Over the last few months, I’ve had some interesting correspondence with Thomas Spande, whose starting point was observing that the ‘Voynichese’ script seemed to have similarities with the medieval Armenian aybuben (‘alphabet’ – its first two letters are ‘ayb’ and ‘ben’). Several other people have proposed this, most recently ‘amandajm’ and ‘Lgh’ on the discussion page for the Voynich Manuscript Wikipedia page: there was also a mysterious “Voynich Armenian Experiment” back in 2000 which seems to have arrived fractionally too early to be picked up by the Wayback Machine; and another mention in the archived Wikipedia talk page.
However, I’m basically sure we can rule out oddly-written Armenian (and indeed all other it’s-an-oddly-written-but-real-language theories) because of the Voynich Manuscript’s peculiarly idiosyncratic word distribution: apart from a small number of high-frequency words, relatively few words or phrases repeat across the whole manuscript, making it a poor match for any real language, whether written directly or even in an simple substitution cipher. This is an extraordinarily deep observation, one which even now few people really grasp the power of: it sits behind Elizebeth Friedman’s 1962 comment that all attempts to interpret the Voynich Manuscript as a simple language and/or a simple cipher were “doomed to utter frustration”. Ignore this at your peril!
All the same, what Thomas Spande dug up next was, well, really rather good. He discovered that a particular fifteenth century physician called Amirdovlat Amasiatsi was working in Constantinople for the Ottomans (i.e. just after its fall in 1453), and that he wrote a large number of books in Armenian. [I added a Wikipedia stub page about Amirdovlat, but note that this still needs a lot more detail to be useful]. The best English-language book on him appears to be “Amirdovlat Amasiatsi: A 15th Century Armenian Natural Historian and Physician” by S. A. Vardanian (1999), though at £144 or so for a second-hand copy, it’s a tad beyond my modest means. 🙁 There are also various studies by John Gueriguian based on his study of Amirdovlat’s books, perhaps most notably “Amirdovlat’ Amasiats’i: His Life and Contributions” in the Journal of the Society for Armenian Studies 3 (1987) pp. 63-91.
What was nice about Amirdovlat was that despite being chief physician to Mehmed II, he was not at all elitist. In fact, he specifically wrote books in Armenian so that ordinary people could benefit from what he had learned: e.g.
* 1459: Usumn bzhshkutyan (The Study of Medicine)
* 1459: Akhrapatin (Pharmacology)
* 1474: Girk ramkakan (Popular handbook)
* 1478-1482: Angitats anpet (Useless to the Ignorant)
* ????: Vasn nshanats hivantin, zgenats yev zmahun (On the patient’s signs of life & death)
The 25 chapters of Amirdovlat’s book on pharmacology describes the properties of plenty of drugs: yet even this was dwarfed by “Useless to the ignorant”, which listed the properties of no less than 3700 drugs, arranged in (Armenian) alphabetical order. He was a serious-minded yet communicative man, widely read and clearly with a deep passion for medicine. But could he have had anything to do with the Voynich manuscript?
On the positive side, I would very much like to read more about Amirdovlat: though admittedly Galenic, his brand of medicine seems to run very much parallel to that found in the European herbal tradition, the brightest lamp post we tend to look under for our Voynichian lost keys. I also think that when the Voynich is finally deciphered, its contents will almost certainly turn out to be grounded within numerous existing textual traditions (though perhaps not quite in the ways that we expect), and so building up a fuller picture of the range of contemporary textual herbal traditions has to be a good thing. As a result, I can see why Thomas Spande considers Amirdovlat to be a possible source for (and perhaps even author of) the Voynich Manuscript.
On the negative side, I personally think it would be extraordinarily surprising if the Voynich Manuscript came from beyond the European mainland (specifically the Northern Italian peninsula, or possibly Savoy at a stretch). Its alphabet seems to appropriate a large number of 14th century Latin-like tropes; its nine-rosette castles seem to point to Italy, Switzerland or Southern Germany (Sicily at a push); it has Occitan-like zodiac marginalia; its final page handwriting seems like a late 14th-century Savoyard hand; its crossbowman seems to have European clothes; and so forth. I’ll happily grant you that all of these could conceivably be wrong simultaneously… but I’m reasonably confident that they’re not.
Of course, there are two basic Voynich camps to choose from: one that thinks we know enough basic factuality to rule out almost all speculative theories with a high level of confidence, and another that thinks we don’t, that almost everything is still in play. Of the two, I’m in the former camp: but you have to understand that it’s a bit draughty and empty in here… I’m sometimes surprised that canvas walls are able to echo so effectively, but there you go, it is how it is. So, which camp are you in?
