Upcoming cipher talk in Jersey…

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Just a quick heads-up (thanks to Paul F!) to any Cipher Mysteries readers planning to be in Jersey in May 2010, because there’s a cipher talk planned for then which you might well rather enjoy:-

Dr Mark Baldwin has made a detailed study of the Enigma machine, the code-breaking work at Bletchley Park, and U-boats and has built up a unique collection of slides which illustrate the main features of those important facts of the Second World War. The show is divided into two parts. It is followed by an opportunity for questions, then a hands-on demonstration of one of the very few surviving Enigma machines.

Spin those rubber wheels! 🙂

Voynichese ololol (lol!)

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Don’t worry, this will be the last Voynichese trivia post for a good few days (I’ve had enough myself). 🙂

If you remove all the spaces (both genuine-looking ones and space-insertion-cipher-like ones) in Voynichese, a slightly different set of patterns emerge (this is one of Marke Fincher’s favourite tricks). I thought I’d have another quick look at multiple repetitions of various verbose pairs in this space-less transcription…

Here are the raw instance counts, and their relative percentages of the unrepeated instance counts:-

  • qo = 5168, qoqo = 9 [0.17%], qoqoqo = 0 [0%]
  • ot = 2679, otot = 3 [0.11%], ototot = 0 [0%]
  • ok = 2961, okok = 7 [0.24%], okokok = 0 [0%]
  • op = 407, opop = 0[0%], opopop = 0 [0%]
  • of = 122, ofof = 0 [0%], ofofof = 0 [0%]
  • ol = 5238, olol = 186 [3.55%], ololol = 13 [0.25%]
  • al = 2885, alal = 60 [2.08%], alalal = 1 [0.035%]
  • or = 2619, oror = 87 [3.32%], ororor = 1 [0.038%]
  • ar = 2815, arar = 161 [5.72%], ararar = 7 [0.25%]

Yes, it’s a load of dull statistics to make your brain ache. But what jumps out at my eyes from this is that the ol/al/or/ar verbose pairs appear repeated many times more than the other high-frequency pairs (such as ot and ok: note these counts are with all the qo pairs removed first). From this, I conclude that qo/ot/ok/op/of all have one kind of statistical behaviour, while ol/al/or/ar have another statistical behaviour entirely.

Specifically, my guess is that the pairs in the first set appear in doubles roughly once every 500 instances (and never three times in a row) simply as a result of scribal copying errors, and that this gives us a rough idea of how frequent copying mistakes probably are in the VMs. My other guess is that ol/al/or/ar are genuinely meant to be in the ciphertext both twice and three times in a row (I somehow doubt the scribe could miscopy a pair three times in a row), and that these are quite probably Roman numerals in the plaintext.

Discuss!

The evolution of Voynichese…?

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Even though René Z likes to tut-tut Voynich speculation (and usually with good reason, it has to be said), there’s something about the maturity and cohesion of Voynichese as a system that makes me quite sure that, unlike Athena, it did not suddenly spring forth fully-grown (and, indeed, fully-armed) from its parent’s forehead. I further infer that the author probably made a major personal investment in the Voynichese system over a long period of time – and given that it has held its secrets safe for over half a millennium, perhaps the author’s likely pride in his/her accomplishment was reasonably justified. That is, perhaps just as with Trithemius’ cryptography mere decades later, the system itself was no less a secret than its contents. 😉

Moreover, the notion that the system was accreted over time might well explain much of the fluency of the script design and the assurance of the document execution (though this much has been noted many times before). In “The Curse of the Voynich“, I made various attempts to turn the clock back to the pre-history of Voynichese, i.e. to use the letter-shapes themselves as a basis for speculating how they evolved and ended up in their final form. Of course, without Marty McFly’s Delorean (or Tom Riddle’s diary, for that matter), tempus will always fugit leaving historians clutching at long-blown-away straws: but perhaps there are some clues here that can help us peer through the fog of time…

My starting point here is that I believe the conceptual roots of the Voynichese cipher system lie not in tricksy Renaissance stateful ciphers, but in far simpler stateless ciphers and steganography, all of which were standard fare for the Quattrocento. Hence, I predict that the “ar” / “al” / “or” / “ol” 2×2 grid of verbose pairs (which I discussed in yesterday’s post) was part of an earlier (much simpler) verbose cipher that was designed to disguise the kind of repeated letters found in Roman numerals (i.e. III / XXX / CCC / MMM): and that what we see now evolved out of that earlier stateless system. It is certainly possible that the looped “l” character was originally designed to steganographically hide an “x”:-

VoynichRomanNumerals

However, this wouldn’t be much of an improvement, so you’d then need to add in hacks such as space insertion ciphers to disguise the verbose patterns: and you’d perhaps then need to add yet another system to handle small numbers (such as the a[i][i][i]r system shown above). And then you’d perhaps need to add in a second (Arabic number, aiiiv?) system… but that’s another story. All in all, this is the kind of cipher evolution I’m talking about: and what makes it speculative is that we only have the end-result of the evolution.

Now… what I’m actually wondering about at the moment is whether anyone has looked through examples of 15th century ciphertexts and cipher ledgers to see if there are any examples of people constructing verbose-pair cipherbets specifically to allow themselves to hide Roman numerals in enciphered texts. While the precise details of the execution may well be quite different, it could be that if we can find examples of the idea in action, we might be able to start tracing some kind of additional behind-the-scenes intellectual history vector for it – where it came from, what kind of person used it, who those people were connected to, etc. I have a few ideas for how to do this, which I’ll (hopefully) try out soon, see if they lead anywhere…

Is Voynichese stateless or stateful?

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If you combine the thoughts I posted yesterday (suggesting that the “o[r]aiiv” word in the top line of f67r1 might encipher “luna”) with the “or oro ror” sequence on line #2 of f15v (which would appear to be a verbosely enciphered Roman numeral, probably “CCCC”), the two would superficially seem to be incompatible. How can the Voynichese “or“-pair encipher both “L” and “C” simultaneously?

Discarding wilfully ambiguous cipher systems (such as Brumbaugh’s “convert everything to a digit and then back to a letter), the answer would be a stateful cipher system, by which I mean a cipher system which reuses the same output letters according to which one of a set of internal states it occupies. Voynich theorists typically predict that the gallows would be the main state-switching mechanism (though Steve Ekwall also asserts that “c” / “cc” / “ch” change the internal state as well – this is what all his “folding and flipping” claims specifically relate to).

Arguably the first known stateful cipher was proposed in Alberti’s De Cifris in 1467: this was a cipher disk pair where the rotor disk rotated relative to the stator disk according to an arrangement between encipherer and decipherer (typically every few words).

Now, to modern cryptographic eyes, the whole point of per-character stateful ciphers (such as Vigenère etc) is to destroy both the numerical statistics as well as the linguistic structure of the ciphertext, as they provide two layers of information that can be used to help break that text. However, this does not seem to have been the case with Alberti’s cipher, while it certainly does not seem to be the case with Voynichese, where there is apparently both visual and statistical evidence of word structure.

Yet Voynichese uses only an alphabet-sized set of characters in its cipherbet, so does not seem to be relying on a secondary codebook at all (even Alberti’s cipher disk used a secondary codebook), so one of the few ways in which it can obfuscate its output over so many pages of ciphertext is via some form of primary statefulness.

However, there seems to be no direct evidence that Voynichese uses only statefulness: rather, it gives the impression of retaining some kind of high-level linguistic structure from the plaintext, but perhaps with letter patterns disrupted within that.

To me, the likelihood is that Voynichese evolved out of what was initially a purely stateless verbose cipher, one where (for instance) “or”, “ol”, “ar” and “al” enciphered the repeated letters in Roman numerals: M C X I. The encipherer probably then hacked his/her own system (with tricks such as the space-insertion cipher we apparently see on f15v) to hide too-obvious repetitions. However, I suspect that an Arabic digit steganography hack was later grafted into the system (the a[i][i][i]v family), probably removing the need for the “I”: and that when the time came round to creating the VMs, some kind of additional stateful disruption might well have been added to this system, whereby the or/ol/ar/al pairs swapped around depending on the state… well, that’s as far as I’ve got, anyway.

Historically, the problem is that there is no evidence of any stateful cipher system prior to Rome in 1465 (when Alberti began researching his book), which doesn’t obviously seem to square with the radiocarbon dating. All the same, it’s not the first time that different forms of dating have yielded slightly different values for the same artefact, all grist for our historical mills… 🙂

Voynich cipher crib thoughts…

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Just a quick note on Voynich cipher cribs.

Even though I’ve built up a fairly substantial set of (what I think are) reasonably pragmatic deductions about how Voynichese works, actually finding any way to use those to get at the rest has (perhaps unsurprisingly) proved difficult. To recap, I suspect that…

  • “4o” steganographically codes for “lo” (and perhaps “la” as well, via some subtle letter formation difference we’re too close to the text to notice)
  • “a[i][i][i]v” steganographically enciphers Arabic digits using the startpoint of the apparent scribal flourish
  • “a[i][i][i]r” verbosely enciphers various rare plaintext letters (such as ‘z’)
  • “e[e][e]” and “ch” / “sh” verbosely encipher vowels
  • “-8” functions as a scribal shorthand symbol for “contractio”
  • “-9” functions as a scribal shorthand symbol for “suspensio”
  • “8-” enciphers “et” or “&”, as well as for Arabic numeral combination (into large numbers)
  • “t-” directs the decipherer to a horizontal Neal key (usually on the top line of a paragraph)
  • “p-” directs the decipherer to a vertical Neal key (usually down the first column of a paragraph)
  • “k-” and “f-” I’m not sure about. 🙂
  • “ot” / “op” / “ok” / “of” / “yt” / “yp” / “yk” / “yf” verbosely encipher fixed letters (hence their use in labels)
  • “or” / “ol” / “ar” / “al” verbosely encipher fixed letters
  • “cXh”, where the ch’s crossbar strikes through a gallows, enciphers the shorthand stroke “subscriptio”
  • (etc, etc)

Of course, I happily admit that all, some or none of these may well be wrong: the issue I’m discussing here is what to do next if (like me) you happen to think that there stands a good chance that these are right. Basically, where now?

It struck me a few days ago that the “aiiv” pattern has a rough analogue in part of the Florentine shorthand used by Leonardo da Vinci: as I discussed in my post on Leonardo’s handwriting, LdV used “i-with-a-circle” for ‘uno‘, and “i-with-a-circumflex” for ‘una‘. Now, today’s thought is that if (say) “aiv” similarly enciphers “uno/una”, then what would happen if we went looking for words in the astronomical quire #9 (‘Q9’) for words of the form “verbose letter” + “aiv”, just in case they encipher “l-una”, i.e. “luna”?

For example, if we look at the topmost line of f67r1 (the thrice-exalted APOD page, with what is manifestly the moon in the middle), the fourth word along is “osaiiv”. Now, I suspect that this is an example of coyness on the VMs’ author’s part, insofar as “os” probably doesn’t exist in the cipher system (i.e. the pair should actually read “or”), so he/she has used “os”as  a kind of secondary misdirection, perhaps suspecting that “oraiiv” might look slightly too crackable. 🙂

So, might “luna” be the first word in the VMs to be genuinely deciphered? It’s certainly possible, but I’d hesitate running down to the betting shop just yet: all the same, it might help point to ways of sneaking past the pack of rottweilers on the door. The titles of the Q9 planet pages might all be there on their respective top lines, if we but gothink to go  looking for them…

Review of Christopher Harris’ “Mappamundi”…

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OK, moving straight into confessional mode, I feel more than a touch ashamed that I haven’t reviewed Chris Harris’ Mappamundi loooong before now. But… even though I’ve read it twice, I still don’t really know what to say about it. Let me explain…

Sticking to the knitting, it’s a fairly trite starting point to note that it’s an historical adventure, with the main character Thomas Deerham seque(l)strated from the book “False Ambassador”.  In that first book, Harris had his hero travel from England to France to Greece (while trying to travel to the Holy Land) and onwards from there to Morea and finally back to Rome, meeting loads of interesting historical figures (such as Plethon) en route. “Mappamundi” continues in Rome with Deerham’s stealing a Toscanelli mappamundi from his only-just-dead boss (Pope Pius II), before heading fast away north across France. In Paris, he meets the vagabond / poet / trickster François Villon: they cross the Channel & end up in Essex trying it on with an eelwife (please don’t ask). Then they meet Christian Rosenkreutz (yes, really) and steal the Voynich Manuscript, which a thoroughly delighted Rosenkreutz calls one of the “Seven Tomes”. On from there to Cambridge, and Ipswich, and… off to find the lost wisdom of Atlantis, steered by the stars, the mappamundi, the VMs and Rosenkreutz’s clinical madness… and (without giving it all away) onwards from there.

Of all the Voynich novels I know of, you could reasonably argue that Mappamundi sticks closest to what we might expect of the VMs’ pre-1600 provenance. What with its Toulon-Occitan-like zodiac month names, and abbreviated longhand Latin quire numbering that Barbara B claims appears in a herbal rebound in England in the 15th century, and perhaps in England picking up its alleged connection with Roger Bacon; all these details tally reasonably nicely with Harris’ account, some intentionally, some not (I’d predict).

Of course, by now you’ll have worked out that Mappamundi is by no means an airport novel – the absence of (for example) millennia-long secret conspiracies, hidden mountains of ancient gold, mysterious powers over life & death that an unreadable book holds, but which only a Harvard Professor of Assyrian Stuff with eidetic memory can unlock, etc etc should be more than a bit of hint. Nor is it experimental literature (even though it plainly merges real historical figures with hallucinatory ones such as Christian RosenKreutz), nor even Umberto Eco-esque über-erudite historical musings masquerading as high literature.

Actually… when you strip it all back, it’s just a historical romp across Europe, in very much the same kind of line (and indeed roughly the same time-period) as Dorothy Dunnett’s well-known Niccolo Rising series. But whereas I alway got the feeling that Dunnett was trying not to re-write history but rather just to thread her own imagined saga through the countless empty holes in a genuine historical tapestry, the presence of Rosenkreutz and the VMs (and even Atlantis) in Mappamundi moves that book sideways into a rather less clear position.

I suppose what it all comes down to is that Harris’ admixure of the notoriously false with the notoriously uncertain with the manifestly true largely negates the effect of all his careful research: the reader stops trusting the author’s historical eye and empathy. Look, I’m not saying it’s as bad a pseudo-historical trip as Forrest Gump: but it did manage to consistently put me out of my readership comfort zone, which is something you could never accuse Dunnett of, for example.

The awful thing is that Harris’ book-writing craft is so spot-on in so many ways (I get to read countless books by authors whose skills aren’t a patch on his), which makes criticising him for what is only really a kind of implicit epistemological confusion foisted on his readers feel somewhat unjust. But many (if not most) of those same readers will likely have a keen eye for history, and that side of me really didn’t enjoy the ride here.

Ultimately, even though I’m supposed to balance up all these factors and finish the review by rotating my haughty Imperial thumb upwards or downwards, this time around I just don’t know what to do. I loved the Dorothy Dunnett side of it while simultaneously hating the Forrest Gump side of it (which included the ending): and it seemed to oscillate between these two extrema throughout. I guess you’ll have to read it for yourself and make up your own mind, sorry if that sounds like a cop-out. =:-o

Review of “The Alexander Cipher”…

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Another day, another historical mystery airport novel to review, this time with Will Adams’ protagonist Daniel Knox exercising his “outcast Egyptologist” mojo in and around Alexandria, Siwa etc. Will Knox be able to solve all the clues and use his exceptional underwater swimming skills to find Alexander The Great’s fabulous (but lost) golden catafalque, or will the various people trying to kill him get there first?

<spoiler on>
Of course he bloody does.
<spoiler off>

And therein lies the rub. The problem with calling your novel “The Alexander Cipher” is that even though it pitches your book well to passing bookshop fingers, it pretty much flags the fact that Chapters 1-2 are going to be spent describing Alexander’s fabulous treasure, and most of the rest of the book is going to involve the main characters’ chasing flimsy clues to find it, culminating in a set piece finale. And Daniel Knox is really not a very likeable hero: even when he’s doing noble & morally correct things in difficult circumstances, you still want to give him a slap. And the cipher itself is just Greek written in Demotic characters, so isn’t really much cop.

Though The Alexander Cipher manages to compile nearly every questionable story ever told about Alexander T. Great and thread them neatly into the story (yes, Adams has manifestly done plenty of research), its character narrative only ever oscillates between first and second gear, never really getting any traction on the people. It’s as though Adams never wants to leave us alone in the room with Knox (or indeed anyone else) for very long, when there’s some questionable archaeological derring-do to be moved onto and done instead.

Really, even though Adams’ research and plotting all hit the right kinds of spot in a relentlessly metronomic kind way, what I ended up noticing most is the overwhelming lack of humanity that pervades each page. When you feel that the guiding force in the book’s universe is a curious stop-motion Newtonian pinball rather than the subtleties of chess or poker, it seems that only a single facet of the human condition has made the cut when the storyline was constructed.

Just to make sure I hadn’t missed something important, I then read Adams’ sequel “The Exodus Quest” (which again features Daniel Knox plus many of the same supporting characters). Same basic thing, but with less gold in play.

It would be easy to pin the blame on (say) Hollywood action flicks for somehow merging macho with Asperger’s Syndrome and for conflating urgency with sociopathy, both stylistic tics which I think Will Adams sometimes allows his protagonists to fall prey to. However Hollywood is (by and large) lazy and unimaginative, and prefers to appropriate shorthand cultural stereotypes of the day rather than to invent them afresh. So that would probably be missing the real point: which is that we moderns all have a bit of a void in our hearts as far as what our appropriate gendered self-image should be. Is being a ‘man’ really as politically jut-jawed and horrendously vacuous as these books portray? Is being a ‘woman‘ really all about beautiful complicity and self-destructive revenge? Perhaps it is better not to have any such self-image if these are all there is on offer on the cultural smorgasbord.

In the end, arguably the most awful thing about Will Adams is that he has written a series of books where the main character comes across as being more tenderly in love with his put-upon heap of a jeep than with anybody else. Though my guess is that he probably originally intended this as light relief, in the end Knox’s jeep became the female lead in the whole saga, the central love interest. OK, to me that’s just a bit wrong, but make of it what you will for yourself.

Review of Bill Napier’s “Shattered Icon”…

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Carrying on with (what is rapidly turning into) Cipher Mysteries BookFest ’10, I’ve had Bill Napier’s (2003) “Shattered Icon” on my list of Voynich-related novels for simply ages, so a review is somewhat overdue. Napier, a “Scottish astronomer who lives in Ireland and has a professorship in Wales“, was so engaged by rumours of a 16th century calendrical plot that he felt compelled to write a book about it. However, if you’re already expecting a stereotypically clunky “Domain Expert” novel, you’ll be pleasantly surprised – he writes pretty well, and has constructed a nice “parallel periods” opus out of his historical obsession.

Even though (as it turns out) this isn’t actually a Voynich novel nor even really a cipher mystery (the secrets are hidden by allusion rather than by cryptography), there’s still plenty of interest for Cipher Mysteries readers, such as a little bit about Bright’s Characterie (arguably the first modern shorthand). Perhaps more intriguingly, the calendar stuff that fascinated Napier so much is all to do with John Dee and his cunning 33-year leap day cycle (an elegant blend of maths, numerology and religion, because that was Jesus’ age when he was crucified, Dan Brown fans).

Having lived in the Caribbean myself for a while (though many years ago), I also rather liked the smattering of patois Napier slips in when the characters are hacking around Jamaica; and (in the parallel timeline) there’s a little bit of Elizabethan apothecary-based fun too. So there’s plenty of good stuff for a typical Cipher Mysteries reader to enjoy, and pretty much all of it dovetails properly into the overall story without too much frenetic plotting overkill.

OK, I’d be the first to admit that it’s far from perfect: most notably, I didn’t really buy into any of the main characters, nor even the modern conspiracy driving the plotline. Still, it’s a given that every book has faults: the issue is more whether the story manages to transcend those faults… and I think in this case, it really does. Though Max McCoy’s Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone, Matt Rubinstein’s Vellum, and Lev Grossman’s Codex are all arguably better books, “Shattered Icon” is a good read, one I recommend to you all. Even though it’s not strictly a cipher mystery! 🙂

The least mysterious manuscript in the world…

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I recently radared a Voynich Manuscript namecheck in a short online blogpost riffing on meaning, love and secrecy. If you manage to get past the author’s densely-textured surface style, there are some good moments in there:

  • “The secret assures us the nearly sure possibility of content but retracts its guarantee at the very limit of its donation. The secret does not only tease, it seduces.“
  • “The secret and its content are terrible adversaries and anyone who confuses the content of a secret with the secret itself is an imbecile.“

I rather like the image conjured up of the secret and the content being at war with each other – it is certainly true that we Voynich researchers spend a lot of time hunting for places where the content overflows the jar, subtly breaking the visual monotony of the ciphertext factory. These are the casualties lining the battlefront of this curious civil war, and are almost paratextual insofar as they comfortably reside on neither side of the line.

For me, the strange paradox that emerges from this is that even though the ciphertext artefact side of the Voynich Manuscript is known as “the most mysterious manuscript in the world”, if its contents ultimately prove to be as hyperrational as I suspect then there should be no great degree of interpretation involved in reading it – no symbolism, no allusion, no internal textual layeredness. That is, perhaps the Voynich Manuscript’s contents will turn out to be the least mysterious manuscript in the world?

Review of “The Charlemagne Pursuit”…

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In my opinion, cipher mystery-themed airport novels tend (as I wrote here a few days ago) to be written by (1) “Rack Pack” writers, (2) “Domain Experts”, or (3) “Wannabe Screenwriters”. Having read Steve Berry’s book “The Templar Legacy” (2006) as a warm-up, I recently moved on to his “The Charlemagne Pursuit” (2008), where the serial use of the main character ‘Cotton Malone’ places Berry firmly amongst the Rack Pack. But is he Rack the Knife or Rack the Hack?

The first thing I’d say is that The Charlemagne Pursuit is definitely put together far better than its predecessor, whose cardboard Bond-world characters such as ‘Cassiopeia Vitt’ (who it seems unfortunately reappears in later Cotton Malone books) and ghastly Templar clichés reduced the art of reading from a pleasure to a struggle. Really, compared with the sparky horses-in-the-New-York-museum start to Raymond Khoury’s “The Last Templar“, Berry’s The Templar Legacy remained ungrippingly pedestrian throughout.

All the same, The Charlemagne Pursuit is no less stuffed with airport mystery fodder – beautiful Nazi-family twin sisters, ancient architectural hints, buried clues, castles, Atlantis, Ahnenerbe, secret submarines, Voynich Manuscript-style documents, professional killers, unlikeable protagonist, etc. Yet what I found most frustrating is that if you stripped out all the history / lost civilizations / Nazi / mad admiral guff, the raw core of the story – Cotton Malone hunting down his dead submariner father, with surprising success – would be basically OK. And so I felt at the end that I’d read a decent-enough 100-page book ripped into a 600-pager by a sustained ingestion of airport novel steroids.

For sure, Berry’s book fully deserves its place in my Big Fat List as probably the highest-profile Voynich Manuscript novel yet: but the VMs is mainly treated as a kind of codicological template to help generate the various mysterious books Berry’s narrative requires along the way, rather than actually engaged with in any interesting or intriguing manner – not actually disdain, but certainly something close to disinterest. And perhaps it’s just me, but there’s also something just a bit desperate about his scattergun constructional style, which comes across not unlike a neurotic parent grabbing every soft toy in turn to try to placate an unhappy toddler. Ultimately, I’d rather read a book with half (if not less!) as many themes weaved together but explored in a more engaging way: but perhaps that’s a grossly unreasonable expectation of the genre, you’ll have to make up your own mind.

In summary, I did enjoy bits of it: but most of it came across as a Nazi-themed rollercoaster ride where you don’t care much for any of the twists and turns, let alone the characters.