Hoaxed history stuff…

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OK, this isn’t strictly a cipher mystery story: but it does play to a lot of the things I think we all love (or perhaps, wearing our historian hats, love to loathe). Courtesy of Paul Morrow at the Pilipino Express, here’s the story of Jose Marco, con man of the century – a man who singlehandedly faked more or less all the interesting parts of the history of the Philippines, including “Datu Kalantiaw, the [utterly fake] first Filipino lawmaker”. This involved his creating five large manuscripts in 1914 totalling over 800 pages (all of ridiculously poor quality), plus many other wobbly fake documents. This seems to confirm the old saw that conmen don’t need to be clever, as long as they’re fractionally cleverer than their victims. 🙂

Oh, and if that doesn’t float your boat, the same writer has a nice 4-part series (in one handy PDF file) from 2009 on what he calls Da Bathala Code. This relates the story of how a (genuinely old) Filipino script called baybayin was hijacked in 1937 by a sculptor named Guillermo Tolentino, who layered all kinds of spurious pictographic interpretations on the baybayin letter shapes, to produce a fake visual etymology for the language. Tolentino in turn was building on similar nonsense put forward 50 years earlier by one Pedro Alexandro Molo Agustin Paterno y de Vera Ignacio, who had claimed that the language was (somehow) derived from Tagalog.

So… ancient scripts, fake etymology, fake (nationalist) histories, fake documents. Enjoy! 🙂

Chinese Voynich theories…

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Following a trail of breadcrumbs from my recent post on Johann Adam Schall von Bell, I’m returning to the issue of whether the VMs could ever have had a Far Eastern origin. To recap, Jacques Guy originally proposed Chinese as a kind of linguistic fou-merde joke on the Voynich research community, only to be unhappily surprised when people started taking it seriously enough to dig up evidence why he might actually have been right. Guy’s “Chinese theory” was, then, somewhat like the Rosicrucian manifestos, in that it was a ludibrium that somehow managed to survive and thrive quite independently of its creator.

Of course, every class of Voynich theory has its naysayers (who normally outnumber the proposer[s] by some 1000:1). In this instance, such people typically point to three major areas of difficulty that any particular Chinese theory would have to overcome – cultural mismatch, codicological mismatch and linguistic mismatch.

Cultural mismatch is the easiest one of the three: where are the Chinese faces, Chinese motifs, Chinese artefacts, Chinese sequences, etc? Search as hard as you like, but you’ll probably (despite what some novelists like to pretend) only find signs of late medieval European culture in there – baths, castles (yes, with swallowtail merlons), European herbals, heads in the roots, cryptoheraldry (eagle, lion, etc)… essentially the same set of cultural conceits that you can see in real Quattrocento herbals and related manuscripts (oh, and in the so-called “alchemical herbals”, which are neither alchemical nor herbal, strictly speaking). I’m also somewhat culturally suspicious about the apparent 30 x 12 = 360-degree division in the zodiac section, because Chinese astronomy before Johann Adam Schall von Bell had long been based on a 365.25 day astronomical year (no matter how awkward this made the maths).

Codicological mismatch is also fairly easy to spot: why would a mysterious Chinese herbal have marginalia and quire numbers written in various 15th century hands? If you are arguing that the VMs is a genuine Far Eastern linguistic artefact (i.e. that it is not openly deceptive), then you’d need to have a particularly strong narrative argument if you are going to try to date its return to Europe much after 1500 (or even 1450). The vellum also seems to have a physically European origin, so this too needs to be taken account of. Furthermore, Voynichese’s general ductus seems to fall within the range of late medieval European styles (it was written by someone fairly adept with a quill rather than with a brush), so the most likely point of codicological departure here would always be that the VMs was written by a European rather than by a Chinese person.

Linguistic mismatch is perhaps both the hardest to spot as well as the hardest to deal with. The core of the Chinese theory was based on Jacques Guy’s amused observation that the frequent “CVCV…” patterns found in Voynichese (such as “otolal“, etc) might be not so much a highly-structured consonant-vowel linguistic artefact as a tonal transcription artefact. That is, that Voynichese is ‘simply’ a structured tonal rendition of an exotic language such as Mandarin Chinese etc, and that perhaps a lot of the letter-following structures we observe are caused by limitations of the way that tones happen to work in that language. OK… but given that the very first tonal rendition of Chinese was apparently attempted by Matteo Ricci in 1583-1588 (the point where the whole idea of a tonal transcription seems to have first appeared), this would seem to point to quite a strong earliest dating for the VMs of (say) 1590 or so, unless you’re going to rewrite a fair bit of the history books etc in your quest to tell your narrative.

Now, you really don’t have to have as big a Renaissance brain as Anthony Grafton’s to be able to notice the contradiction here: which is that for a Chinese theory to overcome the codicological mismatch it seems to require a pre-1500 dating, while for it to overcome the linguistic mismatch it seems to require a post-1590 dating, while simultaneously overcoming the quite separate (and quite large) cultural mismatch issues. The easy answer, of course, is simply to ignore any such problems and just get on with telling your story: it’s far harder to tackle the underlying mismatches and see where they take you.

Incidentally, there’s a little-known interview with Guy Mazars and Christophe Wiart in Actualites en Phytotherapie to be found here (in French) where they propose that many of the Voynich Manuscript’s mysterious plants may in fact be East Asian plants (for example, that f6v depicts Ricinus communis) or Indian plants (they think that many of the plants shown are types of Asteraceae, with f27r representing Centella Asiatica). But you’d have to point out that there are also many, many, many plants in the VMs that are unlikely to match anything these (very learned) experts on Indian and East Asian plants have ever seen. Make of all this what you will (as per normal).

Cipher Mysteries – 100,000 visit milestone!

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The Cipher Mysteries stats to date: 568 posts – 16 static pages – 100,155 visits – roughly 190,000 page loads – 1775 comments – 115 subscribers. Thank you all very much for your continued interest, support, comments (both appreciative and snarky), tweets, and off-line posts and notes (always interesting). Just so you know, most referrals continue to come from Google with only one Slashdot-style traffic superspike (2nd-3rd December 2009, 5000 visits in one day), while the Akismet anti-spam plugin has caught 16,151 spam messages with only 9 false positives (mainly comments from hotmail.com).

It’s also nice to see more cipher mystery bloggers popping up: a big tip of the hat to Elmar Vogt, Elias Schwerdtfeger, Julian Bunn, Diane O’Donovan, Rich SantaColoma, Moshe Rubin, etc (in no particular order). Good luck to all of them (blogging is surprisingly hard work).

As for Cipher Mysteries itself, there’s plenty I’d like to fix: the front page needs a makeover to make it more useful for first-time visitors; the web hosting performance has slowly worsened (but moving such a large database to a new host is proving time-consuming and difficult); and I have a slow-burn plan to get the visit count to 1,000,000 and beyond. But I’m busier than ever in my real-world work, so all in good time, eh?

I have several weeks’ worth of draft posts to finish, and am still working away on an entirely new historical cipher mystery that I suspect will ultimately be more surprising and revealing than the Voynich Manuscript: but I’ll leave that as a ncie surprise for another day. Thanks you all again! 🙂

“Weird or What?” Voynich segment…

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“Weird or What?”‘s Desperate Housewives Cocaine Mummies episode came and went in its own breathless, deathless way, a strangely mismatched mixture of gravelly voiceover (exuding Danikenesque enthusiasm) and static talking heads (with more than a frisson of frozen-in-the-headlights). Purely for review purposes, I grabbed my copy from a terrrrribly slow torrent (the 13-minute Voynich segment started at 19:45), but frankly you might want to conserve your bandwidth for something slightly more edifying (was it really waiting 20+ hours for it to arrive? I suspect not).

The main subject of the show’s producers’ interest turned out to be, ummm, Gordon Rugg. Ably assisted by “three world-class calligraphers”, Rugg proceeded to demonstrate the fullest, absurdest consequence of his ideas: that, just as he predicted, three people with carefully constructed tables and grilles could indeed have simulated something resembling Voynichese at reasonable speed… some 150 years after it was in fact written. As a piece of conceptual proto-computer science, his work remains admirable: but as a piece of history (or indeed common sense), it was nothing less than a load of nonsense. His continued insistence on defiantly proving the possibility of something which manifestly did not happen is arguably even less use than straight ‘if-Hitler-hadn’t-been-born’ counterfactuality (and that’s saying something).

At the risk of sounding like the Daily Mail, ‘when oh when’ is someone of substance going to pull the rug from under Rugg? As a career programmer myself, I would be utterly unsurprised if computer science rides to our rescue further down the line: but given that Voynich studies are nothing short of drowning in a perpetually high tide of possibilistic nonsense, Rugg’s contribution has arguably hindered discourse far more than it has helped it. As I pointed out at the time, the fact that his account didn’t square with the palaeography and the codicology right from the start was a Really Bad Sign. And now that it doesn’t square with the radiocarbon dating either, perhaps the best you can say is that it is at least consistently inconsistent. Oh well…

Really, I was far more interested to find out from “Weird or What?” that the design of contemporary running shoes may well cause more shock to the human body (by encouraging people to run with heel-strikes) than less. But as for the Voynich Manuscript? Didn’t learn a thing, sorry. 🙁

Voynich f116v “nichil” update…

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Here’s the latest on the Savoy palaeography post from a couple of days back: firstly, I donned my image analysis hat and went hunting for any sign of the missing “l”-loop. Enhancing f116v right to the edge, you can certainly just about make out a loop above the “t” of “michiton” (highlighted below), which would be consistent with the prediction that this word was originally “nichil”:-

michiton-nichil-v2

Of course, I’d be the first to admit that what’s being enhanced here is probably not ink but rather a faint depression in the vellum, which may or may not be connected with the word. Hence, given that this is right at (or possibly beyond) the limit of what we can see in the Beinecke’s scans, it’s important not to get too excited – the right thing to do would be to wait until we can get a different kind of close-up scan of these details, so we can make proper concrete progress.

But in the continued absence of useful data that would settle this kind of question definitively (when will the Beinecke’s Kevin Repp respond to my requests?), here’s the wrong thing, i.e. yet more probabilistic speculation based on uncertain codicological evidence. 🙂

If this is “nichil” (or indeed “michi“), I think we can tentatively infer quite a lot. For a start, it would imply that this line of the text is

  • probably written in Latin, specifically in what is known as “Ecclesiastical Latin”;
  • probably after 1400 (which is roughly when Leonardo Bruni started advocating the use of “michi” and “nichil“);
  • probably in Northern Italy or Southern France (which is where Bruni’s ideas spread the strongest); and
  • probably in either an ecclesiastical or proto-humanist context (the two groups most influenced by Bruni).

Yet I would say that the handwriting seems less an Italian hand than a Southern French hand: and to back this up, I’ve been going through handwritten documents from 1350-1500 in the Archives Départementales de la Côte d’Or, in particular the “Recherches des feux des bailliages” (which I presume come from a hearth-counting tax assessment programme of the time). The records for Auxois contain documents from 1376-78, 1397, 1413, 1460, 1461, 1470 etc, so provides quite a nice vertical palaeographic slice of the archives:-

Auxois 1376-78: fol.2 – “Ce sont les noms et surnoms…“

1376-cote_dor_detail

Voynich researchers should immediately feel very much at home here: there’s the Gothic-y angular “l”, the “y”-like “p” (though closed rather than open), and “premiere” on the bottom line is even written with a generously overlooped “p” (as per the VMs’ Q1 quire number).

Auxois 1397: fol.221

1397-cote_dor_detail

Curiously, the 1397 record doesn’t seem to be as good a match to the VMs’ marginalia as the 1376-78 record…

Auxois 1413: fol.2

1413-cote_dor_detail

…while the 1413 hand is I’d say an even worse match (and don’t even ask about the 1460 hand, that’s worse still).

So, the best matches to the handwriting in the VMs’ marginalia would seem to be from Savoy circa 1340-1380 (the previous post showed “nichil” written in a 1345 Savoy hand). Now, this kind of evidence isn’t quite enough to date the VMs on its own: but if we link it with the radiocarbon dating and unusual quire numbering, we might perhaps tentatively infer overall that circa 1425, this line of the marginalia was added (probably in Savoy) by an old monk (or possibly a humanist) who was probably from Savoy. All of which may not sound like much, but it might well yield a genuinely concrete step in the right general direction, let’s hope.

I’d be interested to find out what Voynich palaeographers make of this (*cough* Barbara): and if it is basically right, then perhaps Voynich researchers might now do well to start (1) finding archives containing Savoy letters and documents written circa 1400-1430, and (2) book resources on Savoy social networks circa 1400-1450. Who knows, perhaps we will find a letter by an old Savoyard monk or humanist with surprisingly similar handwriting, who knows? 🙂

Voynich segment on “Weird or What?” tonight…

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According to Stephen Christomalis (who actually features in it), US-based Voynich Manuscript devotees could consider tuning in to the Discovery Channel tonight (5th May 2010 8pm and 11pm) to see the VMs segment on “Weird or What?”,  a show which features a smorgasbord of semi-Forteana and rhetorical historical questions, though sadly sans William Shatner (for now):-

Were Ancient Pharaohs Cocaine party animals? Can sea lions sense disaster? A mysterious coded book that has never been cracked. A Mexican tribe who can run hundreds of miles per day – and no one knows how they do it!

So… that would be “(1) no, (2) no, (3) hello, (4) amphetamine quesadillas?” respectively, then. 🙂 However, I wouldn’t worry too much if you miss this “Cocaine Mummies” episode: for one, it’ll be repeated at 2pm on May 16th 2010 – and for two, Googling for it points you to a whole bunch of torrent trackers, so presumably it’ll be fairly easy for non-Americans to catch a glance.

I think that this will probably provide sufficient proof that the VMs has indeed become one of the lowest-hanging fruits on the historical mystery tree: I’ll just be interested to see what the VMs looks like from the programme’s researchers’ point of view. Will they regurgitate a slab of blandly unhelpful Wikipedia nonsense? Will they hype the VMs up into a Terence McKenna hoax conspiracy? Or will they spin their account towards Kennedy & Churchill’s glossolaliac madness? It doesn’t really matter, but it’s always fun to have a bit of a sweepstake going, don’t you think? 🙂

Savoy palaeography: was michiton originally nichil?

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Because of the lack of satisfactory evidence to work with, there are two basic Voynich research methodologies:

  1. concrete (which focus on those miserably few things we know about the VMs); and
  2. speculative (which try to determine which of the quadrillion possible explanations for the VMs are most inherently plausible).

In line with the first of the two, I’ve spent a long time hacking away at the VMs’ marginalia in a concrete attempt to work out from whence they came, so as to make the provenance leap a century or more backwards from 1600 to some point closer to the Voynich Manuscript’s actual origin. It’s been a hard slog, but I think I’ve now landed on the right doorstep: Savoy (specifically the post-1416 Duchy of Savoy).

When I saw this page (from Archives Départementales de la Côte-d’Or, B 6768, dated 1345), there’s just something about the handwriting that rings a bell for me. OK, it’s not by the same person (in fact, they’re probably close to a century apart) but look at its “nichil” with f116v’s “michiton”:-

nichil-michiton

Is this just some palaeographic coincidence? I really think not: in fact, I predict that if a multispectral infrared scan of f116v was carried out, you’d see (at just the right wavelength) the top part of the  “t” of “michiton” mysteriously morph into a looped “l”, as per the 1345 document. Basically, I’m pretty sure that “+ michiton” originally read “+ nichil” (or possibly “+ nichilum“), as the Ecclesiastical Latin “nichil” seems to pop up mainly in the context of late medieval French Latin texts, by monks allegedly influenced by the Florentine humanist Leonardo Bruni’s (1369-1444) practice of using “ch” for “h”. Perhaps an experienced Savoy palaeographer would be the right person to ask about this? I suspect that there’s much more we could tell…

Interestingly, here’s a map of Savoy in the 15th century: hmmm, not far from Milan at all. So, is that some kind of coincidence as well? 🙂

P.S.: I should add that it could indeed just as well be “michi” written in basically the same hand, except that I suspect that the “o” and the initial “m” of “michiton” were both emended by a later owner, and that this doesn’t help explain what is going on with the whole word.

“Actually, I’m writing a book on machines”…

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Somewhere during the last decade, historians picked up got the idea that history book publishers wanted to be pitched ‘vertical’ books about individual microsubjects, books that somehow try to recapitulate the last N-thousand years of human history as viewed through the narrow prism of, say, salt or swearing or codpieces. All of which somehow reminds me of the joke about the gynaecologist who preferred to decorate the hall through the letterbox, I’m not quite sure why…

Anyway, I’ve been working my way through Pamela O. Long’s epic (2004) book “Openness, Secrecy, Authority”, which is basically ‘the (vertical) history of secrecy pre-Enlightenment’. It covers pretty much all of the historical things I think every Voynich researcher ought to be acutely aware of – books of secrets, alchemy, patents, recipes, Hermeticism, Theophilus, Poimander, Pythagoras, Plotinus, Vitruvius, Hero of Alexandria, Philo, Guido da Vigevano, Fontana, Brunelleschi, Taccola, Kyeser,Valturio, Ghiberti, Filarete, Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Alberti, Ficino, Agrippa, Paracelsus, etc. However, it’s proving to be a haltingly slow process, because every chapter or so I feel compelled to go away and check out what she’s saying to see if I believe her or not. Even though 50% of the time I actually disagree with her conclusions and interpretations, this is almost certainly because she has attempted to cover an extraordinary breadth of subject-matter within a single volume, as well as to give some kind of a socio-theoretic chapter-ending spin on the extraordinarily heterogenous set of things that fall within range of her chosen subject thread, both things that tend to work out badly for authors. 🙂

A full review will follow (because I haven’t yet finished it), but I thought I’d briefly mention it because it inspired the following brief note on books on machines of war. As I mentioned yesterday, Johann Adam Schall von Bell wrote one for the Ming Emperor; Roberto Valturio’s “De Re Militari” caused a stir when Sigismondo Malatesta tried to send a copy to Istanbul with his favourite court painter Matteo de’ Pasti; gay vegetarian pacifist Leonardo da Vinci famously tried to ingratiate himself with the Sforza Duke of Milan with his 1482 war machine sketches; Guido da Vigevano wrote one; Giovanni Fontana wrote one; Antonio Averlino sort-of-claimed to have written one (on engines); and so on.

What I learnt from Pamela O. Long’s books was also that Cornelius Agrippa “attempted to obtain patronage… by making reference to a treatise he planned to write on a engines of war” (p.162), while Alberti promised (in his De re aedificatoria, p.135 of the 1988 Rykwert edition) to “deal with war machines at greater length elsewhere, perhaps implying that he was planning to write a treatise on the subject” (p.125).

But… hold on a minute?! Even though the conventional starting point for this whole subject is one of archival rarity (i.e. that manuscript books of secrets are the exception rather than the rule), it seems that if you mine the subject matter enough you find that people back then didn’t qualify as a free-agent master architect / engineer looking for courtly patronage unless they could point to their own secret book of extraordinary machines to back up their claims. I suppose this is broadly the Quattrocento equivalent of the modern Cult Of The Business Plan, where startup founders could only get audiences with those 1990s princes (yes, Venture Capitalists) if they had a suitably weighty document & spreadsheet to back up their outrageously nonsensical business bet (i.e. a virally-marketed scalable global pet massage franchising scheme etc).

Historians often point to the Quattrocento as being the effective birth of intellectual property (yes, I know Venice issued various earlier patent-like documents, but it’s arguable whether these count): drawing a broad modern parallel, the notion of intellectual capital was sometimes caricatured in the late 1990s as being a way of making a bunch of PhDs losing money look like a good investment. In case you think I’m stretching language too far here, the Quattrocento has two constrasting examplars for these trends: Brunelleschi and Leonardo da Vinci. Brunelleschi started off (it’s highly likely) as a goldsmith with a close interest in clockmaking, and used his own personal practice to develop complex machine ideas – he was empirical/experiential/adaptive, preferring not to transfer his physical constructions onto paper because people would then copy them ad infinitum. Leonardo, by contrast, was constructing theoretical and speculative models for designs without significant regard to their practicalities: I would argue that he could only construct his designs on paper as that was where they belonged – he was theoretical/abstract/creative. In short, Brunelleschi is all about intellectual property while Leonardo is all about intellectual capital, and never the twain shall meet: perhaps his innate practicality is why Brunelleschi is held in higher esteem than Leonardo in Italy.

I think that even though intellectual capital (a demonstrable capacity for having bright ideas, usually theoretical) has a quite different rationale to intellectual property (a set of bright ideas someone believed they owned, usually pragmatic), both types of Quattrocento books of machines performed roughly the same kind of function even though the ideas in them were hardly ever used. Viewed from this angle, they are no more than “alchemical herbal”-style McGuffins that people constructed to try to gain credibility and/or patronage, by becoming an auctor/authority – AKA hire me “because I’m worth it”. Ultimately, I suspect that hyping up your secret book on machines was simply the early modern equivalent of the entrepreneural elevator pitch. 🙂

But now I’m mixing business school models with historical models, while straying dangerously close to the kind of theoretical stuff I was happy to lambast a mere six paragraphs back: probably a sign I ought to call a halt for the day. Make of it all what you will! 🙂

Thoughts on Johann Adam Schall von Bell…

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Fifteen hours in the air coming back from Taiwan (even if it was ultimately to the wrong airport) does lead you to click through all (and I really do mean all) the listings on China Airlines’ seatback audio/video on demand gizmo. And so it was that I listened to Eminem’s 2009 album Relapse (Bagpipes in Baghdad, etc), and watched not only Avatar (hi-tech pants, but all the better for not being in 3d), Shakespeare in Love (Gwyneth Paltrow gains a moustache, Shakespeare loses a muse, the end)… but also a rather splendid documentary on Jesuit missionary Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1591-1666).

[No, he didn’t write the VMs (nor the Rohonc Codex): but he was in Rome between 1611 and 1618, so there is an outside chance that he met Georg Baresch, who started at La Sapienza in 1605, Voynich trivia fans.]

It was the Jesuit mathematician and cartographer Matteo Ricci (1552-1610, so note that 11th May 2010 will mark the 400th anniversary of his death) who made the first real breakthrough into mainland China: as a result of his long-term efforts in understanding Chinese language, writing and culture, he became the first Westerner allowed into the Forbidden City (though he never actually met the Emperor). He co-compiled the first Westernized Chinese dictionary (around 1583-1588, though it got lost in the Jesuit archives until 1934) as well as the second one (1598, this time round with diacritical marks, but this one has yet to surface), and the first European-style map of the world in Chinese (in 1584, but only six copies of the 1602 printing survive). A pretty impressive set of cultural landmarks.

According to this interesting paper by Zhang Baichun:

“Ricci was the first to introduce European astronomical instruments to the Chinese. He made a copper celestial globe in Zhaoqing 肇 慶 (Guangdong) and explained astronomy to visitors in the 1580s. He also taught students in Shaozhou 韶 州 (Guangdong), Nanking, and Peking how to make a celestial globe, an astrolabe, a quadrant, and a sundial. In 1605, Ricci and Li Zhizao 李 之 藻 (1565-1630) wrote the Qiankun tiyi 乾 坤 體 義 (Cosmological epitome), describing the use of a copper armillary sphere to demonstrate the relation between the heavens and earth and to help calculate the coordinates of the celestial bodies (fig. 1). Two years later, Ricci and Li explained the astrolabe and its method of coordinate projection in another work, the Hungai tongxian tushuo 渾 蓋 通 憲 圖 說 (Explanation of the coordinates of the celestial sphere and vault). Prior to this, the demonstrational armillary sphere, the quadrant, and the astrolabe were unknown in China.”

Matteo Ricci tried to determine eclipses, but this was the limit of his abilities: and so noted that a future Jesuit approach to China should include missionaries who were able to construct accurate planetary calendars.

In many ways, calendar-making was a huge political problem in China: the practice had long been for a calendar to be set up at the start of a new dynasty, but this had the downside that over time its usefulness would slip and slide, causing faith in the Emperor (and indeed in the whole ruling class) to recede. For if the Emperor could not predict eclipses, what kind of control did he have over the universe? In fact, you could argue that this specifically Chinese calendrical drift was one of the key factors that helped drive the (vaguely Spengleresque) changes in dynasty.

This was essentially why Johann Terrenz Schreck (did he have a son called Shreck Two?), Giacomo Rho and Johann Adam Schall arrived in Macau in 1619. They came in ships laden with 7000 volumes containing a vast amount of up-to-the-minute Western scientific knowledge, plus numerous trendy and useful technical instruments (such as telescopes): yet the journey aboard their year-long, ummm, slow boat to China had been harrowing, and only six of the crew made it all the way.

The immediate problem they faced was that, after Matteo Ricci’s death in 1610, the Jesuits in Macau weren’t actually welcome on the mainland. However, after a few years this situation was (somewhat curiously) turned around by a war breaking out: Adam Schall compiled a book in Chinese on the latest European war machines (such as cannons) to advise the ruling Ming dynasty, and all of a sudden doors opened to the Jesuits once more.

Later (between 1631 and 1635), Adam Schall helped compile the 137-chapter “Chongzhen Calendar”, which applied the European learning the missionaries had brought with them to the problem of constructing a truly Chinese calendar. However, Emperor Chongzhen decided not to use it: the Ming Dynasty was in huge difficulties, and he judged that introducing it would have added more difficulties to the (already long) list. When the dynasty finally fell and the new Qing Dynasty began, Adam Schall bravely decided to stay on in Beijing – and (after some hair-raising troubles) became a close confidant of the newly installed Shunzhi Emperor. The calendar he had helped construct for the Ming Dynasty was finally introduced by the Qing Dynasty, and remained in use for hundreds of years afterwards.

[Of course, Adam Schall died fairly unhappy because he had failed to convert many people to Christianity, which ultimately had been the whole point of the expensive exercise. But let’s not dwell on that.]

* * * * * *

As far as assessing VMs “Chinese” theories goes, I learnt a great deal from all this. For one, Chinese astronomy of the day had long been based around dividing the equatorial sky in 365 and 1/4 divisions, and the Jesuits had difficulty transitioning over the instruments that were being made to use a somewhat less laborious 360 degree division: so I’m somewhat skeptical that the 30 x 12 = 360 nymphs/stars/labels of the VMs’ zodiac pages can have anything at all to do with Chinese astronomy pre-1640 or so.

I’m also now extremely skeptical about any Voynich Chinese language theory (and, yes, I was already pretty skeptical beforehand – after all, Jacques Guy had originally proposed the notion as a froggily linguistic canard). Socially and culturally, creating any kind of multi-letter Romanized transcription of Chinese or other similarly languages would be a major undertaking that would have attracted great attention. The idea that this could have been done on the quiet (and solely for the VMs) just seems flat-out wrong, particularly if you date the VMs to well before Matteo Ricci’s 1583-1588 first dictionary.

Furthermore, it was fascinating to read in Zhang Baichun’s article that even though (back in Europe) Johann Hevelius had telescopes, he used other equipment and naked-eye obervations in preference to them: citing Hepsold (1908), he notes that “In 1679, Hevelius and Halley had made comparative observations in Danzig. The results showed that the data obtained by Halley with the telescope were not more precise than those obtained by Hevelius with his own sights.” Telescopes, even by the mid 17th century, were still generally very poor quality.

Of course, you’re entirely free to make up your own mind on the origins of the VMs – but personally, I simply don’t see anything Chinese there whatsoever.

Review of “Cracking Codes & Cryptograms for Dummies”…

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With my book publisher hat on, I’d guess that the pitch for this book probably said: “Codes! Ciphers! Cryptograms! Masonic stuff! For Dummies!” And yes, the authors (Denise Sutherland and Mark E. Koltko-Rivera) pretty much seem to have delivered on that basic promise. But… is it any good?

Bear with me while I sketch out a triangle in idea-space. On the first vertex, I’ll put recreational code-breakers – the Sunday supplement sudoku crowd. On the second vertex, hardcore cipher history buffs – David Kahn groupies. On the last vertex, historical mystery / conspiracy fans – Templars, Masons, Turin Shroud, HBHG, Voynich Manuscript etc.

“Cracking Codes & Cryptograms for Dummies” sits firmly on the triangle’s first vertex, but I have to reaches out only fairly lamely (I think) to the other two vertices. Structurally, its innovation is to tell three stories where you need to solve a long sequence (100, 80, and 55 respectively) of individual cryptograms to find out what happened. Quite a few of the ciphers use well-known cipher alphabets, such as Malachim, Enochian, and various Masonic pigpens: there are also a few trendy puzzle ciphers (such as predictive texting ciphers formed just of numbers).

Compare this to its big competitor (Elonka Dunin’s “Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms”) which sits on the same first vertex. Elonka’s book has quite a few more puzzles, is structured both thematically and by ascending difficulty, and sticks to plaintext: it also has a 40-page section on unsolved ciphers (the VMs, the Dorabella Cipher, Phaistos Disk, etc), but with no real pretense at trying to precis Kahn’s “The Codebreakers”.

For me, Cipher Mysteries sits on the opposite edge of the triangle (i.e. between hardcore cipher history and, errm, softcore cipher mysteries) to both of these, so I’m probably not the right person to judge which of the two puzzle books is better. Elonka’s book is easy to work your way through (but feels a bit more old-fashioned): while Sutherland & Koltko-Rivera’s book is lithe and up-to-the-minute (but feels less substantial, in almost every sense). OK, the first is more cryptologic, the second more puzzle-y: but ultimately they’re doing the same thing and talking to the same basic audience.

Really, I guess puzzle book buyers would do well to buy both and make up their own mind which of the two they prefer: but sadly I have to say that most Cipher Mysteries readers might prefer to buy neither. But you never know!