Upcoming crypto talk by Lawren Smithline…

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Just in case you thought my recent list of upcoming talks was too UK-centric, here’s a nice one from the US…

A while back on Cipher Mysteries, I mentioned the 200-year old challenge ciphertext sent to Thomas Jefferson by UPenn maths professor Robert Patterson. But in a PhysOrg.com article (linked from the Daily Grail), there’s news of a lecture being given at the University of Oregon by Lawren Smithline (the person who finally cracked the transposition cipher) at 4pm Tuesday 26th January 2010, in Room 100 of Willamette Hall, 1371 E. 13th Ave., Eugene OR. Free admission.

(As always, please drop me a line if you happen to go along.)

SCRIPT 1.2 – special Voynich section…

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Web-journal SCRIPT (est. 2009) aims to publish articles / videos / pictures / (OK, pretty much anything, really) on “abject textual forms including: code arrays, asemic writing, graffiti, tattoos, and any other marginal(ized) scripted utterance“. Unsurprisingly, for its next issue the editors have put out a call for roughly-5000-word up-to-the-minute belletristic commentaries on the Voynich Manuscript and similar cryptotexts:-

While almost certainly undecipherable (various master WWII code-breakers and modern computers have tried), the Voynich manuscript — a.k.a, the Beinecke Library’s “MS 408” — has arguably more value in abstraction than it would in translation. A word-filled but language-less text; a collection of empty signs; a simulacra of simulacra — one can accept that texts like this may forever remain origin-less and undeciphered. But as such, they offer textual culture something unique: words and text abstracted from the weight of functional representation, semantics, and the other duties language routinely performs. As such, these cryptotexts can be seen as a form of literary abstraction that, like other forms of asemic art, puts a great deal of tension on the graphic/text binary and challenges readers to reevaluate their relationship, and conception of, each.

Articles on, and artistic treatments of, the Voynich manuscript itself are welcome as are those concerned with other failures of cryptanalysis and other texts/language systems that remain undeciphered and/or untranslated.

Doubtless you already know whether or not you are interested…

The editors’ apparent position – that the VMs is probably indecipherable, but that we stand to learn a lot about how we look at such linimal objects from our reaction to them – is something I’m broadly sympathetic to. However, to me the greatest value of the VMs comes from the complicated historical journey we face to reconstruct its fragmented conceptual origins. That is, trying to work out why its meaning continues to evade us should help us to understand the limits of modern thinking and knowledge when applied to difficult historical problems.

All the same, I rather suspect that lumping the Voynich Manuscript in with meaningless writings (whether consciously asemic or not) would be a category mistake: what lies beneath its shiny cryptographic surface is most likely hyperrationality, not anti-rationality or irrationality… three very different things.

Interesting history talks for early 2010…

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Here are some upcoming events that Cipher Mysteries readers might well enjoy:-

  • A nice little bit of codicology to start with: Dr Kathryn M. Rudy, “Dirty Books: Quantifying Patterns of Use in Medieval Manuscripts Using a Densitometer” – 5.30pm, 20th January 2010, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Research Forum South Room. Free.

    “Medieval manuscripts carry signs of use and wear. The priest repeatedly kissed the canon page of the missal, leaving his greasy nose print behind. The devotee regularly touched the image of Mary out of veneration, but inadvertently rubbed the paint off the vellum. Medieval readers of books of hours and prayerbooks – the largest surviving category of late medieval books – often held their manuscripts open for reading by resting their thumbs at the lower corners of the opening. The more often that readers used a text, the darker the thumbprints became.”

  • A talk on the Antikythera Mechanism by Professor Mike Edmunds at the Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society – 7pm, Wednesday 26th May 2010, MANDEC, Higher Cambridge Street, Manchester. Free (but “a donation is requested“).

    “What may well be the most extraordinary surviving artefact from the ancient Greek world was discovered just over a century ago. Found in 1900 in a wreck off the coast of the Mediterranean island of Antikythera, the device contains over thirty gear wheels and dates from around 100 B.C. Now known as the Antikythera Mechanism, it is an order of magnitude more complicated than any surviving mechanism from the following millennium, and there is no surviving precursor.”

  • A talk on ‘Cosmography and Cartography in the Renaissance: Their Relationship Revisited‘, by Dr Adam Mosley – 5pm, Thursday 15th April 2010, Warburg Institute, London. (Free)

    This is part of the ‘Maps and Society’ series of lectures at the Warburg: you may remember Adam Mosley from the review here of his “Bearing the Heavens” book on Tycho Brahe’s research community, so should be very interesting!

  • Professor Michael Farthing –  “Nicholas Culpeper: London’s first general practitioner?“ Gideon de Laune Lecture: 6pm, Wednesday 28th April 2010, Apothecaries Hall, London. Not sure whether or not this is only open to Society of Apothecaries members!

“That’s Life, Samara Brooks”…

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Here’s something a bit unexpected: a teen novel built around school rivalries, DNA testing, the Voynich Manuscript and the Phaistos Disc. Due to come out in February 2010, could “That’s Life, Samara Brooks” be the first properly crossover Voynich-themed book to add to the Cipher Mysteries Big Fat List? I’ll be sure to get a copy along the way… and will let you know. 🙂

Incidentally, Google Books also returns a hit for “Voynich” in Frank Portman’s (2009) similarly-genred children’s book “Andromeda Klein“, but I suspect that the VMs will turn out to be less central to the plot there. Just in case there are any completist Voynich teen novel collectors out there. 🙂

“Voynich Averlino hypothesis” summary…

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In the last few days, several people have independently asked me to summarize my “The Curse of the Voynich” Voynich Manuscript theory (that it is an enciphered copy of Antonio Averlino [Filarete]’s lost books of secrets). Good theories generally improve when you retell them a few times: for example, back when I was first pitching my new type of security camera [i.e. my day job], it would take me about an hour to explain how it worked, but now it takes me about a minute. So… can I condense 230 pages from 2006 into a thousand words in 2010? Here goes…

The first part of my art history argument places the VMs in Milan after 1456 but before about 1480, and with some kind of architectural link to Venice:-

  • “Voynichese” uses a “4o” verbose cipher pair (but not as Arabic digit pairs, i.e not 10/20/30/40). This appears in North Italian / Milanese ciphers dating from 1440 to 1456 and is linked with the Sforzas, yet here forms part of a more sophisticated cipher system. This points to a post-1456 dating, locates it in Northern Italy (specifically Milan), and links it somehow with the Sforza court.
  • One of the rosettes in the nine-rosette page contains a castle with swallow-tail merlons and circular city walls. However, the only towns traditionally depicted with circular walls are Jerusalem, Baghdad, and Milan, of which Milan is the only one in Italy. Therefore, I conclude that this is probably Milan.
  • Also, the Sforza castle in Milan only had swallow-tail merlons after 1450. This gives a probable earliest date & place for the VMs of (say) 1451 in Milan.
  • Late in the 15th century, swallow-tail merlons were covered over to protect the defenders from flaming projectiles. This gives a probable latest date for the VMs of 1480-1500.
  • I argue that the central rosette shows a (slightly scrambled) view of St Mark’s Basilica as viewed from the Campanile beside it, linking the author of the VMs with Venice.

The second part highlights (what I consider to be) very close parallels between the VMs and the “little works” of secrets mentioned by Antonio Averlino in the later phases of his libro architettonico (but which have been presumed lost or imaginary), and which he compiled between 1455 and 1465.

  • The subjects of Averlino’s lost little books were: water (spas), agriculture, engines, recipes, glass-making, and bees.
  • I think Quire 13 depicts water – both spas and plumbing machinery / engines
  • I think that Herbal A pages are agriculture (grafting, herbiculture, etc)
  • I think that Herbal B pages contain engines (but visually enciphered to resemble strange plants). I also suspect that Averlino was the author of the lost mid-Quattrocento “Machinery Complex” manuscript postulated by Prager and Scaglia.
  • I think f86v3 specifically depicts bees (Curse pp.138-140)
  • After publishing my book, I discovered that Averlino did indeed have his own herbal, written “elegantly in the vernacular tongue“

The third part outlines what I suspect was Averlino’s opportunity and motive for creating the VMs, based on well-documented historical sources (plus a few specific inferences):-

  • Antonio Averlino was interested in cryptography, specifically in transposition ciphers. His libro architettonico partly fictionalizes himself and many of the people around the Sforza by syllable-reversing their names – for example, his own name becomes “Onitoan Nolivera“.
  • Averlino was friends with the powerful cryptographer Cicco Simonetta, who ran the Sforza Chancellery: when Averlino suddenly left Milan in 1465, he left his affairs and claims for back pay in Simonetta’s hands.
  • Disenchanted by his experience of working for Francesco Sforza, Averlino planned to travel from Milan across Europe to work in the new Turkish court in Istanbul – his friend Filelfo drafted a letter of introduction for him.
  • I infer (from the peculiarly intentional damage done to the signature panel of his famous doors in Rome) that Averlino travelled to Rome in the Autumn of 1465, perhaps even with the party travelling from Brescia with what is now known as MS Vat Gr 1291.
  • I also infer (from a close reading of Leon Battista Alberti’s small book on ciphers) that an unnamed expert in transposition ciphers debated cryptography practice in detail with Alberti in late 1465, and I suspect that this expert was Averlino, who would surely have sought out his fellow Florentine humanist architect while in Rome.
  • Some art historians have put forward particular evidence that suggests Averlino did indeed travel to Istanbul around this time to work on some buildings there.
  • However, this happened not long after the notorious incident when Sigismondo Malatesta’s favourite painter Matteo de’ Pasti was arrested in the Venetian-owned port of Candia in Crete. His crime was attempting to take a copy of Roberto Valturio’s book on war machines “De Re Militari” to the Turks, punished by being hauled back in chains to Venice for interrogation by the Council of Ten.
  • Though not always 100% reliable, Giorgio Vasari asserts that Antonio Averlino died in Rome in 1469: so there is good reason to conclude that if Averlino did indeed travel East, he (like his old friend George of Trebizond) probably travelled back to Italy before very long.
  • Overall, my claim is that if Averlino made (or tried to make) the dangerous trip East in 1465 and wanted to take his books of secrets (which, remember, contained drawings of engines just like “De Re Militari”) along with him, he would need to devise a daring way of hiding them in plain sight. But how?

The fourth part of my argument describes how I think Averlino trickily enciphered his books of secrets to make them seem to be sections of a medieval herbal / antidotary written in a lost language. However, given that this section is extraordinarily complicated and I’m rapidly closing in on my thousand-word limit, I’ll have to call a halt at this point. 🙂

Three years after committing all this to print, I still stand by (pretty much) every word. Obviously, it’s a tad annoying that the recent radiocarbon dating doesn’t fit this narative perfectly: but historical research (when you do it properly) is always full of surprises, right? We’ll have to see what the next few months bring…

Some online herbals…

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Blogger of the visually bizarre BibliOdyssey has a number of nice online herbal scans you might well enjoy: each page has a brief description of the related manuscript and links to other places you can read more about the subject, while each picture links to its own Flickr page (which is handy).

  • ‘Arzneipflanzenbuch‘ [BSB Cod.icon. 26], Augsburg circa 1525. Herbal with lots of eccentric roots (sounds familiar, eh)
  • Hieronymous Braunschweig’s Distillerbuch, Strasburg circa 1500. Distillation manual, with plenty of alchemy, chemistry, botany, medicinal tips, etc.
  • Rembert Dodoens’ Cruydeboek, Belgium 1554. Hugely popular herbal built on Leonhard Fuchs’ equally famous herbal (but with many additions).
  • Tacuinum Sanitatis, 15th century copy owned by the Bibliotheque Rouen. An extremely nice-looking herbal book of medicine with herbal bits, exactly the kind of high quality artefact the Voynich Manuscript plainly isn’t.

Kicked out of the Independent Researcher Guild…?

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Technically, I shouldn’t disclose that I was ever a member: but here’s the letter I received today kicking me out of the IR Guild:-

Dear Mr Pelling,

I am sorry to inform you that the Independent Researcher Guild’s Ethics and Behaviour Committee has recommended your honorary guild membership be withdrawn. The specific grounds cited are:-

  1. Treating facts as “useful stepping stones towards the truth“. This is wholly incompatible with Guild Article #2, which explicitly states that facts are to be viewed as “politically motivated deceptions designed to hide doubts“.
  2. Attempting to frame “research questions“. While it is acceptable for Guild members to grandstand using scientific-sounding phrases (particularly in TV interviews), actual use of the scientific method is expressly prohibited under Articles #18 and #19.
  3. Trying to actively falsify parallel research hypotheses, particularly those of fellow Guild Members. The committee suggests you meditate further upon the Guild’s founding principle of The Cornucopia of Truths: that history only makes sense as a church broad enough to accommodate everyone’s individual truth.
  4. Your reaching out to mainstream academics is plainly wrong-headed: their primary responsibility – even in the postmodernist wing – is to close down debate, the diametric opposite of what the IRG stands for.
  5. Preferring probability and human judgment over possibility – really, you should be fully aware that, as Guild Article #7 clearly states, probability is the primary tool used by academics to forcefully silence historical dissenters such as us. This is the line in the sand we draw to separate Them from Us: it seems that you are now on Their side.
  6. Finally: the committee notes that your proposing a bourgeois (even, dare we say it, ‘middle class’) reading of a mystery object (and with no heresy and no centuries-long political conspiracy behind it) is just plain ludicrous. ‘Lone gunmen’ should be the subjects of our collective derision, not of our individual research.

You now have 7 (seven) days to remove all the IRG logos and graphic devices concealed in your website graphics. Your invitation to our 2010 secret conference in Aldwych Underground Station has also been withdrawn. Your ability to use the IR Guild’s copyrighted phrase “independent researcher” in conjunction with your name has also been revoked. We now suggest you look to Academe for accreditation: certainly, you are no longer welcome here.

Yours in equal parts sadness and annoyance,

<scrawly signature>

Senior Membership Services Manager
Independent Researcher Guild

Honestly, could my year have got off to a worse start? I think not! 🙁

The Center for Cryptologic History’s 2010 calendar…!

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It’s not widely known that the US National Security Agency has a small section at Fort Meade devoted to the history of code-breaking: The Center for Cryptologic History. As well as making scans of a number of useful documents available on its website (most notably Mary D’Imperio’s “An Elegant Enigma”), the CCH convenes its own history of cryptology event every two years: the 2009 conference had David Kahn, Elonka Dunin, Whitfield Diffie and loads of other well-known crypto people both attending and giving talks. Though the focus was mainly 20th century, the two notable exceptions were…

  • Kathryn Schwartz, Harvard University – “The Academic, Poetic and Militarised Impetuses behind Medieval Arabic Cryptology’s Development”
  • Richard Belfield, Fulcrum TV – “The Story Behind the Shepherd’s Monument Inscription at Shugborough Hall”

Note that though I didn’t rate Richard Belfield’s “Six Unsolved Ciphers” book very highly when I reviewed it here, the Shepherd’s Monument chapter was by far its best section, so his lecture on that same subject would probably have been well worth catching.

And now we have a new reason to be interested in the CCH: its 2010 calendar contains several pictures of the Voynich Manuscript, which is an especially good reason for Cipher Mysteries readers to want their own copy. But you can’t buy this in the shops (except on eBay, where you can buy pretty much everything that isn’t actually thermonuclear): according to the CCH’s Barry Carleen…

If any of your subscribers would like to order calendars, they can send an e-mail to [email protected] and we’ll be glad to provide them as long as supplies last.

So there you go – a happy 2010 to you all! 🙂

Proto-Swedish Voynich food theory…

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As far as theories of the Voynich Manuscript’s linguistic origin go, people have over the years proposed proto-Russian, proto-German, proto-Dutch, in fact proto-just-about-every-European-language-going… yet it seemed that nobody had tried Swedish as a possible match for Voynichese.

However, when I gave this a go, I found to my great surprise that the two meshed really well, particularly the unique “dinka-donka” (i.e. ‘verbose’) scansion they apparently share. After a bit of work, I managed to compile the following set of letter equivalences (EVA transcription in square brackets):-

chefese

(The full EVA key maps “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz” →  “o–bmc–r-stxkeydnfu—-h-“, and
“ch / sh / ckh / cth” → “v / i / g / w“). This transforms the following Voynichese on f116v…

pchal larar al ckhal rain alol fchy rpchey shfy ches ar opche kan dlr
olkeey rain shey qoraiin shey ol lchedy rshey qokeedy chtain oly
soraiin ykeey rain sheeky qokain sheey qol cheds ar r arshe
qokain ar raiin shek okain yrshey qolchey okain shckhy qokam
shedy qokeey qoka qokeey lchey olkey raiin cthar shckhy qotar

…to the proto-Swedish plaintext…

yvot tonon ot got nork otet cvh nyvmh ich vmf on eyvm sok btn
etsmmh nork imh denorrk imh et tvmbh nimh desmmbh vuork eth
fenorrk hsmmh nork immsh desork immh det vmbf on n onim
desork on norrk ims esork hnimh detvmh esork igh desox
imbh desmmh deso desmmh tvmh etsmh norrk won igh deuon

I then needed to find a remote community where this (otherwise lost) proto-Swedish is still in use. After an extensive research trail, I uncovered rare video footage of the one person in the world who still talks this language: and, amazingly, I was able to link up the text in the Voynich Manuscript’s recipe section with a short section of the tape (as per the subtitles), proving without a shadow of a doubt that the eleventh starred paragraph on f116r contains the recipe for meatballs:-

SCmeatballs-subtitled-2

You couldn’t make it up. Nor perhaps would you want to. 🙂

Voynich quill forensics…?

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Not sure if anyone has suggested this before, but I was musing on Locard’s exchange principle (which proposes that “with contact between two items, there will be an exchange”) and how that relates to the quills used to write the VMs. Marxists are fond of pointing out how both people and machines are consumed by industrial processes (not just raw materials, the notional “consumables”), and so surely the same should be true of writing with a quill pen?

That is, because the process of writing with a quill pen blunts (i.e. consumes) the quill, Locard’s exchange principle suggests that we should in theory be able to find tiny fragments of quill pen embedded in or around the stream of Voynichese ink. All you’d need is an idea of what you’re looking for, a microscope, access to the VMs, and a fair bit of patience. 🙂

How might that help us? Well… a quill is a feather, and feathers are organic, so feathers have DNA. We might therefore be able to use the quill fragment DNA in conjunction with the vellum DNA to try to physically locate where the writing was done.

Of course, if you wanted to get a full genome from a feather (as per this paper), you’d need more than microscopic fragments to work with. But I’d guess a determined investigator would be able to identify the species even from a tiny piece. And if it turned out to be a dodo feather, we might be able to prove that the VMs was a spectacularly knowing hoax courtesy of insiders at Rudolph II’s court. 😉