Body, Gerry Kennedy, Jeff Haley, and indeed to anyone else who might like to come along – please email me to let me know what dates you prefer. Also, if you’re an overseas Voynichero who (it just so happens) plans to be in London around the end of August / early September 2010, email me your dates too and I’ll try to fit it around them.

As always, looking forward to it! 🙂

[*] Just so you know…

  • “Voynich researchers” – deluded souls whose methodological rigour is of little use against this cryptological Everest
  • “Voynichians” – people immersed in the VMs world for so long they probably have their own private pronunciation for EVA
  • “Voynicheros” – those who don’t take the Voynich quest hugely seriously, perhaps even preferring travelling to arriving. 🙂

Chaocipher updates…

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Like hourly buses on a wet winter morning, here’s a pair of Chaocipher pages that arrived at my stop one after the other, both discussing how to break John Byrne’s Exhibit 1, and both strongly recommended reading for those interested in the Chaocipher.

First to arrive was Carl Scheffler’s page on Exhibit 1 (but you might perhaps want to read his introductory page on the Chaocipher first, complete with nice coloured disk diagrams). By looking for long sequences of repeated symbols, he managed to reduce the staggeringly-large search space down to a mere ~457,000 permutations to check: in fact, he further managed to reduce the space to only 444 permutations, which would probably be achievable even without the aid of computers. Furthermore, once he had discovered the initial ring state, Carl went on to reverse engineer the keyphrase used to set the disks up (‘THINKTHINK’, with the sequence of letters applied to the disks with the pattern LLRLLRLRRLR). He has a further page planned on Exhibit 4 – I’ll let you know when he posts this.

Subsequently, Moshe Rubin’s near-definitive update on Exhibit 1 turned up. As usual, Moshe’s 12-page PDF manages to answer more or less every question you find yourself asking along the way (though admittedly he doesn’t yet know to whom Byrne’s enciphered “CORDIALTHANKSTOLO” was referring). From this, you can also see that Byrne used ‘Q’ and ‘W’ for ‘,’ and ‘.’ (plus ‘Z’ for ‘end-of-line’), hence the plaintext begins “ALLGOODQQUICKBROWNFOXESJUMPOVERLAZYDOGTOSAVETHEIRPARTYW“.

Incidentally, though the idea of encoding punctuation as rarely-used letters is a well-known cipher trick, I find the historical question of when this mechanism was first used particularly intriguing. This is because I’ve long wondered whether the “am” letterpair frequently found at Voynich line-ends might also encipher a rare letter (such as ‘X’). True, there are some Milanese ciphers with letters for scribal abbreviations and contractions (the 1450 cipher for Tristano Sforza enciphers ‘-9’, while the 1455 cipher for Ludovico Petronio Senen has a cipher for ‘subscriptio’), but these seem to belong to a quite different family. I can’t see this in Kahn or al-Qalqashandi, so… what was the earliest cipher to replace punctuation with rarely used letters?