Review of “The Six Unsolved Ciphers”…

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…or, in all its prolixitous glory, “The Six Unsolved Ciphers: Inside the Mysterious Codes That Have Confounded the World’s Greatest Cryptographers“, by Richard Belfield (2007). It was previously published by Orion in the UK as “Can You Crack the Enigma Code?” in 2006.

You’d have thought I’d be delighted by this offering: after all, it covers the Voynich Manuscript, the Beale Papers, Elgar’s “Dorabella” cipher, the CIA’s Kryptos sculpture, the Shepherd’s Monument at Shugborough, and the “Zodiac Killer” ciphers, all things that a Cipher Mysteries blogger ought to get excited about. But there was something oddly disconsonant about it all for me: and working out quite why proved quite difficult…

For a start, if I were compiling a top six list of uncracked historical ciphers, only the Voynich Manuscript and the Beale Papers would have made the cut from Belfield’s set – I don’t think anyone out there could (unless they happened to have cracked either of the two) sensibly nitpick about these being included.

Yet as far the other four go, it’s not nearly so clear. I’ve always thought that the Dorabella cipher was a minor jeu d’esprit on Elgar’s part in a note to a dear friend, and most likely to be something like an enciphered tune. The Kryptos sculpture was intended to bamboozle the CIA and NSA’s crypto squads: and though it relies on classical cryptographic techniques, there’s something a bit too self-consciously knowing about it (its appropriation by The Da Vinci Code cover doesn’t help in this regard). And while the Shugborough Shepherd’s Monument (Belfield’s best chapter by far) indeed has hidden writing, placing its ten brief letters into the category of cipher or code is perhaps a bit strong.

Finally: the Zodiac Killer ciphers, which I know have occupied my old friend Glen Claston in the past, forms just about the only borderline case: its place in the top six is arguable (and it has a good procedural police yarn accompanying it), so I’d kind of grudgingly accept that (at gunpoint, if you will). Regardless, I’d still want to place the Codex Seraphinianus above it, for example.

Belfield’s book reminds me a lot of Kennedy & Churchill’s book on the Voynich Manuscript: even though it is a good, solid, journalistic take on some intriguing cipher stories, I’m not convinced by the choice of the six, and in only one (the Shugborough Shepherd’s Monument) do I think Belfield really gets under the skin of the subject matter. While he musters a lot of interest in the whole subject, it rarely amounts to what you might call passion: and that is really what this kind of mystery-themed book needs to enliven its basically dry subject matter.

It’s hard to fault it as an introduction to six interesting unbroken historical codes and ciphers (it does indeed cover exactly what it says on the tin), and perhaps I’m unfair to judge it against the kind of quality bar I try to apply to my own writing: but try as I may, I can’t quite bring myself to recommend it over (for example) Simon Singh’s “The Code Book” (for all its faults!) as a readable introduction to historical cryptography.

PS: my personal “top six” unsolved historical codes/ciphers would be:-

  1. The Voynich Manuscript (the granddaddy of them all)
  2. The Beale Papers (might be a fake, but it’s a great story)
  3. The Rohonc Codex (too little known, but a fascinating object all the same)
  4. John Dee’s “Enochian” texts (in fact, everything written by John Dee)
  5. William Shakespeare’s work (there’s a massive literature on this, why ignore it?)
  6. Bellaso’s ciphers (but more on this in a later post…)

Feel free to agree or disagree! 😉

Review of “On Tycho’s Island”…

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People don’t generally know a lot about Tycho Brahe, which is a shame. In most accounts of the history of astronomy, his bright star tends to get eclipsed by the twin 17th century supernovae of Kepler and Galileo. But scratch the surface of the story, and it’s really not that simple…

Brahe was a Danish nobleman with a singleminded desire – to understand why the motions of the planets in the heavens failed to match what the best astronomical tables (based both on Ptolemaic and Copernican systems) predicted. Somehow, he engineered an arrangement by which King Frederick II granted him the island of Hven to pursue his astronomical studies for the glory of Denmark: yet what Brahe set up there was as much a social institution (like a postgraduate research community) as a technical observatory – to get the job done, he needed people just as much as equipment.

In fact, Tycho tried to get all the brightest young astronomers of the time to work on his island (for peanuts, it has to be said, but that’s research for you), and to correspond with everyone who was anyone in astronomy. Even so, things didn’t always work out as planned, most notably with Ursus (though I believe the question of whether Ursus was as big a scoundrel and weasel as Brahe tried to make out is far more open than most historians credit).

Methodologically, Brahe’s biographers and historians have tended to focus on the man and his writings: yet until recently none specifically focused on his ever-changing familia (family) of research assistants that passed through Hven. John Robert Christanson’s book “On Tycho’s Island: Tycho Brahe and His Assistants 1570-1601” (Cambridge University Press, 2000) changed all that: what started out (quite literally) as Christianson’s shoe-box of notecards to pull together the numerous fragmentary mentions of Brahe’s coworkers slowly grew into a database, and then (25 years on) into the present book.

But there’s a problem: however interested you are in the subject, after a while the database-like origins of the book – in the infinitessimal ebbs and flows of the set of assistants – start to grate on the reader. And let’s face it, what Brahe was running was as much a kind of “observation factory” as anything else, turning (taking a Marxist-Leninist spin) a input stream of idealistic researchers into a output stream of data. After around 150 pages of on-island minutiae, you start to wonder: where is this all going? How much more can I take?

And then on page 171, Christianson’s book explodes in a direction you simply won’t (unless you’re extraordinarily well-read on Brahe’s life) have seen coming. Brahe tries to marry off his eldest morganatic daughter (“morganatic” means that when a nobleman marries a commoner, his children won’t inherit his nobility or money) to Gellius Sascerides, a clever (but church-mouse poor) member of his familia. And then everything – and I mean everything – starts to go wrong for Brahe (and at some speed), to the point that he ends up dismantling his beloved observatory and fleeing the country. Thanks to his Europe-wide network of contacts (particularly Tadeas Hajek), he finally ended up working for Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in Prague (though only briefly) – but even so, Brahe’s swings in fortune are really quite staggering.

It’s only once you reach the end of the book that you can appreciate what happened in terms of his two familiae. Given that neither his morganatic children nor his set of researchers and coworkers seemed likely to him to give him the continuing legacy he desired, what was Brahe to do? He tried to finesse a best-of-both-worlds scenario, but the attempted union of his morganatic family and his (almost adoptive) intellectual family was simply never going to work within his societal context. It is only really a proper appreciation for his constellation of assistants on Hven that gives his whole story poignancy.

Writing teachers often say that the beginning of a story is rarely the best place to start: and so many writers would start “Brahe: The Novel” with the attempted negotiations for the wedding (and bring in all the preceding history in flashbacks etc), because this is where the wedding train (sorry!) starts to come off the rails – and where oh-so-controlling Brahe begins to lose the plot. Yet what Christianson has produced is rather more valuable than a novel: a rich, dense, vividly-detailed historical stage upon which the reader can imagine and construct their own dramas.

Overall verdict: Highly Recommended (but don’t give up in the middle!)

Voynich and Orlando Bloom…?

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According to the Holy Moly website, the continuing movie career of “dead-eyed rat boy” Orlando Bloom “is a mystery up there with the Voynich Manuscript“. Perhaps Bloom would be pleased to hear that this is an accolade similarly awarded to the poem Beowulf, in that “we can say nothing with certainty about its author, its date, its audience, its history, its context, and (therefore) its meaning.” And when Dav Yaginuma was unable to get to his Movable Type blog, he described it being “as inaccessible as the Voynich Manuscript“.

So… yes, I completely agree with you: the VMs may be the most mysterious, enigmatic & inaccessible book in the world, but it remains a lousy metaphor.

A nice day out in Oxford…

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TVE, the Spanish national TV company, wanted to interview me about my History Today telescope article. For visual props, they requested a 17th century telescope and a copy of Girolamo Sirtori’s book – fair enough. A quick search of COPAC revealed eight copies across the UK: but what jumped out at me from the list was that there was a copy at the Museum of the History of Science (“the MHS”) in Oxford, which I knew had a fair few telescopes – and so I suggested the interview be carried out there. Plus, I’d wanted to go there for years and years. 🙂

All of which is how I ended up having a nice day out in Oxford. Though the MHS has all kinds of historical scientific gubbins (particularly the basement, which vividly brought to mind Thomas Dolby and Magnus Pyke singing “all my tubes and wires and careful notes / and antiquated notions“), you can’t help but notice its collection is dominated by astrolabes, astrolabes, and more astrolabes. Did I mention they have a beautiful spherical astrolabe too? You get the basic idea: it’s Astrolabe City.

After the interview, I went downstairs to the MHS library to look at their copy of Sirtori’s book for myself (I’d only ever seen scans of it). I also played “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” with Gemma Wright, the Head Librarian: I showed her my copy of Jim Morrison’s very cool book “The Astrolabe”, while she showed me the MHS’ copy of John Lamprey’s 2007 English edition of Stoeffler’s Elucidatio (also very neat, a snip at $50 + S&H). Errrm… I’m not quite sure why I’m making myself look like “ubergeek of the week” here, so perhaps I ought to stop…

As an aside: though the steak & ale pie in The White Horse (the pub opposite the MHS) was OK, their Dark Star “Sunburst” was epic – just like being in a beer festival (only without a covers band playing “Mustang Sally” too loud, thank goodness). Just in case you ever happen to be thirsty in Oxford! 😉

“History Today” Spanish telescope article…

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At the beginning of this year, I became interested in the mystery surrounding the invention of the telescope, spurred by Richard SantaColoma’s outrageous claims that the enciphered Voynich Manuscript contained images of telescopes disguised as strange tiered albarelli. But really, who did invent the telescope? Where did it come from?

At first, I thought the answer ought to be straightforward to find out, particularly as this year (in fact this month, September 2008) marks the 400th anniversary of the supposed invention. But the more accounts I read, the less I believed.

You see, for four centuries, people have asserted that three Dutchmen suddenly invented the telescope all at the same time: but my opinion is that this is a placeholder for an explanation rather than a proper explanation – bluntly, whatever actually happened back then, you can be fairly sure that that wasn’t it.

When you strip it all down, there are basically two rival accounts to choose from: the mainstream story (“three Dutchmen invented it, take your pick whichever you prefer“) and the one offered by the Milanese rich kid courtier Girolamo Sirtori in his 1618 book “Telescopium, siue Ars perficiendi nouum illud Galilaei visorium instrumentum ad sydera”. Essentially, Sirtori said that he had gone to Gerona and met the real ‘first inventor’ of the telescope, a man called Roget of Burgundy: however, given all the uncontestable documentation in Dutch archives, historians had long thought this too marginal a research lead to pursue. And anyway, Sirtori offered no means by which Spain and Holland were connected.

However, I managed (thanks to Google and the helpful staff of the Municipal Archive in Barcelona) to dig up a transcript of an obscure 1959 radio broadcast written by a particularly dogged investigator called Jose Maria Simon de Guilleuma – an optometrist, scientific instrument collector and amateur historian from Barcelona. He was so intrigued by Sirtori’s account that he spent probably a decade or more sifting through numerous Spanish and French archival sources – and in so doing verified much of Sirtori’s story.

Fascinating stuff! And furthermore, when I combined Simon’s findings with more up-to-date research, a brand new narrative of the invention of the telescope presented itself, which I believe joins all the disparate pieces together (in a kind of intellectual history sort of way).

I wrote up my findings and reconstruction, sanity checked them with several very experienced telescope historians, and submitted them as a fairly substantial article to History Today (it’s on the front cover, you can’t miss it). Perhaps it’ll cause a stir, perhaps not – but all the same, it’s certainly a fully-rounded hypothesis which I hope will prove to be a spur to other historians and researchers to look that bit further.

There’s a short piece in the Guardian today by Ian Sample, and I did a short interview on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning: there’s also a longer piece in El Mundo, and doubtless several more to come out this week. But for the full story, you’ll have to buy a copy of History Today for yourself… 🙂

Edith Sherwood’s Voynich plants…

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A few years ago, people Googling for “Voynich” started to see a sponsored “AdWord” link on the right hand side provocatively posing the question of whether there might be some link between the Voynich Manuscript and Leonardo da Vinci, and pointing them to www.edithsherwood.com.

Naturally, I pointed out that this hypothesis was a load of rubbish, primarily because Leonardo was left-handed, and the VMs was written by someone right-handed – a pretty good prima facie reason to dismiss the claim. Edith also relied on a particularly partial reading of the month names in the zodiac section (one of them when mirrored looks a bit like “lionardo”): but failed to notice not only that they all read like Occitan month names (which there is absolutely no reason to think that a young Florentine like Leonardo would have used), but also that they were plainly written by someone else.

Still, unlike the majority of Voynich theory proponents out there, she is at least looking in the right century and (I believe) in the right physical milieu (and possibly even the right town, in a roundabout kind of way): and for that I am grateful. No, don’t be like that: I really am. honestly.

Since then, Edith’s website has had some ups and downs (of which being hacked by some kind of Russan spam harvester and having its mail inboxes overflow were probably some of the downs). But over the last month, she has returned to it and begun to fill it with many additional pages detailing her and her daughter’s thoughts on actual plants apparently matching the drawings in the VMs. They refer to some of Mr Dana Scott’s botanical identifications (but repeatedly refer to him as a her, which Dana doubtless finds irritating), though largely propose their own matches.

Unfortunately, at such a large historical distance, finding botanical equivalents is a hugely hazardous way of trying to move forward: and the secondary claim to have localized the VMs’ production to Italy and/or the Mediterranean from the resulting set of highly contentious / non-obvious plants is simply not methodologically sound, however they try to spin it.

Though many people have taken this same tack over the years, that doesn’t make it a sound methodology: in fact, the consistent lack of progress achieved by it is very probably a clear indicator that doing so is in fact brutally unsound.

What is going on? I think that what we see expressed in the herbal drawings is not metaphor (a symbolic equivalent to or conceptual parallel of an original object) so much as metonymy (where component parts stand in for the whole). One classic example linguists give of this is the way Cockney geezers call a car a motor (or, in its gloriously glottal-stopperish glory, a “mo’er”), where a key component (“the motor”) is sufficient to stand in for the whole (“the car”). You may also recall this from Alexei Sayle’s “‘‘allo John go’ a new mo’er… / I keep tropical fish / in my underpants” [etc etc]).

Despite all that, the possibility remains that Edith and Erica might have managed to make some good observations. As I’m not a botanist, all I can say is that I think their reading of colours in the VMs is once again codicologically naive (because there seem to be plenty of reasons to conclude that most of the strong “heavy” colours in the VMs were not added by the original author): which would unfortunately seem to point in the opposite direction.

“I told you I’d be back…”

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After a summer break full of dull-as-ditchwater technical woes, I’ve finally managed to restart my rusty old “Voynich News” blog (on Blogger) as the shiny new “Cipher Mysteries” blog (on WordPress). Although I’m most of the way through migrating the 200-ish old posts over *sigh*, what you’re reading now should (fingers crossed) be the first new post.

Incidentally, I’ve got a busy week coming up, with my big telescope article finally coming out in History Today – there’s plenty of media interest in it going on behind the scenes, so should be “interesting times”. I also have six book reviews on their way here (including Adam Mosley’s “Bearing the Heavens” and Richard Belfield’s “Six Unsolved Ciphers”), as well as a whole heap of meaty historical cipher stuff to cover: but please bear with me while I get this new site straight – getting it all ship-shape again will take a few days…

In the meantime, you might enjoy the funny picture I put up on the Cipher Mysteries ‘about’ page… Enjoy! 🙂

Top 10 Voynich Manuscript theories, decoded…

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Symmetrical and repetitive prey behaviour is the key tool exploited by hunter gatherers: and so it goes with Voynich Manuscript websites. Once you’ve seen the same damaged pattern a few times, the shared wonky rationale behind it is usually fairly transparent.

And so here is a suggested critical reader for those fruity (but decidedly wobbly) jellies we all love to dip our fingers in: Voynich theories. Make of them all what you will…

(1) Any theory involving time travel or aliens
Subtext: “My theory has so many holes in, it would need two series of Doctor Who to fix them all.”

(2) Any theory involving Jesuits
Subtext: “I prefer reading 18th century fiction to 20th century non-fiction.”

(3) Any theory involving China
Subtext: “What do you mean, Jacques Guy wasn’t being serious?”

(4) Any theory involving the New World
Subtext: “I’ve got the hots for that Brazilian woman. What do you mean, she’s not female?”

(5) Any theory where the VMs is written in lightly disguised Hebrew
Subtext: “I wish I had read the Bible when I was young, instead of taking so many drugs.”

(6) Any theory where the VMs is written in a mixture of European languages
Subtext: “I put so much time into learning those languages, they have to be useful soon, right?”

(7) Any theory where the VMs contains alchemical or heretical secrets
Subtext: “Lynn Thorndike’s books are far too heavy for my weak arms to lift.”

(8) Any theory where the VMs describes telescopes, microscopes, or computers
Subtext: “I can rewrite the technological history of the world howsoever I please; and anyone who objects is just a moany old loser.”

(9) Any theory where the VMs is a hoax, channeled writing, glossolalia, etc
Subtext: “I can say anything I like about the VMs, and there’s absolutely nothing you idiot historians can do about it, ner ner ner.”

And finally…

(10) Any theory where the VMs was written by an architect
Subtext: “I see everything in the VMs as rational and ordered, however irrational and disordered everyone else may think it is. Perhaps I should lighten up.”

PS: because the torrent of VMs-related news has dwindled to a thin trickle over recent weeks, I’m taking the rest of August off – see you again in September! 😉

Poisonous ink warning…

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Here’s a quicky news story from the Mysterytopia mystery news-clipping website.

Medieval bones from six different Danish cemeteries reveal that monks who
wrote Biblical texts and other religious materials may have been exposed to
toxic mercury, which was used to formulate just one of their ink colors:
red.

So, if you do happen to get a chance to look at the VMs at the Beinecke, remember not to lick your fingers after handling pages with red paint on…

You may possibly remember a similar monks-dying-with-black-tongues-and-a-black-finger schtick from Umberto Eco’s “Name of the Rose”. Doubtless our erudite semiotics professor friend lifted the idea from a nameless footnote somewhere in his personal Borgesian library: but all the same, it’s nice to read about it for real, right?