“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.

Can You Name This Man?

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Here are some nice period photos for you, and a little challenge. 🙂

While looking on Trove for white ties (as per the one which was famously in the Somerton Man’s suitcase), I stumbled upon the Sam Hood Photographic Collection II’s Theatrical subsection, which contained this intriguing white-tied image (“308. Smoker with violin case”):

There was no further identification or markings on the photograph or in the NSW catalogue, so just for fun I trawled through the rest of the 275 photos in the set to see if the white-tied guy turned up again. I’m pretty sure I found him (right of centre) in “137. Chorus with comics”:

…and in “169. Child Performers” (as the front half of a pantomime cow, possibly with the same guy who was on the stone stairs with him above):

The catalogue notes say that 137-138 show the “male comic, Alfred Frith” (1885-1941, and whose stage credits are listed here). Here’s what Alfred Frith looked like in 1933:

So it’s safe to say that our Formbyesque Alfred Frith is definitely in “294. Comic arrives, Central Station”, mugging away for the ‘Hood:

And also in “295. Comic arrives, Central Station”, with his same precious golf clubs:

Oh, and it’s definitely sure it’s Alfred Frith in “138. Chorus with comics”:

But your challenge is: can you identify the comic actor with the violin case?

…who was surely the same comic photographed with Alfred Frith (if you don’t believe me, check out the handkerchief in his top pocket):

(PS: please don’t tell me he’s a Russian spy called Pavel, *sigh*.)

On single-leg gallows and the benefits of having more questions than answers…

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Since posting about Voynichese’s strange single leg gallows behaviours a few days ago, I have continued to think about this topic. On the one hand, it’s clear to me how little of any genuine substance we actually know about how they work; and on the other, I’ve been wondering how I can start some broadening conversations about them (by which I mean ones that ask more questions than they answer).

As today’s experimental contribution, I’m going to write a post listing a load of the questions I have in my head to do with single leg gallows but without really trying to answer any of them. I can’t tell how this will work, but here goes regardless. 🙂

Incidentally, for anyone who wants to run their own statistical experiments on single leg gallows, I would strongly recommend using Herbal-B + Q13 + Q20 as their basic test corpus, because I’m acutely distrustful of any Voynich stats that combine Currier A and Currier B. Even though I’m basically doing the latter here. 😉

Questions: final flourish

Rather than finishing with a second vertical leg on the right hand side, single leg gallows instead cross over the left hand leg and finish with a slight flourish to the left. This final flourish can be (1) short, (2) long and straight, or (3) long and curved (i.e. finishing with something like an EVA c-shape).

  1. Have the variations in the finishing flourish of single leg gallows been catalogued and/or transcribed?
  2. Are these variations found uniformly throughout the manuscript, or are they strongly correlated with the various scribal hands (as recently proposed by Lisa Fagin Davis)?
  3. If they have been transcribed, is each flourish type statistically associated with any neighbouring textual behaviours (e.g. contact tables, etc)?

Questions: followed by EVA e?

One huge difference between single leg gallows and double leg gallows is that non-struckthrough single leg gallows are very rarely followed by EVA e. If you count strikethrough gallows separately from normal gallows, the statistics are quite, umm, striking:

  • k:ke = 9758:3809 = 39.03%
  • t:te = 5802:1748 = 30.13%
  • p:pe = 1383:5 = 0.36%
  • f:fe = 416:3 = 0.72%
  • ckh:ckhe = 876:242 = 27.63%
  • cth:cthe = 905:190 = 20.99%
  • cph:cphe = 212:64 = 30.19%
  • cfh:cfhe = 73:14 = 19.18%

Moreover, looking at the eight instances in Takahashi’s transcription where EVA p and EVA f are followed by EVA e, I suspect that many of these may well be transcription errors (i.e. where Takahashi should have instead written EVA pch / fch).

Hence it seems to me that Voynichese has a secret internal rule that almost completely forbids following EVA p and EVA with EVA e. This is a massively different usage scenario from EVA t / EVA k (which are followed by EVA e 39.03% and 30.13% of the time respectively).

OK, I know I said I was only going to ask questions in this post, but looking at these numbers afresh, I can’t help but speculate: might it be that EVA p/f are nothing more complex than a way of writing EVA te/ke?

  1. Has anyone looked closely at the eight places where pe/fe occur?
  2. Why is there such a huge difference between pe/fe and the other six gallows?
  3. Might this be because EVA p and EVA f are optional ways of writing EVA te and EVA ke?
  4. Has anyone considered this specific possibility before?
  5. How similar are the contact tables for EVA te/ke and EVA p/f?

Questions: Followed by EVA ch?

Similarly, comparing the stats for instances where gallows are followed by the (almost identical looking) EVA ch glyph reveals more differences:

  • k:kch = 9758:1074 = 11.01%
  • t:tch = 5802:975 = 16.80%
  • p:pch = 1383:733 = 53.00%
  • f:fch = 416:190 = 45.67%
  • ckh:ckhch = 876:5 = 0.57%
  • cth:cthch = 905:3 = 0.33%
  • cph:cphch = 212:1 = 0.47%
  • cfh:cfhch = 73:0 = 0.00%

Here, we can see that both p and f are followed by ch about half the time (53% and 45.67% respectively), which is significantly more than for k and t (11.01% and 16.80% respectively).

At the same time, the dwindlingly tiny number of places where strikethrough gallows are followed by ch (only nine in the whole manuscript) again raises the question of whether these too are either scribal error or a transcription error.

As an aside, I previously floated the idea here that c + gallows + h may have simply been a compact (and possibly even playful) way of writing gallows + ch, which would be broadly consistent with these stats.

  1. Is there anything obviously different about Voynichese words containing EVA kch / tch and Voynichese words containing EVA pch / fch?
  2. Has anyone looked in detail at the eight instances where strikethrough gallows are immediately followed by EVA ch?
  3. If you remove paragraph-initial p- words from these stats, do the ratios for p:pch and f:fch settle down closer to the ratios for k:kch and t:tch?
  4. How similar are the contact tables for EVA tch/kch and EVA cth/ckh?
  5. How similar are the contact tables for EVA tech/kech and EVA pch/fch?

Questions: Double Leg Parallels?

Some researchers (perhaps most notably John Tiltman, if I remember correctly) have wondered whether EVA p / f might simply be scribal variations of (the much more common) EVA t / f.

  1. Beyond mere visual similarity, is there any actual evidence that supports this view?
  2. I would have thought that the pe/fe stats described above would have meant this was extremely unlikely, but am I missing something obvious here?

Questions: Paragraph-Initial?

Yes, single-leg gallows (mainly EVA p) are very often found as the first letter of the first word of paragraphs. But…

  1. How often do single leg gallows (and/or strike-through single leg gallows) appear in the first word of a paragraph but not as the very first letter of the word?
  2. Do these these paragraph-initial -p-/-f words show any pattern?
  3. Are there structural similarities between paragraph-initial p-/f- words and other paragraph-initial?
  4. Might there be some kind of numbering system embedded in paragraph-initial p- words (particularly in Q20)?

Questions: vs Double Gallows?

Yes, single-leg gallows are to be found mainly in the top line of paragraphs, but that’s imprecise and unscientific.

  1. Are the number of gallows characters (whether single or double) per line roughly constant for both the first lines of paragraphs and for the other lines of paragraphs?
  2. Do these statistics change between sections?

And Finally…

Please feel free to leave comments asking any other single leg gallows questions, I’m sure there are plenty more that could sensibly be added to this page. 🙂

All answers happily received too. 😉

Introducing Virtual Typex…

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I missed Virtual Typex‘s launch back in March 2020, but a Cipher Mysteries review is better late than never, eh?

The short version: Virtual Typex is a gloriously techy bit of onscreen kit, that simulates all the moving components of a Typex cipher machine in a visually satisfying way. You’ll need a big monitor to see all the details properly (think UHD rather than HD), but as cipher machine simulations go it’s really nice-looking. (Though see the final section below for the caveat.)

There’s an extensive set of help / introduction screens here, which both set the historical scene nicely and explain all the fiddly stuff to do with rotors, plugboards, and reflectors (and how Virtual Typex simulates them all). They don’t include any real Typex rotors (or rotor insert) settings, which is a huge shame (but I’m sure that Cipher Mysteries readers already knew that GCHQ aren’t likely to release anytime soon, bless ’em).

One nice piece of Typex history they got right (which I think may well be described here for the first time) is the wiring for the basic Typex reflector. This they managed to infer from an engineer’s Typex Mk III rotor-test cheat sheet when used with the pass-through rotor insert test set (and with the “DRUMS LOCKED AT AAAAA”:

The discussion on the page continues:

[…] it is therefore possible to work out the reflector wiring for Typex as the [pass-through] rotors add nothing to the cipher in this case.

To do this, you’ll need one more piece of information, how the input & reflector heads (the connectors on either side of the rotors) are wired. The diagram above shows that on Typex, the input was wired reversed with respect to the reflector. This means that while A input pin is in line with the A reflector pin, B sits opposite Z, C-Y, D-X .. Z-B.

This, satisfyingly, then yields a Typex reflector mapping of:

As I said above, this is a really fantastic visualisation tool, that lets anyone who wants to try out a Typex for themselves (but without investing their pension on buying their own Mark 22 at auction, *sigh*).

However, it might not be correct. 🙁

Much as I like all the visuals and interactive side of VT, I’m going to be a huge spoilsport by suggesting as nicely as I can that I don’t think that this hasn’t yet been verified against a real Typex: and that anyone who relies on this as an actual simulation might well come a cropper. 🙁

The reason I think it’s incorrect is that if you (virtually) put any of the rotors with inserts in, and enter A twenty-six times (i.e. enough to rotate the first of the moving three rotors through a complete revolution), the next rotor along only clicks over five times (in an Enigma, it would click over once). Here’s the sequence of rotor settings you see onscreen in Virtual Typex:

  • AAAAA
  • AABAA
  • AACAA
  • AADAA
  • AAEAA
  • ABFAA <– i..e. the first time the second rotor along clicks over
  • ABGAA
  • ABHAA
  • ABIAA
  • ABJAA
  • ABKAA
  • ABLAA
  • ACMAA<– the second time
  • ACNAA
  • ACOAA
  • ACPAA
  • ACQAA
  • ACRAA
  • ADSAA <– the third time
  • ADTAA
  • ADUAA
  • ADVAA
  • ADWAA
  • ADXAA
  • ADYAA
  • AEZAA <– the fourth time
  • BFAAA <– the fifth time

To my eyes, the problem is that the standard-issue empty rotor (i.e. the empty rotor that the inserts insert into) has nine triangular notches around its outside, not five. And it was my best understanding that it was these triangular notches that trigger the rotation in the next rotor along.

It’s always possible that I’ve got this basic physical detail wrong, but it’s certainly something that I’d like solidly checked before endorsing Virtual Typex as anything apart from beautiful cryptographical eye candy. :-/

PS: I also couldn’t help but get the impression that parts of the site’s historical documentation had been lifted unattributed from Cipher Mysteries, which is a bit cheeky. Just thought I’d say, hohum. :-/