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!” 😉

Marius-Adrian Oancea and the Rohonc Codex

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I’ve had a nice email from Marius-Adrian Oancea, asking me if I would look at his interesting Rohonc Codex site. While working for the EU in Fiji between 2009 and 2011 (it’s a dirty job, but someone’s got to do it, I suppose), Marius-Adrian filled his spare time making notes on the Rohonc Codex, and has now written them up in a series of web-pages.

For example, he sets out some persuasive arguments that the text is written from right-to-left (along each line), from top-to-bottom (for lines within each page) and from back-to-front (from page to page).

What is interesting about this is that because I don’t currently believe that the folios (folded pairs of pages) have ended up in the correct order (simply because the chronology of the Biblical pictures seems strangely out of order), it may be possible to identify some candidate facing pages based on matching incomplete half-phrases on the bottom of the right-hand page with incomplete half-phrases on the top of the left-hand page. (I’m not sure that anyone has done this yet.)

He has also found a pair of intriguing repetitive word-skipping sequences on 162L and 162R, where the two instances are each padded out with a different filler “letter” / “word”.

However, I think there is a far simpler explanation for this problematic text than his conclusion that “existing paragraphs were repeated or repeated with insertions […] to create a larger book without making the effort to produce original, non-repetitive text“. What if these inserted filler shapes are both cryptographic nulls? They certainly don’t seem likely to be meaningful, so perhaps they are purely meaningless (nulls): and the fact that the phrase without the nulls also appears on 162L also seems to point that way. It would be interesting to revisit the stats if those two (possibly) null characters were excised from the text stream.

Alternatively, the apparent presence of nulls in the Rohonc Codex’s text might instead mean that the author was trying to duplicate the page structure of an existing manuscript, and that those pages didn’t originally have much text on (and hence needed padding). We’re still not necessarily looking at an enciphered document: we still have no definitive proof of that, but the presence of nulls would seem to be a very strong indication of the presence of encipherment (to my eyes, at least).

Similarly, on the same facing page pair (162L/162R), the author seems to repeat a block of text: though I should also point out that a straightforward explanation for this could be that the encipherer lost their position in the text and ended up enciphering the same block twice in a row. It’s certainly easy to do if you’re not hugely experienced at enciphering.

All in all, I’m not (yet) convinced that “The Codex is written in Hungarian, or at least transliterates words in Hungarian, using a version of the rovásírás (Old Hungarian Alphabet) also known as székely rovásírás or székely-magyar rovás.”. Up to that point in his pages I was feeling quite comfortable with his overall argument, but decomposing symbols into pieces and then anagramming them to get transliterated old Hungarian is a bit more than I was personally able to chew on without choking. Even so, there are plenty of tasty things on Marius-Adrian’s site to get your teeth into. 🙂

New Voynich-Nibiru-dinosaur-Time theory…

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Modern life plainly has me stumped: I now can’t even tell email spam and Voynich theories apart. Both seem to be generated from long lists of largely comprehensible phrases, before being dumped in my inbox as self-evident truths: both make my head hurt.

So with that gushing introduction over, here’s this week’s Voynich theory, courtesy of Jimmy Craig on starseeds.net (don’t ask what that is, you can guess enough to tell from its URL that you probably don’t want to know), who believes “that the Voynich Manuscript is describing “Food”, as in the “Mana from Heaven”, that Adam and Eve were not allowed to eat.” Moreover,…

The Characters in the Voynich Manuscript, are a description of the process that removes time. All the language in the Voynich Manuscript is apart of this algorithm based description, because of the complexity of the argument itself, the algorithm is parsed. This is probably the correct way, or more correct way of addressing the algorithm itself. The Process that Removes Time is Nibiru the Star Wormwood, Star of David. It is the great flood at the end of time, that brings mankind into Forever Night. The characters of the Voynich Manuscript are this Ocean, that is Nibiru the mechanism that removes time.

Craig then refers to the dragon picture on f25v, where the little dragon seems to be vacuuming up a giant plant into its snout:-

The Green Flower is Nibiru, the dinosaur in white below it is “Time”, the Star Nibiru is consuming “Time”, consuming the Dinosaur that is vomiting out the Flood Waters. Time is being destroyed by Nibiru we see the food or mana from heaven being produced thus some have concluded the Voynich Manuscript was a recipe book, when in fact it is a description of the translation of the universe. Therefore, it is a difference in the description of potential for the portion of man inheriting the new universe.

My own meta-theory is that there is a Voynich theorybot out there on a cunning, distant server, busy cranking out Voynich theories. You may think that this is a lousy hypothesis to explain the current near-Biblical flood of Voynich theories but… where’s your disproof?

$1000 historical shorthand marginalia challenge…

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What’s a Greek urn? About a hundred drachmas a day, Morecambe and Wise once said. Or possibly 1000 USD, if he /she can read shorthand marginalia…

The story of the day is that an unnamed donor has offered a thousand bucks to the first person to decrypt some curious marginalia in a rare 1504 edition of Homer’s Odyssey. And no, that’s not the car mentioned in The Simpsons’ segment “D’oh, Brother Where Art Thou?”, it’s a book held by The University of Chicago Library, whose librarians are no doubt being over-run with nutty emails now that the offer of a thousand bucks has gone semi-viral on the Interweb etc. You can download the hi-res TIFF files from Hightail here (though free registration is required for access).

The curious writing only appears on two pages of Chapter 11: and even with my ludicrously atrophied schoolboy Greek, it didn’t take long to work out which part the first page covers. If you start from the “πρωτην τυρω” on the second line, one translation runs:-

“The first I saw was Tyro. She was daughter of Salmoneus and wife of Cretheus the son of Aeolus. She fell in love with the river Enipeus who is much the most beautiful river in the whole world. Once when she was taking a walk by his side as usual, Neptune, disguised as her lover, lay with her at the mouth of the river, and a huge blue wave arched itself like a mountain over them to hide both woman and god, whereon he loosed her virgin girdle and laid her in a deep slumber. When the god had accomplished the deed of love, he took her hand in his own and said, ‘Tyro, rejoice in all good will; the embraces of the gods are not fruitless, and you will have fine twins about this time twelve months. Take great care of them. I am Neptune, so now go home, but hold your tongue and do not tell any one.’

“Then he dived under the sea, and she in due course bore Pelias and Neleus, who both of them served Jove with all their might. Pelias was a great breeder of sheep and lived in Iolcus, but the other lived in Pylos. The rest of her children were by Cretheus, namely, Aeson, Pheres, and Amythaon, who was a mighty warrior and charioteer.

“Next to her I saw Antiope, daughter to Asopus, who could boast of having slept in the arms of even Jove himself, and who bore him two sons Amphion and Zethus. These [two] founded Thebes with its seven gates…”

Yes, Neptune indeed “loosed her virgin girdle and laid her in a deep slumber” – these days, that kind of stuff only appears in court reports. 🙂

Anyway, what is interesting here (I think) is that you can see “Zethus | Amphion” written longhand in the bottom margin, as well as “Amythaon” above “Antiopé” in the left hand margin, all embedded inside long sequences of cursive marginalia.

zethus-amphion

amythaon-antiope

Well, I’m fairly sure you’ve already worked out what I suspect: that these marginalia are not French shorthand (as the anonymous donor believes, though admittedly without proof), but are in fact some kind of cursive late Greek tachygraphy. Personally, I suspect early 18th century rather than 19th century (the language seems a bit too clunky to my eye), but a proper French historian (or indeed palaeographer) should be able to figure that part out (i.e. from the French itself) without any great difficulty.

Unfortunately, I can’t think for the life of me where my book on tachygraphy and shorthand has disappeared to, so all I can do for the moment is note (a) that Greek tachygraphy was an in-vogue subject in Germany 1860-1900, (b) it is usually considered to be formed of three parts (a syllabary, a monoboloi, and a set of endings), (c) that there is a long-running debate as to whether Greek tachygraphy really can be considered a continuum covering different marks over more than a millennium, and (d) that the Porphyrogenitus Project at Royal Holloway might also be a good place to start (did they ever publish it all?). So, what we have here looks to me like a simplified Greek tachygraphic syllabary, but what do I know, eh?

For now, all I can do is just throw up a couple of interesting Greek tachygraphy links for any starving academics out there who are so desperate for a small heap of money that they’ll even take a Cipher Mysteries post at face value. Good luck!

* A Plato Papyrus with Shorthand Marginalia Kathleen McNamee.
* On Old Greek Tachygraphy F. W. G. Foat, The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Volume 21, November 1901, pp. 238-267. Intriguingly, Foat mentions some “crypto-tachygraphy in a 15th century Lucian” (in Cod. Pal. 73, described in p.2 of Wessely’s “Ein system altgriechischer Tachygraphie” (1896), but I wasn’t able to find a copy online).

Delia Huegel and the Rohonc Codex

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I’ve looked at the Rohonc Codex numerous times in the past, though my conclusions so far haven’t exactly amounted to what I’d consider headline news:-
* its drawings are plainly Judeo-Christian, though often viewed through a distorting lens;
* the presence in its text of both pictograms and ridiculously repetitive sequences points to some kind of hacky nomenclator cipher;
* frankly, it’s a bit of a mess, with many folios stitched together out of order.

Being brutally honest, I’ve been waiting for Benedek Lang’s book on it to get translated into English (and I’d be delighted to publish such a splendid thing myself) before throwing myself off the Rohonc Codex’s cliff-top with only my cipher mystery experience to bungee back to the top. For if you were planning on exploring a bear cave, wouldn’t you want a torch to help steer you past previous adventurers’ rotting bones, hmmm?

All the same, I was recently delighted to find a genuinely sane Rohonc Codex website courtesy of Delia Huegel from Arad in Western Romania. She has – much to her own surprise, it would seem – spent several years trying to find and understand the religious dimension of the Rohonc Codex’s drawings. I’ve gone through (and enjoyed) every webpage: she writes with wit and verve, and – unlike much of the Rohoncology out there – she is happy to fess up to the issues her approach faces. It’s a tricky old thing, fer sher, and such honesty helps a great deal.

For me, the two highlights of her site were (a) her comparison of Albrecht Dürer’s hellmouth with the Rohonc Codex’s hellmouth, which I agree is a solid indication that North-Western European religious iconography was a specific influence on the Rohonc Codex’s author: and (b) her identification of King David praying to God and the back-to-front rendering of YHWH in Hebrew. Both are pretty much historical slam-dunks, but both raise more questions than they set out answer. Which is what the best answers nearly always do, IMO.

But most magnificently of all, her site is brought to life by the direct inclusion of a significant amount of imagery she has collected along the way while developing her ideas: I can imagine that the site sits very much as a kind of visual / iconic complement to Lang’s more obviously textual approach. Recommended! 🙂

As an afterthought, a question struck me: what if the pages were written in a back-to-front order, but a later owner then tried to rebind them so that the drawings instead appeared in a more conventional-looking front-to-back order? Just a thought!

Spring 2014 Voynich Miscellany…

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Over the last few days here at Cipher Mysteries, I’ve had all kinds of ups and downs with the website, mainly to do with excessive levels of spam (which triggered account suspensions, etc). Anyway, I’ve now turned all the security dials to 12 (Spinal Tap must have got it wrong, because 11 apparently wasn’t high enough) and have added yet more Heath-Robinson bodgery to the webmaster scripts and configurations: fingers crossed it will make a positive difference. And I’ve finally got outgoing mails working again (how annoying was that?!), *sigh*

Regardless, it’s spring cleaning time: that is, time to clear out my short term collection of Voynich cultural mini-links, some of which you might even like. Arty Voynich appropriators first:-

‘Modestly’ (Anne Corr) is offering a 32-page hand-made book comprising images from the Voynich Manuscript. She says:-

There are eight folded pages each with four illustrations printed onto a lovely textured watercolour paper chosen for its excellence in print quality and longevity. I have used a coptic stitch with a faux leather cover, finished with a faux leather tie. It certainly gives the impression of a medieval book.

I hope she’s talking about her own book: as if we haven’t got enough trouble with Voynich theorists who similarly claim that the Voynich itself “gives the impression of a medieval book.” *shakes head, sighs*

Rather less obviously crafty is New Zealander Baron’s Selection, who (virtually) offers T-shirts via Zazzle themed around “Philosophy, Politics, general ‘intellectual’ stuff.” One is called Voynich #1 T-Shirt (f67r1), and the other Voynich #2 T-shirt (Scorpio).

Incidentally, I once won a big box of promo T-Shirts for suggesting that the right question for the answer “Above a grocer’s shop in Grantham” was “What was the setting for Ben Elton’s ‘Inferno’?” All of which was a very long time ago indeed, however you try to slice that particular gala pie.

And now we move on to Voynichian musicians.

Melbourne music producer Andrei Eremin has recently put out a track called Voynich Manoeuvre. I actually quite like it, but it has got a certain 9pm-in-a-Shoreditch-restaurant vibe to it that’s hard not to notice: music to drink overpriced urban cocktails to. But perhaps that’s the point, I don’t know.

Anyway, Arcadia Studios TV has a YouTube interview with Nelson Rebelo of rocking Portuguese underground band The Voynich Code to promote their debut single ‘Antithesis’: here’s the official video for it. The guitar lick at about 4:19 is quite cool, though the whole band then goes into a sequence where they all look they’re playing air guitar, even though most of them are holding guitars. Which is a bit odd.

All the same, my son points out (correctly, it has to be said) that Antithesis is hard to distinguish from the awesomely dark the Lego Movie Batman song, though The Voynich Code’s version possibly still gets the vote (by a whisker). But feel free to make up your own mind, pop pickers! And that’s just the first verse… 😉

Finally: some proper Voynichian miscellany.

Was the (15th century) Voynich Manuscript written in the (1987-vintage) conlang Lojban, perhaps through some kind of trickery involving Leonardo da Vinci and time travel? You know the answer already (I can only hope), but though this April Fool’s Day paper was inspired both by Talbert and Tucker and by Stephen Bax, the way it deciphers “penis” and “darseBar” surely combines technical correctness with historical mastery in a way that the preceding three authors can only dream of emulating in the future. Enjoy!