The Glut of Somerton Men…

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The Somerton Man, found dead by the sea wall on Somerton Beach in the early morning of 1st December 1948, has had innumerable speculative theories pinned to his unnamed corpse over the years.

Was he a Soviet spy, an international man of mystery, a former lover, an errant parent, a Third Officer, a gangster, a baccarat school nitkeeper, an interstate car thief, a jockey, an accountant, a ballet dancer, a transvestite, a gold prospector, a homesick Norwegian, or a whatever-happens-to-take-your-fancy-tomorrow-morning kind of guy? The list keeps on growing.

But why so many theories?

John Does & Jane Does

In the wider world of cold cases, plenty of other John / Jane Does are arguably every bit as mysterious as the Somerton Man.

Yet if you’re expecting there to be a (socially-distanced, mask-wearing) queue of people stretching down the high street waiting to bend my weary Cipher Mysteries ear with their tediously touching theories about the Isdal Woman, for example, you’ll be looking in vain. (There’s a nice news story about her teeth here, by the way.)

Oh, and despite Wired’s nice story about the unidentified hiker known as “Mostly Harmless”, I haven’t so far seen a torrent of theories speculating that he was an Anglo-American Douglas Adams fan obsessed by Marvin the Paranoid Android. Or a gold prospector. Or a car thief. Or whatever.

“The first ten million years were the worst,” said Marvin, “and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”

So the issue here is more about why those others don’t seem to attract even a fraction of the theories that he does. What’s the difference that leads people’s minds to conjure up such a glut of (possible) Somerton Men?

Life & Death

Even by the 1949 inquest, a good deal was known about the Somerton Man’s physical condition and the details of his death:

  • “[S]mall vessels not commonly observed in the brain were easily discernible with congestion” – I believe this would have taken a considerable time to build up, perhaps years?
  • “The spleen was strikingly large and firm about 3 times normal size” – this too would have taken some time to happen, perhaps months?
  • “Both lungs were dark with congestion, but otherwise normal.” Like most adults back then, the Somerton Man was a smoker, so this was very probably a long-term consequence of his smoking.
  • “The stomach was deeply congested, and there was superficial redness, most marked in the upper half. Small haemorrhages were present beneath the mucosa. There was congestion in the 2nd half of the duodenum continuing through the thin part. There was blood mixed with the food in the stomach.” The blood in his stomach showed that he had almost certainly been convulsively sick (though, oddly, there was no vomit by the body or on his clothes or his oddly-shiny shoes);
  • “The heart, if anything, was contracted […] I am quite convinced that the death could not have been natural, as there is such a conflict of findings with the normal heart.” A poison or misadministered drug was suggested, though all attempts to detect what that was unfortunately failed.
  • “There was a small patch of dried saliva at the right of the mouth. The impression was that it ran out of his mouth some time before death when he was probably unable to swallow it, probably when his head was hanging to the side. It would run vertically. It had run down diagonally down [sic] the right cheek.“
  • “The post mortem rigidity was intense, and there was a deep lividity behind particularly above the ears and neck.” Blood pooling at the back of his neck was inconsistent with his having been propped up against the sea wall at the back of the beach prior to his death.
  • His body had been carefully posed, but with various key elements of his clothing (like a wallet, id card, money, hat, etc) missing

It was hard to avoid the conclusion that poison (or drugs) had been the cause of death; and also that many of the “difficulties” and apparent inconsistencies would disappear if the man had previously died elsewhere, and had then been carried to the beach by person or persons unknown.

But with nobody stepping forward to (successfully) identify the body, this whole line of reasoning merely raised at least as many questions as it answered: and so the inquest was not able to reach a helpful conclusion.

And that, sad as it may be, is still very largely where we are some 70+ years later. Something bad had happened, sure; but without being able to flag it as murder, misadventure, accident or suicide, what’s a coroner to do, eh?

(Human) Nature Abhors a Vacuum

Aristotle famously wrote about the Horror Vacui, i.e. the idea that Nature abhors a vacuum so much that it causes things to fill the void. (Though even fifteenth century engineers knew that this principle had its limits.)

To my eyes, though, it seems that Human Nature abhors a vacuum far more than poor old Mother Nature does. That is, where there is a causal void – i.e. a lack of explanation as to the cause – the runaway horses in our minds gallop and leap impossible fences to construct explanations.

In the case of the Somerton Man, none of the sudden death tropes of the day so familiar to newspaper readers were present – no gangland execution, no violent lover’s argument, no business betrayal, no drowning, no falling drunk down a set of stairs, no being hit by a car. In short: no smoking gun.

Ultimately, a quiet death on a beach – however posed or artificial the Somerton Man’s mise-en-scene may have seemed to those looking carefully – was a disappointment to those hoping for the theatrics of violence.

And so I think it is not the Somerton Man’s actual death that so inspired the theories so much as the absence of explicit forensic theatre. He died cleanly, with nicely groomed fingernails, and wearing shiny shoes: which is all wrong on some level.

Evidence of Absence

But above all else, I think the most disturbing thing about the Somerton Man’s death lies in none of the details that were noted, but instead in the fact that – barring a little bit of sand at the back of his head – he seems to have had no real forensic contact with his (supposed) place of death.

Really, the scenario where someone undergoes the trauma of convulsive death throes while laying on a beach and yet somehow manages to avoid ending up covered in vomit and sand makes no sense to me whatsoever. This is a direct affront to Locard’s Exchange Principle, right?

So can we please call a halt on the whole “romantic loner suicide” scenario? The whole idea that he somehow travelled to Somerton Beach just to die on his own simply makes no physical sense.

Similarly, calling him “The Unknown Man” makes no sense to me either. Rather, I suspect that he spent his last hours in a nearby house, laid out on his back on someone’s bed before dying there, and then being left there for a few hours with his head tilted backwards over the edge (while the blood pooled in his neck).

It also seems highly likely to me that people from that house tidied him up (even cleaning and shining his shoes), before carrying him to the beach and posing his body against the sea wall there.

Essentially, if the Somerton Man did not die on the beach, we can be sure that the people who knew him – and who brought him there – have carefully airbrushed themselves out of the picture. He was very much known.

The Missing Thread

In many ways, I’m not that interested in all the different people the Somerton Man might have been. The glut of possible Somerton Men we have are only ever hypothetical, a long row of Pepper’s ghosts we summon up to try to work out what happened, like CSI bullet trajectory sticks.

And yet in some ways we know almost too much about the mundane mechanics of it all: perhaps our dead man even had his final pasty at Glenelg’s All Night Cafe.

In the end, all we’re missing is the narrative thread of a single life that binds all these pieces together. It’s like we’re trying to solve an upside-down jigsaw, where all our attempts to be scientific and rigorous have failed to turn any of the pieces the right way up.

But even if – mirabile dictu – exhumed DNA magically hands us a name on a silver dish, will we really be able to completely reconstruct the jigsaw’s picture side?

Having spent so many years on this man’s trail, I can’t help but suspect that we won’t. Perhaps some secrets don’t want to be known: not all Ariadne’s threads are there to be followed.

The Nageon de l’Estangs in 1760…

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Here’s an official document from 1760 from the Mauritian Archives relating to the Nageon de l’Estang family property:

(Click on the image to get a higher resolution JPEG.)

And here’s a transcription very largely provided by Ruby Novacna, with additional parallel transcriptions from Anthony Lallaizon and Thomas below – thanks very much to all three of you for this excellent help!

Rather than modernise the text, my preference (as per Ruby’s excellent work) is to try to stay close to the original spelling, though anyone wanting to grasp what it means might prefer Anthony’s and Thomas’ versions in the comments below:

1. Le conseil Superieur de l’Isle de France a tous Presents et
2. aVenir Salut. Scavoir faisons qu’en consequence des Ordres de
3. la compagnie inseréé dans la deliberation du deux Janvier M
4. Sept cent cinquante trois [i.e. 2nd Jan 1753] et de ladite Deliberation Nous Avons au Nom
5. De Messieurs les Sindics et Directeurs De la Compagnie Des Indes
6. Concedé et Delaissé Concedons et Delaissons Des maintenant et p[our] toujours
7. Par ces presentes au sieur André Nagëon De l’Etang fils Du sieur
8. Bernardin Nagëon Son père De son vivant officier Des Vaisseaux
9. De Côte p[our] la Compagnie ledit André Nagëon Demeurant chez M[a]d[am]e
10. Sa Mere, En ce port et Paroisse Louis a ce present et acceptant P[our] Luy
11. Ces hoirs et ayant cause la propriété D’un terrain De treize toises
12. Deux Pied(s) Delarge Sur Vingt Six toises quatre pied(s) De proffondeur
13. Scitué sur le Rempart De la grande Montagne n[uméro]te 130. Borné D’un
14. Coté par une rue qui conduit alad[i]te montagne Dautre Coté Par…
15. D’un bord un autrerue qui conduit Dans l’Enfoncement et d’autre bout par
(16. Une rue Entredeux)
16. Le Sieur (?)
17. Le tous suivant le plan corigé par M Magon (?) Directeur et Commd[an]t gen[er]al
18. Led[i]t terrain accordéé au S[ieur] Nageon fils par Ordonnance Du Conseil Du
19. Sept may Mil sept cent Soixante [7 May 1760] Pour Par led[i]t Nageon fils Ses enfans
20. Hoirs, ou heritiers meme ceux D’iciluy ayant cause jouir faire et Disposer
21. Dudis terrain comme la chose luy appartenant en toute propriété roturière
22. Et néant moins reconnaitre Messieurs De la Compagnie Des Indes comme
23. Seuls Seigneurs Directs, Suzerains Hauts moyens et Bas justiciers et p[our] ce
24. est sujet atous droits de justice et Banalité quils jugerons a propos D’Etablir
25. Sera tenu ledis Sieur D’Enclore et faire Batir sur ledit terrain de faire
26. Couvrir les Batiments qu’il y fera construire En planches, Bardeaux ou
27. Arg[?] , aux termes presents par les Reglements, s’oblige de payer par
28. annéé sur les ordres et dans les tems qui seront prescrits par le Conseil
29. Douze deniers De premier Cens reputé cens commune et imprescriptible
30. Tant p[our] le fond que pour laquotité lequel Emportera lod(s) et ventes
31. S’aizinnes [saisines] et amendes, au Désir de la coutume de Paris comme aussy
32. D’executer Exactement toutes les Ordonnances et reglements faits et a faire
33. Par la suite par la compag[ni]e ou le Conseil de passer au domaine de la
34. Compag[ni]e. Declaration et reconnaissance dudit terrain et des droits
35. Cy dessus Stipuler le tout a peine de Nullité de la presente Concession De
36. Reunion au domaine Dudit Emplacement Sur le Simple Requisition du
37. Procureur General du Roy Sans estre par la compag[ni]e tenu Daucunes
38. Indemnité. Ny formalité de justice Ny Sans que ladite peine Ny rien
39. Du contenu en la presente Concession Puisse estre reputé comminatoire mais
40. De rigueur étant la condition precise du don gratuit que la compag[ni]e
41. En fait et p(9) que ces presentes ayant leur forces et valeur ou marges
42. D’Expedition d’icelle sera apposéé le sceau de la compagnie des Indes
43. Donné au Port Louis de l’Isle de France le dix de may mil sept cent soix[an]te [i.e. 20 May 1760]
44. Et a Signé
45. Nageondeleteang
46. ? Lejuge ?
47. ?

Oh, and here’s a close-up of the signature at the bottom left, which I read as “Nageondeléteang”, yet another variant spelling to add to the list *sigh*:

Hidden treasure, Pointe de Vacoas, and 300 dead dodos…

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In my last Cipher Mysteries post, I floated the idea that when Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang famously wrote that…

j’ai naufragé dans une crique près des Vaquois

… he may have been referring not to the town or inland area called Vacoas, but rather to Pointe de Vacoas on Mauritius’ South-Eastern coast, which was close to the half plot of land he owned. According to his Will (BN1), what Bernardin did immediately after being “shipwrecked in a creek” was:

j’ai remonté une rivière et déposé dans un caveau
les richesses de l'Indus

So: might there be a cave next to a creek not far from Pointe de Vacoas? Generations of Mauritian treasure hunters must surely have put the same two and two together to get the same bejewelled four, right?

But perhaps more importantly, you might be asking what on earth this post has to do with three hundred dead dodos? Has Cipher Mysteries been taken over, as my son asked, by some kind of “ARK: Survival Evolved” meme?

Photo by BazzaDaRambler – Oxford University Museum of Natural History

No, this post is genuinely about treasure and dodos. Really. Read on.

The Creek

Having looked at a fair few historical maps of Mauritius, it seems to my eyes that there was only ever one winding little creek near Pointe de Vacoas. Rather than starting from beside the Point itself (as per the cadastral map I mentioned in the last post)…

…the creek actually starts a little to the side, though it does then indeed kick sideways across towards the Mare du Tabac, which became the Union Vale Sugar Estate:

Source: Mauritius Chamber of Agriculture

In this 1880 map, you can see “Pte Vacoa” in the bottom right leading round to a small river (the “Ruis[seau] des Marres”) that winds its way inland, before finishing up by the Union Vale railway station (at centre left).

Union Vale, 1880 map of Mauritius

OK, while I’m not saying that Ruisseau des Marres is ‘definitely’ the stream / creek that Bernardin was referring to, what I am saying is that it seems (to my eyes) to be a very strong candidate indeed. For if you don’t look there, where else would you to go looking first, hmmm?

Going over the map carefully, you should also be able to see the area around the Ruisseau des Marres is called “LES MARRES”. There are also a couple of odd-looking features on the map labelled as “Mare …”, the right of which is labelled as “Mare aux [something] or Dodo“. Unsurprisingly, we’ll be returning to that location before very long…

The Cave

I first started thinking about Mauritian lava tubes back in 2016, and have never really stopped. This is because Bernardin’s second letter BN2) runs:

l'entrée d'une caverne jadis formé par un bras
de rivière passant sous la falaise et bouchée
par les corsaires pour y mettre leur trésor et
qui est le caveau désigné par mon testament

…which I think sounds exactly like a description of a lava tube.

Here’s a rather nice 1820s drawing by de Sainson of a Mauritian lava tube in the Grande Riviere quartier (not too far away) that I previously mentioned in a separate post:

Though the lava tube or lava blister we’re looking for must surely have been more modestly sized than this epic specimen, it’s the same basic idea.

Mare Aux Songes

In a rather charming 2007 New Yorker article called “Digging For Dodos“, we meet a gaggle of dodo experts and enthusiasts, all inspired by the Mare Aux Songes – a (formerly) boggy pond in the South-East of Mauritius. This site was discovered in 1865 by local teacher George Clarke, after his thirty year search for dodo bones.

In fact, the Mare Aux Songes ended up yielding far more dodo bones (from more than 300 separate dodo skeletons!) than everywhere else combined. Hence even the dodo skeleton at Oxford University Museum of Natural History (yes, the photo at the top of the post) was from the Mare Aux Songes.

In response to a malaria epidemic a few years later, British engineers covered the whole boggy area with concrete to prevent mosquitoes breeding: the Mare Aux Songes then spent most of a century out of reach.

The experts (in the New Yorker article) had formed a group called the 2006 Mauritius Dodo Expedition, with the idea of revisiting the Mare Aux Songes with a more modern scientific approach, to find more about dodos. Specifically, they wondered whether they might find multiple historical layers of dodo remains. But what they actually found was that all the dodo bone fragments seem to have come from a relatively short period around 4000 years ago.

What exactly had happened? The report outlines the group’s conclusions:

The geomorphology of the rock valley, in particular being bounded by steep cliffs, suggests collapse of a pre-existing cavity in the subsurface. In volcanic settings rock valleys generally evolve from the collapse of lava tunnels (e.g. Peterson et al., 1994), and these systems are common in (SW) Mauritius (Middleton, 1995; Saddul, 2002; Janoo, 2005), suggesting that the MAS rock valley was created in a similar way. Therefore at some point after 120 ka, large-scale roof collapse led to the formation of a dry valley at MAS (Fig. 4A).

“Mid-Holocene vertebrate bone Concentration-Lagerstatte on oceanic island
Mauritius provides a window into the ecosystem of the dodo (Raphus cucullatus)”

So, the basic narrative they reconstructed was this:

  • the Mare Aux Songes had started out as a lava blister (i.e. a void inside the volcanic basalt) with a diameter of ten or more meters;
  • the lava blister’s roof had weathered and collapsed, leaving behind an exposed hemispheric ‘bowl’;
  • there had been a long dry period, perhaps across a couple of centuries;
  • during that dry period, a large number of animals (mainly turtles, but a few dodos too) had found themselves trapped inside the steep-walled bowl; and
  • this was where, unable to climb back up its steep walls to escape, the three hundred dodos died.

And you will surely be unsurprised to find that the Mare Aux Songes mentioned on the map above is (or was) the boggy pond that formed in a roofless lava blister about 1km NNW of Pointe de Vacoas (as per the 1880 map).

Local Ponds and Caves in 1838

The best historical source on the geography of the local area I have found so far is the (1838) book “Statistique de l’Ile Maurice et ses dépendances” by M. le Baron d’Unienville.

Helpfully, the Baron lists the ponds (“mares”) of most interest in this quartier (my loose translation) [pp.139-140]:

The Mare la Violette, on Lahausse's land, yields a lot
of water, nevertheless sometimes drying up, but only
very rarely; its waters drain into le Bouchon.

The Mares du Tabac spring from between the Toussaint,
Avice and Buttié plots; they provide eels [anguilles],
shrimps [chevrettes], and water snails [corbeaux]; they
drain out into the Cul du Chaland, towards le Bouchon.

The Anse-Jonchais, Bambous and Albert ponds sometimes
dry up, but all provide very good water.

On M. Fenonillot's land, there is a natural pond three
to four hundred fathoms long by one hundred wide, becoming
up to 25 feet deep in the rainy season, with water springing
from the earth. This pond dries up in the dry season.

Interestingly, the Baron didn’t even consider the Mare Aux Songes to be worth reporting on, presumably because it was so marshy and boggy that you couldn’t get any useful water from it.

But more interestingly, he goes immediately on to discuss the caverns of the quartier (again, please forgive my loose translation) [pp.140-141]:

This district is very cavernous in places, especially towards
the coast going round from Chasur to the point.

In several parts of the Mares-du-Tabac area, the ground
resonates hollowly under the footsteps of men. The artificial
excavations present there the certainty of a great upheaval
formerly caused by underground fires, since in addition to
volcanic stones whose soil is covered, the layers of earth
are firstly topsoil, then tuff [a light, porous rock formed
of volcanic ash], then earth again in unequal layers always
interspersed with volcanic stones.

The Pointe du Souffleur offers a rather singular phenomenon,
also found in other regions; the water pushing violently into
the cavities of this point, emerges in a jet of water rising
to a rather great height through a hole two to three inches
in diameter, with the compressed air producing a noise similar
to that of a strong forge bellows.

There are several excavations in this area that are believed
to go through to the sea, such as the Fanchon hole and the
Maignan hole. The first is located on the Chemin du Port, home
of Sieur Leroux, and the second on the Maignan land. Tests
have been carried out to map the underground routes and
interconnections between these holes; but those tests were
unsatisfactory, because the lack of air causes lights to
be extinguished beyond a certain distance.

Sieur Charroux, among others, spent twenty-four hours lost in
the labyrinths of these caves, and considered himself very
fortunate to find the opening through which he had entered
and which may be twenty feet deep.

All in all, I think there is ample reason to believe that Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’s description of (what sounds to me like) a lava blister or lava tube beneath a cliff is entirely consistent with the geology of the area around Mare la Violette.

It may sound overly romantic, but it seems certain to me that there are still as yet unmapped voids under the ground; and it might well be that one of these once had a concealed entrance. Perhaps the notion that pirates used these voids is just a campfire story (it wouldn’t be the first or the last): but nonetheless, voids there were.

The Cave Nobody Found

The local landscape circa even 1900 was very different on the surface to how it was circa 1750. Much of the area had been razed for growing sugar cane; estates and railways had been built; marshes had been filled and capped in response to the Epidemics of Mauritius; and so forth.

And so by the time of the great explosion of interest in Mauritian treasure hunting in the early 20th century, the area along the Ruisseau des Mares was probably close to unrecognizable. Not that this probably did anything to stop the grimly determined treasure hunters of the era with their fake maps, rumours, hunches, dynamite and shovels. Who knows what features they blew up in their hunger for buried gold?

Now a large part of the same general zone is being redeveloped by Omnicane – a company formed from Mon Trésor & Mon Désert sugar companies, among others – into the Mon Trésor Airport City project. So perhaps the cave we’re looking for has already been unknowingly flattened and redeveloped ten times over, who can tell?

If (and I happily admit that it’s a big if) Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang’s treasure is still in the cave he left it in nearly three hundred years ago, then the way forward is surely through GPR (ground penetrating radar), tracking along the land beside the eastern bank of the Ruisseau des Mares. But it is (and probably will always be) a needle-shaped void in a lava haystack.

Still, even though it took George Clarke thirty years to find his cache of three hundred dead dodos, who would now say that his search wasn’t worth it? And surely that’s how Mauritian treasure hunters feel (more or less), right?

Even so, rather than hiring a load of GPR equipment, I have to point out that you would (thanks to the French treasure hunting laws that Mauritius inherited) probably be better off instead walking up and down beside that river bank until you fell down a hole into a long lost treasure cave.

As they say in the theatre, break a leg. 😉

Finishing With A Song

It’s rare that you can write a blog post that covers an unsolved historical mystery and yet brings in so many nice historical angles along the way: rarer still that you can do all that and end on a song.

So here’s my cousin Phil Alexander (AKA “Philfy Phil”, recorded at The Goat, St Albans in 2010) with “Dido Dies”, one of his… errrm… cleaner parody songs. The first verse and chorus are about dead dodos, and you already know the tune, so feel free to sing along, you know you want to:

The final dodo walked the earth four hundred years ago
No more flapping wings and croaking; the dodo, yes, has croaked
He’s in the doodoo
He lies extinct
No more delicious in Mauritius
Or at least that’s what I thinkt

Then Salvador Dali died in 1989
With the oddest of moustaches
Like his anti-artist predecessor, Dada
Painting stuff
Did he look back and then realize he’d painted quite enough?
And well… let’s face it, most of it was guff

Dada died, Dali died, da dodo died
Dada died, Dali died, da dodo died
D’oh, da dodo died

“Carte générale de l’Isle de France avec le détail de son Terrier et les noms des habitans par numéros”…

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This “Carte générale” is a really great 18th century map of Mauritius held at the BNF, one that Cipher Mysteries commenter Anthony Lallaizon alerted me to. The BNF shelfmark is “département Cartes et plans, GE C-9307“.

Note that the BNF also has a second map of Mauritius that seems to be an updated copy of the first map, but with the owners’ names [rather than reference numbers into an index] inserted directly into the map. BNF shelfmark: “département Cartes et plans, GE SH 18 PF 219 DIV 2 P 24“. (The plots in this seem to my eyes to be a little more subdivided, which is why I suspect it’s slightly later.)

What is interesting, as Anthony is clearly aware, is that these two maps offer snapshots into the world of Mauritius at around the period we’re interested in (if we’re interested in the Nageon de l’Estang family, that is).

So, let’s dive deep into these maps and see what pearls we can retrieve…

The Nageon Plot

As Indian Ocean treasure hunters have known for over a century, the will signed by “Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang” begins (my rough translation):

I’m about to enlist to defend the motherland, and will without much doubt be killed, so am making my will. I give my nephew the reserve officer Jean Marius Nageon de l’Estang the following: a half-lot in La Chaux River district of Grand-Port, île de France […]

Now, as most people who have ever gone hunting for historical cadastral maps (i.e. maps that show the “extent, value, and ownership of land”, typically so that the owners can be taxed) will tell you, this can be a very hit and miss affair. (Errrm… mostly miss.)

Personally, I’d long ago given up on the faint hope that there might be any actual cadastral map of 18th century Mauritius out there: the best I had hoped to find was a later will referring back to an earlier (long lost) will.

But… what we have in GE C-9307 is indeed a cadastral map, nicely indexed. And in that index, just as sweetly as you could wish for, is “574 Nageon”.

Ah, you may reasonably ask, so where is this Nageon plot in modern-day Mauritius? Well, carefully aligning the map so that we can see (most of) the rivers depicted above, I think we can locate this plot extremely exactly.

Yes, the plot is now part of the runway and plane parking area of Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam International Airport, which is Mauritius’ main international airport.

So, it turns out that pretty much everyone who has flown to Mauritius from abroad will have passed directly over the Nageon de l’Estang land before they’ve even got their bag down from the overhead locker.

Which is nice.

Other Names on the Map

Anthony points to other possibly connected names that appear in GE C-9307’s index, such as 571 Pitel and 630 Clergeac.

If you had (quite understandably) forgotten why, a 2016 Cipher Mysteries post flagged that André Ambroise Nageon de l’Estang married “Perrine Clerjean” (which was probably “Clergeac”) in Port Louis on 14th January 1766; and then (after her death) married Mathurine Louise Françoise Pitel in Grand Port on 13th June 1768.

To this illustrious list I’d perhaps add quite a different name to conjure with: 467 Levasseur (there in both maps). (A piratical relation? Or no relation at all? You choose!)

Finally, I also noticed an intriguing detail just along the coast: Pte du Vaquoas (which is still marked as “Pointe Vacoas” on modern maps).

Could this be what Bernardin Nageon de l’Estang was referring to when he wrote:

j’ai naufragé dans une crique près des Vaquois

The reason I ask is that even though Mauritius has a modern town Vacoas-Phoenix (right in the middle of the island, close to Curepipe), that town does not seem to appear in these two 18th century maps at all.

So, could it be that Bernardin was simply referring to Pointe Vacoas? Sadly, because the description then goes on to describe climbing up a cliff…

remonte la rivière, remonte une falaise en allant vers l'Est

…and the area around Pointe Vacoas looks extremely flat, the odds that this is true seem small to me. But even so, I thought I ought to mention it. 😉

Domingo Delgado and the “Amelia Manuscript”…

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You might be interested to know that an interview with (relatively new) Voynich researcher Domingo Delgado was posted to YouTube a few days ago. In this, Delgado describes how he thinks the Voynich Manuscript was:

  • made in Italy (because he thinks the handwriting is distinctively Italian);
  • made in the 15th century (largely because of the same ‘4o’ pattern I went on about in The Curse of the Voynich back in 2006);
  • written in Latin (because that’s what educated Italians used back then); and
  • enciphered using a combination of substitution and “permutation” (I’m pretty sure he means ‘transposition’) tricks (though he doesn’t want to give any details away just yet, his book – to be published next year – will teach everyone how to decrypt Voynichese for themselves)

Having previously (in 2019) concluded that the Voynich’s author was Leon Battista Alberti, Delgado now thinks for 100% sure that it was funded by Federico da Montefeltro (though he doesn’t have any more detail than this).

He doesn’t yet know the author’s name, because the text’s combination of substitution and transposition means that it’s taking him a while to decrypt its text: so far, he has only managed to decrypt a few lines at a time.

Delgado also seems a bit cross that existing Voynich Manuscript researchers don’t seem to have taken his work seriously – in other words, that he hasn’t been given the seat at the top table he so rightly deserves.

(Hot tip: there is no top table – we all sit on the floor.)

f6r = Groundsel?

His decryption process seems largely to have been to look at the top two lines of herbal pages to see if they contain a tell-tale Latin plant-name that has been manipulated in some way. His key example seems to be f6r, which he says discusses groundsel, and how the plant is attacked by mites.

Groundsel certainly does have a long herbal medicinal history: it was mentioned by Pliny (who called it ‘senecio‘) and by Dioscorides (who recommended it as a cure for kidney-stones). Nowadays, we know that even though canaries do like a nice bit of groundsel seed, humans who take too much of it may well get liver damage. [So perhaps we’ll yet see the Donald recommending it as a coronavirus cure.]

My guess is that Delgado was looking specifically at the last word of the second line (EVA chotols), which he has matched with the -e-e– of ‘senecio’:

My guess is also that Delgado thought that he had seen a reference to “(minutum) reddas”, which some may know from Luke 12:59: dico tibi non exies inde donec etiam novissimum minutum reddas = [King James Bible] “I tell thee, thou shalt not depart thence, till thou hast paid the very last mite” (i.e. the last cent, penny, or farthing). And no, I can’t easily guess which Voynichese word of f6r Delgado thought was “reddas”.

It’s true that spider mites are among the (many, many, many) things that attack senecio vulgaris. But honestly, were any fifteenth century gardeners really that sophisticated about what was (and is) basically a weed?

Perhaps there’s an outside chance that this f6r identification is correct, but to be honest, I’m really not seeing even that much so far.

Nine-Rosette Castle = Amelia?

The decryption that Delgado seems most impressed with is that of the famous castle in the nine-rosette page:

He was so surprised to find the name of the town with the castle – Amelia (in Umbria, formerly Ameria) on this page that he plans to title his book “The Voynich Amelia Manuscript” (i.e. with a deliberate strikethrough).

As justification, he says that the text describes a “carpet of roses” (presumably that’s what the swirl of stars in the middle of the rosette represents?), and that even today there’s an Umbrian festival that has elaborate carpets of roses (he says this is “Spoleto”, but I’m pretty sure he means the Infiorate di Spello).

Spello does indeed have quite a splendidly beautiful festival, even if many of the designs do seem to my eyes to be a little too eager to combine 1960s psychedelia with 1980s crop circles:

Of course, Cipher Mysteries readers will immediately recognise this very specific point in a Voynich theory blog post: the first mention of a specific historical phenomenon. So yes, this is where I would normally point out that the first document mentioning decorating the streets of Spello with flowers (and not even with carpets of flowers) only dates back to 1831.

As a result, my confidence that this is a real decryption is as close to zero as makes no difference, sorry.

BTW, I suspect it is the second word of the Voynichese label just above the castle that Delgado reads as “amelia”, but it’s probably not hugely relevant:

Why a Hoopoe’s Heart?

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Everyone knows Macbeth’s witch’s ingredient list:

Fillet of a fenny snake, / In the cauldron boil and bake;   
Eye of newt, and toe of frog, / Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,   
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting, / Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing, […]

While real medieval recipes were hardly averse to a bit of mystification, I think it’s fair to say that – by and large – most seem to have been intended to be achievable. But… why do so many of them include a hoopoe’s heart?

It’s a vague question that I’ve had lurking at the back of my mind for ages, that lurched abruptly forward yesterday when I saw a news story about how a hoopoe had been sighted in York for the first time in forty years. Here’s Jon Noble’s nice photograph of the York hoopoe:

So I went on a short journey into the archives to try to answer the historical question: why a hoopoe’s heart?

Hoopoe History

Perhaps the best source on everything to do with the hoopoe is John Gotthold Kunstmann’s (1938) University of Chicago dissertation “The Hoopoe : A Study in European Folklore“. Kunstmann traces the pictorial history of the hoopoe all the way back to Ancient Egypt and Crete; notes references to it in Ovid, Pliny, Pausanias, Isidore (via Hrabanus Maurus), and even Rabelais; and discusses folk tales about ‘how the hoopoe got its crest‘ (though e.g. it seems a tad unlikely that Solomon gave the hoopoe its crest because of its hatred of women, etc).

Kunstmann’s chapter II is where things start to get more meaty. The (originally African) hoopoe appears in “Egyptian (Demotic), Coptic, Graeco-Egyptian medical prescriptions, in Pliny […]” etc, all the way up to R. James’ (1752) Pharmacopeia Universalis (2nd edition).

Pretty much every part of the hoopoe was considered to have magical properties, along with its eggs, its ashes, and even a magical stone called “lapis quirinis” (or quiritia, cinreis, withopfenstain) fabled to be found in its nest.

Hoopoe Hearts

The heart of the hoopoe is said (in Konrad von Megenburg’s Buch der Natur, which we’ve seen here a number of times of late) to be used “by magicians and by people who perform evil deeds secretly”. Kunstmann goes on:

Hans Vintler in Pluemen der tugent informs us that the hoopoe’s heart, placed upon a sleeper at night, will cause him to reveal hidden things. According to a MS from Stendal, the hoopoe’s or the treefrog’s heart, if carried on one’s person, will cause everybody to love one. The same MS advises drying and pulverizing the heart of the hoopoe and placing it under one’s head at night, in order to dream about the location of hidden treasure. Johannes Ravisius Textor mentions the heart of the hoopoe as good for stitches in the side.

(Note that Textor was just reprising Pliny)

Voynich Manuscript researcher Marco Ponzi also recently mentioned a hoopoe heart in a post on magic rings:

Laura Mitchell (Cultural Uses of Magic in Fifteenth-Century England) quotes a spell in MS Ashmole 1435 in which the heart of a hoopoe grants prophetic dreams (Cor ypapa supponatur sub capite dormientis et sompniabit futuram).

Eating a Hoopoe Heart

The Papyri Graecae Magicae talks about eating the honeyed heart of a hoopoe at full moon. So the idea of eating a hoopoe heart has a very long pedigree indeed.

Václav Havel’s (1984) “Thriller” begins (and, if you read it all, ends) with:

BEFORE ME LIES the famous Occult Philosophy of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, where I read that the ingestion of the living (and if possible still beating) heart of a hoopoe, a swallow, a weasel, or a mole will bestow upon one the gift of prophecy.

Agrippa’s ultimate source might be the one mentioned by Richard Kieckhefer in his “Magic in the Middle Ages” (p.142):

[…] to learn all that happens on earth, the secrets of everyone’s mind, and even heavenly things, one manuscript [British Library Ms Sloane 3132 fol. 56v] recommends beheading a hoopoe at sunrise, under a new moon, and swallowing its heart while it is still palpitating.

(Though it might be less fuss to just get a Twitter account.)

In the same footnote, Kieckhefer mentions Bodleian MS e Mus. 210 fol. 186v: “to learn the language of the birds, take the heart of a hoopoe or the tongue of a kite and put it in honey for three days and nights, then place it under your tongue“.

Dirty Hoopoes

Yet the hoopoe was also considered a filthy bird, and was included in the list of “birds of abomination” in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 (Kunstmann p.44) “whose flesh must not be eaten”. Even Aristotle passed forward various explanations for the hoopoe’s bad smell (which is genuinely the case, it’s sadly not a very hygienic bird).

Even though Kunstmann doesn’t say so, I suspect this makes the idea of consuming a (dirty) hoopoe’s heart as part of a magical recipe also (because it was a a “bird of abomination”) transgressive.

And yet because of the hoopoe’s magical associations and powers, people were clearly happy to do that. Even if they didn’t first store it (as per Havel’s “Thriller”) in a Thermos flask. 🙂

Typex seen through code-breaking eyes…

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Previous posts here have established (I believe) that the WW2 Pigeon Cipher was almost certainly encrypted using the British Typex cipher machine. So I think it would be a good idea to look at this message from a Typex code-breaker’s point of view.

While Kelly Chang’s (2012) master’s project on the cryptanalysis of Typex is a very useful resource here, I think it’s fair to say that she confines her efforts to purely numerical, permutational attacks. But because she doesn’t try to peer inside an actual ciphertext, I think it’s also fair to say that she doesn’t really look at Typex from a practical code-breaker’s perspective.

So, let’s get to it: let’s (temporarily) close our mathematical eyes, and instead try to look at a Typex message (the WW2 pigeon cipher) through our code-breaking eyes.

The Typex Keyboard

Whereas Enigma was just 26 plain letters A-to-Z (no numbers, no spaces, no umlauts, and not even a special Swastika symbol), Typex had two modes: Letter Mode and Figure Mode. And so the Typex keyboard (below image from Crypto Museum, or you can play with a real-looking one at Virtual Typex) encodes lots of letters in slightly roundabout ways (akin to escape code sequences).

The most notable mappings in Typex’s (default) Letter Mode are:

  • X –> Space
  • V –> Switch to Figure Mode
  • Z –> Switch to Letter Mode

In Typex’s Figure Mode, the top row maps to numbers (QWERTYUIOP —> 1234567890), the second row (largely) maps to punctuation symbols, while the special Letter Mode meta-letters (X/V/Z) maps to G/C/D.

So, to encipher “X” on a Typex keyboard, you’d need to switch into Figure Mode (“V”), press the Figure Mode version of the letter (“G”) and then switch back into Letter Mode (“Z”), i.e. “VGZ”.

Putting this all together, you can see that before sending the classic test sequence “The Quick Brown Fox Jumps Over The Lazy Dog” via Typex, you’d need to “escape” the letters to the Typex keyboard mapping, i.e.

THEXQUICKXBROWNXFOVGZXJUMPSXOVCZERXTHEXLAVDZYXDOG

Here, I’ve highlighted the three escape sequences (for “X”, “V”, and “Z” respectively): similarly, 1234567890 would need to be Typex-escaped as “VQWERTYUIOPZ” before transmission.

Was Typex’s keyboard a strength or a weakness? Certainly, it was more sophisticated, and gave more a concise, bureaucratic feel to messages (“£2/3/6” would have been vastly longer for Enigma). But at the same time, the added expense and physical complexity (the number of Typex machines built was only ever a fraction of the number of Enigma machines in use) seems fairly unwise to me.

Moreover, Typex’s keyboard’s escape sequences significantly modified the way technical language was transmitted. Even though shorter messages are harder to crack than longer messages, I can’t help but wonder whether Typex’s escape sequences might have added crypto weaknesses.

Typex “X”

Any enciphering system that enciphered spaces as X would instantly make X the most common letter in (escaped) plaintexts. So it should be clear that Typex’s letter “X” (which enciphers SPACE) was one possible weakness.

Moreover, right from the earliest part of the war, German codebreakers noted that the first three letters in a new class of intercepted messages were never “A”, “I”, and “R” (respectively), and the last letter was almost never “X”. From this they deduced (correctly) that:

  • Messages were being sent using an Enigma-style rotor cipher machine (where letters never map to themselves)
  • The sender was almost certainly the British Air Force (“AIR”)
  • The last letter was probably using X as a padding character

Even if Typex is (largely) randomising the output letters (via permutation and stepping), we still know that plaintext “X” can never be enciphered as ciphertext “X”. Can we use this to look inside the ciphertext?

If we discard the (almost certainly disguised) rotor setting AOAKN at the start and end of the pigeon cipher message, we get the following:

      HVPKD FNFJW YIDDC
RQXSR DJHFP GOVFN MIAPX
PABUZ WYYNP CMPNW HJRZH
NLXKG MEMKK ONOIB AKEEQ
UAOTA RBQRH DJOFM TPZEH
LKXGH RGGHT JRZCQ FNKTQ
KLDTS GQIRU

For this 25 x 5 = 125-character ciphertext, a completely random letter mapping would imply an average instance count of (125/26) = 4.8 instances. In fact, the instance counts of the letters (in decreasing count order) are:

H K R N P D F G Q A J M O T E I X Z B C L U W Y S V
8 8 8 7 7 6 6 6 6 5 5 5 5 5 4 4 4 4 3 3 3 3 3 3 2 2

Even if X is the most common letter in the plaintext, the amount of enciphered text would need to be very long (I’d guess 20+ times longer or more) before Typex (escaped space) X’s higher frequency would show up as a measurable dip in the (Typex ciphertext) X’s statistics.

X:    ----- ----- -----
--X-- ----- ----- ----X
----- ----- ----- -----
--X-- ----- ----- -----
----- ----- ----- -----
--X-- ----- ----- -----
----- -----

Sadly, because of the short length of the ciphertext, the only thing to note is that the third and fifth lines have no X’s in, which we’ll return to in the next section.

Typex “Q”

From the preceding table, we can see that Q appears six times in the ciphertext. Even though Q is a relatively rare letter in English (hence 10 points in Scrabble), there are a number of different ways that Q can practically appear in an enciphered Typex messages:

  • As the letter Q in text (in Letter Mode)
  • As the digit 1 (in Figure Mode)
  • As part of a five-letter QQQQQ separator block (these appeared in the middle of Typex messages, and were used to help conceal messages starts e.g. coded addressees)
  • As a null (Typex operators were, as part of the security protocol, expected to insert a random character every few words)
  • As part of a Q-code

Even though Q-codes were originally used for shipping transmissions, their use quickly spread through the various armed services. A few years ago, I found a Combined Operating Signals handbook in the Royal Signals Museum archives. Its first page looked like this:

But though it is entirely plausible that a WW2-era message might include Q-codes such as QPZ (“Yes”) or QQZ (“No”), my understanding is that Q-codes were far more for radio operators than for cipher machine operators. Hence I’m not genuinely expecting to find any Q-codes in the plaintext here.

I’ve previously posted about QQQQQ here, but the short version is that if we look at the six instances of Q that appear in the pigeon cipher message, they appear to cluster in the bottom half of the message:

      ----- ----- -----
-Q--- ----- ----- -----
----- ----- ----- -----
----- ----- ----- ----Q
----- --Q-- ----- -----
----- ----- ----Q ----Q
----- -Q---

Of course, this might just be a sign that randomness is doing its random thing here. But there’s a pretty good chance that the lack of Q’s in the top half implies that the top half of the plaintext has more Qs than normal.

Why might that be? The two most likely reasons would be (a) the presence of a QQQQQ section divider block (say, on the “PABUZ WYYNP…” line), and (b) the presence of number sequences (because in Figure Mode, Q enciphers the digit “1”). And because of Benford’s Law, we might reasonably expect “1” to appear more often than other digits, so this perhaps isn’t quite as arbitrary as you might at first think.

I also wonder the lack of Xs on the third line might be an indication that the block of five letters immediately before the (putative) QQQQQ ends with a block of Xs, e.g. –XXX QQQQQ. It’s certainly possible…

Other Letters

If we look at the five Ts in the ciphertext, these too cluster at the bottom in a slightly unusual way:

T:    ----- ----- -----
----- ----- ----- -----
----- ----- ----- -----
----- ----- ----- -----
---T- ----- ----- T----
----- ----T ----- ---T-
---T- -----

And the two Vs in the ciphertext are also (perhaps) notable for both being at the top:

V:    -V--- ----- -----
----- ----- --V-- -----
----- ----- ----- -----
----- ----- ----- -----
----- ----- ----- -----
----- ----- ----- -----
----- -----

Note also that even though the instance counts of V and Z in any given message will (almost certainly) be identical (because Figure Shift will be followed by a matching Letter Shift back again), these are small enough that they won’t show up in the instance stats. But the small number of Vs in the ciphertext might possibly be a (very weak) indication that the bottom half of the text has a lot of Figure Shifting going on.

But really: are these statistically significant results, or is it merely the Randomness Fairy laughing into her hand? A researcher with the persistence of Dave Oranchak would randomise millions of cases and see how often these conditions recur: but with such a small ciphertext, it’s hard to be sure. For now, though, it’s just a set of interesting observations. 🙂

Looking for a Baltimore / Washington crypto collaborator…

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This website may have been quiet-ish of late, but the lights here at Cipher Mysteries Mansion have been burning into the night. Yes: once again, I find myself hot on the trail of one of the ‘classic’ unbroken historical ciphers.

Intriguingly, what I’ve found is that there is some hugely useful information out there relating to that particular cipher that almost nobody knows about. The only (minor, piffling, inconsequential) practical challenge is that what I need to know about is located on the opposite side of the Atlantic from me (in the Baltimore / Washington area, in fact).

To be precise, I believe that this extra information (if I’m correct) would lift up my chances of cracking this specific cipher from a miserable 0% right up to the dizzying heights of 1 in 5040 (i.e. ~0.02% chance of success).

But that’s not the point of doing it: which, rather, is to try to recategorise this whole challenge from impossible to possible. If I can demonstrate that this is doable, then I think all manner of doors will open up… and hopefully the other 5039 chances too.

So: will anyone in the Baltimore-Washington area with an interest in crypto history please kindly step forward and offer their assistance? I need someone to take a couple of hours out to have a look at this in person. Thank you so much! 🙂

Brief notes on Voynichese benched gallows…

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I mentioned in a comment on Koen G’s recent post that I thought that Voynichese benched gallows (i.e. gallows that have a ch glyph struck through them) may well be nothing more complex than a different way of writing gallows+ch; and that I thought this was much more likely than the alternative notion that it was a different way of writing ch+gallows.

When Koen asked me what evidence I had for this, I thought that I ought to write a brief post explaining how I got there (i.e. rather than cramming my “truly marvelous demonstration” into a Fermatian margin). So here goes.

Yes, It’s Contact Tables (Again)

The evidence I’d point to is from (you guessed it) contact tables for glyphs following benched gallows. The notable feature of these I mentioned recently on Cipher Mysteries (though the obeservation is, of course, as old as the hills) is that benched gallows are only very rarely followed by -ch.

Here’s a simple parsed count example (Takahashi transcription), showing how very rare benched gallows + -ch are as compared to both -e and -ee:

cth 712cthe 167cthee 23cthch 3
ckh 629ckhe 222ckhee 20ckhch 5
cph 147cphe 56cphee 8cphch 1
cfh 59cfhe 13cfhee 1cfhch 0

Baseline: (ch 10652), of which (che 4138), (chee 742), and (chch 18)

Furthermore, as I noted in that post, almost all of the places where benched gallows are followed by ch seem to be Takahashi’s transcription errors (sorry Takahashi-san).

Compare and contrast with the contact tables for the preceding glyph, where the ch- instance counts hugely outnumber the counts for e- and ee-:

cth 701ecth 59eecth 6chcth 139
ckh 501eckh 124eeckh 9chckh 242
cph 177ecph 7eecph 1chcph 27
cfh 54ecfh 3eecfh 1chcfh 15

Baseline: (ch 10652), of which (ech 143), (eech 33), and (chch 18)

As a sidenote, the interesting things in this particular table are (a) how rarely benched gallows are preceded by ee- (far less than by just e- or ch-), and (b) how frequently benched gallows are preceded by ch- when ch itself is very rarely preceded by ch-.

So, What’s Going On Here?

I think it’s safe to say that there is probably a really basic reason why benched gallows preceded by ch- are found so much more often than benched gallows followed by -ch. But what might that reason be?

For me, the suspicion is simply that c+gallows+h is just a different way of writing gallows+ch. The contact tables I quote above certainly don’t seem to offer anything to support the alternative scenario where c+gallows+h is a different way of writing ch+gallows.

To my eyes, replacing benched gallows with gallows+ch would match the statistics baseline for che/chee/chch far more closely than replacing benched gallows with ch+gallows would match the statistics baseline for ech/eech/chch. That is, the benched gallows right contact tables (i.e. the contacts that benched gallows have with glyphs immediately following them to the right) seem to me to broadly match the ch right contact tables, but the benched gallows left contact tables don’t obviously match the ch left contact tables.

The big issue here – as always, though – is one of proof. It’s all very well my speculating that it would be better to replace benched gallows with gallows+ch rather than ch+gallows, but how can this be made stronger?

Though I’m not sure that it would be possible to turn this gallows+ch replacement hypothesis into a smoking-gun proof, I do suspect that it could be tested much more rigorously. Perhaps CM readers will have good suggestions about how to carry out a suitable test (or three). 🙂

Finally: Might ch Be Enciphering U?

To me, Voynichese’s various families of shapes and glyph behaviours look (much as John Tiltman suggested) like a grab-bag of contemporary cipher tricks. As a result, it would make a lot of sense to me if the distinctive benched gallows was simply one of the set of slightly older cipher tricks that were artfully combined to form Voynichese.

Along these lines, I’ve previously floated the idea (based mainly on the look of the benched gallows, but also on my long-held suspicion that e/ee/ch/sh might somehow be vowels) that Voynichese ch might in fact encipher plaintext U/V. This is because I can easily imagine that c+gallows+h may have begun its life as an early 15th century steganographic trick used to disguise or visually disrupt QU patterns before being absorbed into the Voynichese Borg mind.

Replacing benched gallows with gallows+ch would be entirely consistent with this idea (though note that the gallows need not necessarily be enciphering Q, even if the trick started that way), so it’s possible that both ideas might turn out to be true simultaneously.

Incidentally: in “The Curse of the Voynich” (p.177), I mentioned a strikethrough trick that appeared in an “otherwise unremarkable” 1455 cipher (Ludovico Petronio Senen) to encipher the Tironian-style ‘subscriptio’ shorthand sign (e.g. that turns “p” into “p[er]”). My speculation here is therefore that the strikethrough trick may have first emerged in this general era, though instead used to visually disguise plaintext U’s.

Hence one thing I have been meaning to do recently is to trawl carefully through Mark Knowles’ fascinating haul of 1400–1450 Northern Italian ciphers to see if there is any indication there that a strikethrough trick was ever used in one of those ciphers to disguise the U in QU pairs. You might have thought that encipherers would have added a special token for “QU”, or might have simply chosen to omit the U after Q: but neither of these options typically seems to have happened in this general timeframe (outside of the most complicated syllabic ciphers).

Comparing Voynichese word-initial l- with ol- and al-…

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I recently mentioned in a comment that my working hypothesis was word-initial EVA l- was a different token to EVA l elsewhere: and Emma May Smith asked me what evidence I had for that statement. So I thought I’d post a few stats to throw onto the fire.

The Evidence

Just to be clear, though: because I’d rather not mess up my stats with line-initial EVA l- stats, all the following figures relate to word-initial (but not line-initial) stats. And to keep everything as clear as practical, the comparisons are solely between words beginning l-, ol-, and al-.

So, here are the raw instance counts according to the Takahashi transcription for word-initial (but not line-initial) l-, ol-, and al-. For example, there are 1267 word-initial (but not line-initial) l- words, of which 58 are just EVA l (on its own), along with 433 word-initial (but not line-initial) words beginning with lk-. (Note that the “(-)” line is an estimate, my app unfortunately couldn’t calculate it.)

.l.ol.al
12671416477
(-)58538256
k43332642
t34351
f10123
P17132
ch29313820
sh105538
o1718555
a419732
d485226
y135832

To compare these three columns, we now need to turn their values into percentages. What this following table is saying, then, is that word-initial (but not line-initial) l- is followed by k 34.18% of the time, t 2.68% of the time, etc. (Note that I didn’t try to capture all of the values.)

.l.ol.al
100%100%100%
(-)4.58%37.99%53.67%
k34.18%23.02%8.81%
t2.68%2.47%0.21%
f0.79%0.85%0.63%
p1.34%0.92%0.42%
ch23.13%9.75%4.19%
sh8.29%3.74%1.68%
d13.50%6.00%11.53%
a3.24%6.85%6.71%
o3.79%3.67%5.45%
y1.03%4.10%6.71%

In short, this table is trying to compare the contact tables for three word-initial (but not line-initial) contexts: l-, ol-, and al-. So… what does it say?

Though the +f and +p rows are broadly the same for all three contexts, I think just about every row presents significant differences. For example:

  • Only one word in the VMs begins with EVA alt (on f72v2, Virgo)
  • Comparisons between the ch and sh lines seem to imply that tehre is vastly more similarity between ch and sh (ch seems to occur 3x more often than sh) than between l-, ol-, and al-.
  • l- is typically followed by k (34.18%) and ch (23.13%), but this is quite unlike ol- and al-.

However, the biggest difference in all these counts is where l, ol, and al form the whole word (the “(-)” row). So here’s the last table of the day, which is where the whole word counts are removed from the totals, i.e. word-initial but not line-initial and also not word-complete:

.l.ol.al
k35.81%37.13%19.00%
t2.81%3.99%0.45%
f0.83%1.37%1.36%
p1.41%1.48%0.90%
ch24.23%15.72%9.05%
sh8.68%6.04%3.62%
d14.14%9.68%24.89%
a3.39%11.05%14.48%
o3.97%5.92%11.76%
y1.08%6.61%14.48%

Even though taking out all the word-total instances has damped down some of the larger ratios, there are still plenty of big ratios to be seen.

Perhaps the most surprising is the comparison between ly- (1.08%) and aly- (14.48%). (Interestingly, all but one of all the places where the ly and aly instances occur in the text are at the end of a line or butted up against a mid-line illustration. Which I think points strongly to ly and aly being abbreviated in some way, but that’s an argument for another day.)

The Conclusion

For me, I simply can’t see anything systematic or language-like about the comparisons between any of the three columns. When their contact tables are so different, what actual evidence is there that l-, ol-, and al- are all presenting the same (right-facing) linguistic context? Personally, I simply can’t see any.

My conclusion from the above is therefore that l-, ol- and al- are (without any real doubt at all) three different tokens, i.e. they are standing in for three different underlying entities.