Impromptu Voynich pub meet, Friday 13th June 2014…

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This coming Friday, well-known Voynich Manuscript researcher Rene Zandbergen will (briefly) be in London, hence this impromptu Voynich pub meet announcement. 🙂

ReneZandbergen

If you’d like to come along, Rene, Philip Neal and I will be – from 5.30pm to 6pm onwards – at the Prospect of Whitby in Wapping, an historic London pub with its own riverside gallows especially for pirates. So if you do happen to have a wooden leg, an eye-patch and a bag bulging with pieces of eight, be aware of the potential for mishap. 🙂

If it’s a nice-ish day (i.e. not raining torrentially), the chances are that we’ll be in the beer garden / patio area – go through the pub, turn left after the main bar, and continue forward to an outside area. Good for dogs, too (particularly if you’re John Kozak, *hint*).

But if it’s a wet day (and let’s face it, that’s the English summer to a ‘T’), be aware that we could end up anywhere in the pub’s two floors. If so, mooch around looking for a table with a slightly tattered copy of “Le Code Voynich” on, and you’re almost certainly in the right place. Hope to see some of you there!

Partial decryption of the Action Line Cryptogram…

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Readers of Klaus Schmeh’s crypto-blog may have come across the Action Line Cryptogram, a nine-page acrostic-like cryptogram from Detroit in 1926. Interestingly, another (slightly different) version of the same cryptogram (but dated 1st July 1908) was unearthed in 2006… not a lot of people know that. 🙂

Anyway, here’s my partial decryption of the last two pages of the 1926 copy (though the other copy’s version of these pages is extremely similar). There are large sections I haven’t scratched the surface of, so feel free to break those yourself. 🙂

T D, O T D O T.

Third Degree, Or The Degree Of Truth

I t D t i a A a t i d , a P , a C , a A t t C , a W S a A , a E o t W S a A , a P S , a G , t V S , a t H o t O .

In this Degree there is an Alarm at the inner door, a Password, a Countersign, an Answer to the Countersign, a Warden Sign and Answer, an Explanation of the Warden Sign and Answer, a Priest Sign, a Grip, t– V– S–, and the H– of the Order.

T A a t i d i t r .

The Alarm at the inner door is three raps.

T P i A . . . . ; t b l a a t , w u f w p ; w i a L , o i e p t o . I c t w , e t t I G , o t t W , t b m g t l , . . , a , i r b t I G , o W , h m g t r o t w , . . . , l a b . T I G a W m b s .

The Password is A– […the rest is unknown, though “T I G o W m b s” is probably “The Inside Guardian and Warden must be sure”]

T C a A a m t s a i t p D .

The Countersign and Answer [the rest is unknown]

W S – T S i m a f : C t r h , e t i f , w i e ( t o f ) ; p t c o t f w t p o t i f .

Warden Sign – The Sign is made as follows : Clasp the right hand, extend the index finger, [the rest is unknown]

A t t S . P t r h o t m , t f t c t t f ( t e n ) , l t b a e i t f .

Answer to the Sign. Place the right hand on the [the rest is unknown]

E . T E o t S a A i , ” T , b y s . “

The Explanation of the Sign and Answer is [the rest is unknown]

P S . T P S i m a f : P t t o t r h o t r n , a , u i a a p , m a s d , w t l f , t m a s a t b w t i , o f .

The Priest Sign is made as follows : [the rest is unknown].

G – C t r h ; w t t , p h o t t o k j o t t f .

Grip – Clasp the right hand ; with the thumb[?], place half[?] of the thumb[?] [the rest is unknown]

N s h i m t G .

[Unknown]

T V S – T r h u .

[Unknown]

T H o t O a g a f : O a b s ; t W s i f o t c o t N G ; t m l t a f h m , w a : P t o r h a t l h , p t ; c t h t t ( f b ) ; p a m a r ; p a a r .

The H– of the Order [the rest is unknown].

“A Highly Unlikely Scenario”, reviewed…

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Having been exposed to what might reasonably be termed a ‘surfeit’ of unhealthily imaginative Voynich theories since nineteen-clickety-duck [*], I’d like to think that I’ve seen quite a lot of ‘highly unlikely scenarios’: and so pretty much anything involving Roger Bacon, time travel, and the Voynich Manuscript I should have covered, right?

Wrong! In her 2013 novel “A Highly Unlikely Scenario: Or, A Neetsa Pizza Employee’s Guide To Saving The World” Rachel Cantor straps an extra ten feet to her conceptual pole and vaults far higher than just about anyone else would try. (In fact, I’d say she tries her level best to vault out of the whole darn arena.)

Yet there’s a spark, verve and swerve to her jambalaya of story ingredients: future fast food corporations at war, a heady mix of mismatched philosophies, time-travelling conversations (with Marco Polo and family members), magical songs (“who is the king of the [clap] third ether?“, stop me if you’ve heard it before), anarchist book club members (sort of), and clothes so vividly jangling they make your inner eye hurt (toreador pants and red afros? Yes, really). And then the story properly begins…

There will be those who glibly snark that such a book is not a ‘novel’, it is simply a creative writing experiment that somehow managed to escape the labs: and that the correct cultural response to such over-hybridized monsters is a tranquilizer dart in the thigh and a discreetly dark van to clear the Frankenbody from the streets. But pshaw to such reactionary knee-jerking, I say: for all its angularity, such writing keeps language fresh and (dare I say it) exciting. Read this and enjoy it! 🙂

[*] Which is, of course, the punch-line to the wonderful old joke: “Two little old ladies playing bingo. One says to the other, ‘You know, I’ve been coming here since nineteen clickety-duck’.“

Analysis of Scorpion Cipher S5…

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Following my recent Scorpion Ciphers post, I’ve put up a permanent reference page on the Scorpion Ciphers and have also tried to contact John Walsh about the as-yet-unreleased other ciphers… so we’ll see how that goes.

Since then, I’ve been working a little more with S5, which has 155 unique symbols out of 180 letters. Because repeated symbols in S5 are always multiples of 16 letters apart, it seems likely to me that this ciphertext was constructed from 16 independent alphabets cycled through in strict sequence. My hope was that this regularity might give us a better chance of cracking S5 than if it were a randomly chosen homophonic cipher.

All the same, this was just a guess: so the first thing I did was come up with a way to test this hypothesis, by writing a short C program to encipher 180-long subsections of the Scorpion’s own plaintext using various numbers of sequential alphabets, to see if this would produce roughly 155 unique symbols.

For each number of alphabets (e.g. 2), I tried (notionally) enciphering every 180-long stretch of the Scorpion’s text, and kept a tally of the minimum number of symbols required (e.g. 37), the maximum number of symbols required (e.g. 44), and the average number of symbols required (e.g. 40).

Interestingly, the results weren’t what I expected:-

alphabets = 1, uniques = (19..24) 21
alphabets = 2, uniques = (37..44) 40
alphabets = 3, uniques = (50..61) 55
alphabets = 4, uniques = (60..74) 68
alphabets = 5, uniques = (72..86) 79
alphabets = 6, uniques = (77..97) 87
alphabets = 7, uniques = (88..105) 97
alphabets = 8, uniques = (91..110) 101
alphabets = 9, uniques = (92..116) 106
alphabets = 10, uniques = (104..122) 113
alphabets = 11, uniques = (107..127) 117
alphabets = 12, uniques = (113..136) 122
alphabets = 13, uniques = (113..134) 123
alphabets = 14, uniques = (115..138) 129
alphabets = 15, uniques = (123..146) 132
alphabets = 16, uniques = (120..147) 133
alphabets = 17, uniques = (128..146) 136
alphabets = 18, uniques = (126..151) 137
alphabets = 19, uniques = (128..150) 139
alphabets = 20, uniques = (132..153) 143
alphabets = 21, uniques = (133..159) 144
alphabets = 22, uniques = (131..155) 145
alphabets = 23, uniques = (137..154) 145
alphabets = 24, uniques = (137..157) 147
alphabets = 25, uniques = (139..160) 149
alphabets = 26, uniques = (141..158) 149
alphabets = 27, uniques = (143..163) 152
alphabets = 28, uniques = (143..164) 152
alphabets = 29, uniques = (139..164) 153
alphabets = 30, uniques = (145..164) 154
alphabets = 31, uniques = (143..164) 153
alphabets = 32, uniques = (146..167) 156

That is to say, even though S5 looks as though it is strictly cycling through 16 ciphers, this isn’t consistent with the stats of the Scorpion’s other plaintext (because that is so verbose and repetitive that it would require on average 32 alphabets to typically yield 155 symbols).

What I think this is implying is either (a) that the Scorpion’s plaintext is significantly less repetitive than the text of his/her messages, or (b) that the cipher system the Scorpion used also employs an extra layer of compression (e.g. a nomenclatura, using extra tokens for common words such as [THE] and [AND], or even common syllable pairs).

I don’t know… I’ll have to have a further think about this, it isn’t at all obvious what’s going on here.

Update: having scratched my head about this for a few more hours, I don’t feel comfortable with the suggestion that some kind of nomenclatura is involved. Rather, what I suspect now is that what we’re looking at here is not a 16 x 26-token set of ciphers (i.e. A-Z) but a 16 x 36-token set of ciphers (i.e. A-Z plus 0-9), coupled with a slightly less verbose plaintext. Hence my very rough (and admittedly as yet unmodelled) estimate is that roughly 25-35 of the tokens in the plaintext will turn out to be digits.

Unfortunately, I also think that this may have left the text undecryptable, unless there is some additional kind of meta-consistency between shapes across the 16 alphabets (e.g. if all the circle-plus-upright-cross shapes encode the same underlying plaintext token). Oh well!

Claudette Cohen and a Voynich Finno-Baltic Birth Registry…?

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Might the Voynich Manuscript be a Finno-Baltic birth registry? Might the names of some of the nymphs really be “Ellda, Sellai, Saisa, Saillar, Sia, Ella, Sara, Saisa, Rllai, and Eillkka”?

On the positive side, Claudette Cohen already has more words decrypted than Stephen Bax (she has a plucky ten to his stodgy nine), so she should clearly take some comfort that her brave-hearted Finno-Baltic decryption is numerically more of a success than his plainly inferior effort. And she also thinks that she has found thirteen points of similarity with a 1910 map of Sortavala, though with more than a passing nod towards “Karelian embroidery” (it says here).

Cipher Mysteries readers surely don’t need an advanced diploma in telepathy to know what I’m thinking here.

“Good for you, Claudette Cohen – even though you’re wrong for about a thousand different reasons, I’m happy for you that this is how you’ve come to the Voynich Manuscript. Enjoy your stay, and try to have some fun with it!”

Juan Roget, José Maria Simón de Guilleuma, and Barcelona’s notarial archives…

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I’ve just got home from a short trip to Barcelona (where I gave a talk on gamification at the very enjoyable Gamification World Congress 2014), but which – you guessed it – also involved my diving head-first into the city’s notarial archives.

Long-standing (or do I mean “long-suffering”?) Cipher Mysteries readers may recall that I took the opportunity a few years back to visit the AHPB (Arxiu Històric de Protocols de Barcelona) to hunt for notarial documents cited 50+ years ago by optometrist and local amateur historian José Maria Simón de Guilleuma. He claimed that these showed the presence of telescopes in various inventories and auctions predating the 1609 Dutch invention of the telescope (which would be consistent with Sirtori’s claim that Barcelonan glasses-maker Juan Roget was the real inventor of the telescope), and even gave the subject, the notary and the date for each one. So it should surely be a simple matter to retrieve them and have a look for myself, right?

Well… as Sergio Toresella is fond of saying about archives, “I’ve been in a hole many times, but I’ve never caught a spider”. That is, it’s normally better to go there with an open mind (and be pleased with what you do find) than with a short list (and be disappointed). Unfortunately, there were only four things on my list:-

  1. Notary: Francisco de Pedralbes. Pedro de Cardona, 10 April 1593.
  2. Notary: Francisco de Pedralbes. Maria de Cardona y de Eril, 13 December 1596.
  3. Notary: Geronimo Gali. Jaime Galvany, auction held on 5 September 1608.
  4. Notary: Miguel Axada. Honorato Graner, 6th August 1613

All too short a list. 🙁

Anyway, to help researchers find things in Barcelona’s notarial archives, there are two printed catalogs, both by Lluïsa Cases i Loscos: (1) “Inventarii de l’AHPB” (in several volumes, covering all the AHPB’s holdings), and (2) “Catàleg dels protocols notarials de Barcelona” (covering notarial archives elsewhere in Barcelona).

Because I had already gone to the AHPB (with no success), this time I tackled the other archives. From online searches, I knew that there were at least some notarial documents by Miquel Axada in the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona (AHCB), so that was my first stop. (But remember to take your passport to sign in with the security guard on the ground floor).

Once on the AHCB’s third floor, I quickly went through their copy of the “Catàleg dels protocols notarials de Barcelona” to find out where I should be looking (note that the most useful bit of the book is the index on the inside back cover, because that tells you where each individual archive’s listing begins inside the book). This directed me to:-

  • PEDRALBES, FRANCESC: AHCB, Arxiu Notarial, XII.3 and XII.19
  • GALI, JERONI: AHCB, Arxiu Notarial, XIII.9
  • AXADA, MIQUEL: AHCB, Arxiu Notarial, XIII.9; and AHBC, Manuals Notarial, 116-8°

It’s a little confusing, but “AHCB” is short for the Arxiu Històric de la Ciutat de Barcelona (not far from Le Boqueria on Las Ramblas), while “AHBC” is short for the Arxiu Històric de la Biblioteca de Catalunya (close to the Gothic cathedral at the top of town). Regardless, I was already at the AHCB, so ordered up XII.3, XII.19, and XIII.9 straight away: and because the AHCB’s archives are so much smaller than the AHPB’s, these arrived in (a very creditable) ten minutes.

What landed in front of me were six-inch or even eight-inch-thick wodges of papers: even though some small sections had their original bindings, and other small subsections had had numbers added to them, there was very little obvious order to them, with notarial material from multiple centuries jumbled together. Moreover, quite a few sections had damage to the top of the pages (frustrating, because that is where the date is very often written) or general fading / water damage to the entire page.

Not a very promising start, it has to be said. 🙁

Anyway, after about an hour of wading through these, I was able to make sense of the structure of the documents: the various date styles, the various embellished notary signatures, the stock phrases, the common abbreviations, etc. And after a couple of hours, I began to read the handwriting a bit faster, and I even found myself able to guess dates based solely on handwriting style. (In fact, there was one document in Notarial XII.3 [I think] that had truly extraordinary handwriting, an intensely modern-looking humanist-Arabic hybrid – in retrospect, I wish I’d asked for a copy of that. Something for next time!)

Alas: Notarial XII.3 had only a single sheet by Francesco Pedralbes (from 1598, and entirely unconnected with Pedro or Maria de Cardona), while Notarial XII.19 also had a single entry “Ego Anthonius Navarro agricola sabitator” and a splendid ornate signum design for Francesco Pedralbes.

Notarial XIII.9 did have a sequential group of papers all signed by Hieronymi Gali, including one that – unusually for these particular archives – was apparently of an auction, with various prices written in. For the sake of completeness, I’ve asked for a copy to be scanned (I should receive it later this week), but unfortunately for my search (a) the date was wrong, (b) the subjects were wrong, and (c) the key telescope-related phrase was absent. The few papers by Miquel Axada in Notarial XIII.9 were similarly not the ones I was looking for.

So, the AHCB was basically a bust for anyone trying to test Simón de Guilleuma’s claims. Undaunted, I continued to the AHBC (for which I had already got a library card on my first trip to Barcelona). With the very kind help of a librarian, I ordered Manuals Notarial, 116-8°, went and sat in the Reserved Document side-room (it’s on your left as you enter the main door into the library)… and waited for what, after the AHBC’s swift response, seemed like a small eternity.

So I wandered around the room, looking at the silent piano (so that musicologists could play through the musical scores in the archives); the listings of library holdings in various countries; a book listing anonymous or pseudonymous books in British libraries; Dorothea Waley Singer‘s books listing alchemical books in UK libraries; and so forth. In other words, all the usual suspects.

And then Manuals Notarial 116 arrived: unlike the previous unstructured gloop of papers I had been dealing with, this was a structured, sequential log of papers, written and bound in their proper order, and covering June to December 1613. So I turned to the date I was looking for and found… nothing. Zilch.

To be precise, the papers from nearby dates were all signed by Anthonius Axada (not Miquel Axada): the nearest to the date began “Ego Bertrandus Desualls cuius bad(?) honoratus gratis…” I’m pretty sure that here (as elsewhere), “honoratus” meant “honourable / well-respected / top-tier” while “gratis” meant “free man of the city”: this makes me wonder whether “Honorato Graner” as noted by Simón de Guilleuma could well have been a misreading of a common phrase. So there was nothing here either. It was a bit odd that there was apparently nothing notarized by Miquel Axada here, but perhaps the references to Anthonius Axada had been cross-referenced to the wrong Axada notary?

Anyway, I was just about to give up when I noticed that there was a small wodge of papers folded into the back cover. I gingerly took them out and examined them: they were all signed by Miquel Axada! I patiently went through these one by one and at last found… nothing at all either.

So, just as Sergio Toresella had warned, there was not a spider to be found in either of those two archival holes: which is annoying and suspicious in equal measures. On the plus side, all three notaries were active at (or extremely close to) the dates Simón de Guilleuma gave, and Jeroni Gali did (unusually) handle auctions. On the negative side, though, absence of evidence in three separate archives that was allegedly not absent would seem to be a bit of a hard thing to explain away comfortably.

Did Simón de Guilleuma genuinely find these documents (and perhaps have them moved together somewhere else)? Or were they never there at all? Right now, I don’t know: all I can say is that I came, I searched, but found no spiders. Oh well!

Cracking the Scorpion Ciphers…

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Back in 2007, John Walsh (the host of “America’s Most Wanted”) announced that he had, since 1991, received a string of disturbing-sounding letters from an individual calling himself / herself “The Scorpion”: many of them had sections or pages that were apparently in cipher. Two of these ciphers were released to the public: these became known as “S1” and “S5”.

In the same year, Christopher Farmer (“President of OPORD Analytical”) announced that he had cracked S1 (which was apparently built on a 10×7 grid):-

scorpion3

Farmer’s claimed solution reads like this:-

baelprovid
edthemwith
newstories
butwhatifi
askjwdoiwa
xrtwbonesa
gezjefxkon

Unfortunately, all the diagrams illustrating Farmer’s ingenious reasoning have withered on the Internetty vine in the years since then (they’re not even in the Wayback Machine, nor anywhere else as far as I can see), which is a bit of a shame.

Even so, this turns out to be an entirely surmountable problem: Farmer’s claimed solution is clearly incorrect, for the simple reason that letters in the ciphertext aren’t consistent in the plaintext. For example, the cipher “K” maps to both ‘a’ and ‘g’, the “backwards-L” maps to ‘w’, ‘w’, and ‘x’, the “backwards-F” maps to both ‘u’ and ‘v’, and so on. At the same time, his claimed plaintext doesn’t really make a lot of sense (“BAEL”… really? I’m not so sure).

It seems likely to me that Farmer guessed that “PROVID” was steganographically hidden in plain sight at the end of the topmost line (and if you squint a bit, you can see why that would be), and then built the rest of his decryption attempt around this hopeful starting point. Moreover, he seems to have guessed that “O” maps to ‘o’, and “backwards-E” maps to ‘e’, which are both pretty peachy assignments. But I don’t buy any of this for a minute: there are way too many degrees of freedom in this S1 cryptogram (roughly half of the individual cipher shapes occur exactly once), and quite a few extra ones in his claimed solution too.

It’s a brave attempt, for sure: but it’s still wrong, whichever way you turn it round.

Other people have tried their hand with S1, though both AlanBenjy in 2009 and Glurk on Dave Oranchak’s site in 2010 pessimistically pointed out that 53 of S1’s 70 symbols are unique, yielding a ‘multiplicity’ a fair way beyond the range of what homophonic cryptograms can practically be solved. Hence I would tend to agree with their assessment that there’s no obvious way that we will solve S1 with what we currently have to hand: in fact, there seems no way to tell whether S1 is a real cipher or a hoax – the only repeating cipher pair is “S A” (i.e. “S Λ”), which could well have happened by pure chance.

The only other Scorpion ciphertext released to the public to date is the 180-character cryptogram known as “S5”:-

scorpion4

Once again, 155 of these 180 symbols are unique, which at first glance would seem to make S5 even less likely to be solved than S1.

But wait! In May 2007, user “Teddy” on the OPORD Analytical forum pointed out that if you transpose S5 from a 12-column arrangement to a 16-column layout, shape repeats only ever occur within a single vertical column. In fact, every single 16-way column except one (column #5) includes one or more repeated shapes.

Radically, this suggests to me that S5 was constructed in a completely different way from conventional homophonic ciphers: specifically, I think that each 16-way column of S5 may well have its own unique cipher alphabet. This would mean that S5 would need to be solved in a completely different manner to the way, say, zkdecrypto works. (I don’t believe S5 was constructed with eight columns, but I thought I ought to mention that that’s a possibility as well, however borderline). Maybe that small insight will be enough to help someone make some headway with S5, who can tell?

The huge shame here is that it may well be that the other Scorpion ciphers (which to this day have not been released) might well give us additional clues about the inner workings of both S1 and S5. Specifically, if one of the other ciphers happened to have used precisely the same 16-alphabet systemas S5, it might well give us enough raw data to crack them both.

Has anyone apart from John Walsh ever seen S2, S3, S4, and S6? Just askin’, just askin’…

Update: Looking again at S1 (while bearing in mind the way S5 seems to have been constructed), I find it hard not to notice that the distances between instance repetitions seem strongly clustered around multiples of 5 (with the only instance not fitting the pattern being the “backwards-L” on row #5):-

+60, +20, +50, +36, +24, +20, +40, +20, +40, +25, +35, +10, +25, +6, +45, +9, +6.

I suspect that this means that the encipherer probably enciphered S1 by cycling through five independent cipher alphabets (largely speaking). This wasn’t a mechanically precise encipherment (whether by accident or by design), but something close enough to one such that almost all the time he/she was no more than a single alphabet ‘off’, one way or the other.

This offers a quite different kind of constraint from normal homophonic cipher searches, and possibly even enough to crack the S1 cipher. After all, we have a fair amount of the Scorpion’s meandering plaintext to use as a statistical model to aim for… 🙂

Getting to the story behind the Somerton Man…

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There’s a curious paradox about the Somerton Man / Tamam Shud case: we seem to know a lot more about the Unknown Man (found dead on Somerton Beach in December 1948) than about the nurse Jessie Harkness (who died in 2007). Yet we now have apparently good evidence that the two were connected in some way.

So, today’s question is simply this: how were they connected? She was firmly on the map, while he was (and still is) completely off the map – what gossamer thread of historical happenstance linked these two individuals?

I’ve been thinking about this for some years: and despite the many stories I’ve heard proposed (spies, car criminals, loner sheep shearers, etc), right now only one back-story stands out as being particularly likely to me. Feel free to disagree with any (or indeed all) of it, but it goes something like this…

Late 1943: Jessie Harkness is a trainee nurse working at Sydney’s Royal North Shore Hospital (RNSH), having started there the previous year. One particular patient catches her eye, a merchant seaman called Styn or Stijn: a 3rd Officer, perhaps he’s Dutch or South African, in hospital with some kind of tropical fever. Yet as he recovers, he shows himself to be strong, fit, intelligent, poetic, charming, persuasive: they start a relationship.

1944: their relationship grows, to the point that she even starts signing her name “Jessie Styn”. But there are problems: he’s possessive and perhaps a bit too ready to fight for what he wants. When he’s fully discharged from RNSH, the war is still on and he (an alien) has to leave the country. He promises to return: Harkness gives him a copy of the Rubaiyat to remember her by, though silently her heart has perhaps already moved on.

How does it all end? The evidence seems to want to tell its own sad story:-
* 1948: a train ride, probably overnight from Melbourne;
* an unexpected visit to an empty Somerton house;
* a long wait on the beach;
* a return to the house;
* a fist-fight, fierce but brief;
* an unwell Styn vomiting, perhaps even losing a dental plate;
* Styn dead, laid on his back on a small bed with his head arching backwards over the edge;
* someone (perhaps Harkness) meticulously cleaning the dead man’s shoes;
* someone else (perhaps George) carrying Styn back to Somerton Beach in the dark of night;
* a vow of silence: We Shall Not Speak Of This Again.

Once again (as with poor old Horace Charles Reynolds), all we really have to rely on is Australian shipping records. If the back-story is correct, what ship was Styn on when he arrived so unwell in Sydney in late 1943? And did he arrive in Melbourne on a ship in the days just before 30th November 1948?

Travel Channel

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Sorry for the short notice, but über-cipher-mystery The Voynich Manuscript is featuring prominently on an episode of “Castle Secrets & Legends” on the Travel Channel UK (Freeview channel 42) at 9pm tomorrow, i.e. 16th May 2014. It’s also playing on The Travel Channel Europe about now as well, if you happen to be elsewhere in our beloved United States of Europe EU. The blurb goes like this:-

“Behind the gates of the world’s most impressive castles, manor houses and mansions, many secrets are waiting to be revealed. Marvel at these amazing structures in all their glory and hear of the remarkable, mysterious and bizarre tales tied to the rich and powerful who once resided there.”

Yada yada yada. *sigh* All the same, there’s a reasonable chance they’ll have taken some nice footage of Villa Mondragone, which genuinely is an astonishing place in a wonderful location. If so, it’ll definitely be worth recording. Cryptography Schmyptography, eye candy wins out every time, right?

Homer’s Odyssey shorthand marginalia identified…

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The University of Chicago Library’s thousand dollar shorthand identification challenge I mentioned here a few days ago has been won – the full announcement is here.

And the winner was… Italian software engineer Daniele Metilli who, working with colleague Giula Accetta, was able “to identify the shorthand and translate the first fragments in a few hours on a Thursday night. If I didn’t have access to online sources such as Google Books, the Greek Word Study Tool of the Perseus Digital Library, and the French corpora of the CNRTL, I probably wouldn’t have won. What great times we live in!”

But it ended up being a three horse race, as two runners-up (Vanya Visnjic, a “PhD student in classics at Princeton University”, and Gallagher Flinn, a “PhD student in linguistics at the University of Chicago”) also identified the script and gave correct translations of fragments. So it was Metilli only by a nose!

Anyway, it turns out that the “mystery script” was a little-known system of French tachygraphy published by a certain Jean Coulon de Thévénot (1754-1813) in “Méthode tachygraphique, ou l’art d’écrire aussi vite que la parole” (1789), of which a revised 1819 edition was available online.

Metilli is still working on it (well done!), and has collected much of his findings on a good-sized PDF on his personal website. At the end of his write-up, he has a bit of fun speculating as to the identity of the note-taker:

While discussing the translator hypothesis with Miss Accetta on the day before publishing this report, something odd came to my mind. The main edition of the Odyssey we used as reference was translated by Édouard Sommer and published by Hachette book by book starting in 1848. While transcribing the shorthand, we had noticed how the annotations sometimes seemed to use the exact same wording as the “argument analitique” found in that edition.

The Sommer translation is very accurate and close to the text, just like our annotations. The other translations of the time (Bareste, Leconte de Lisle) look nothing like it. So it finally came to me: which year did Hachette publish book XI of the Odyssey? Which year did the annotator write his notes? The same year: 1854. What if Mr. Sommer were our mysterious annotator?!

At the risk of sounding like Penry the mild-mannered janitor, all I can sensibly do is quote Chinese-American philosopher H. K. Phooey, “Could be!” 😉