Cipher Mysteries

Edith Sherwood very kindly left an interesting comment on my "Voynich Manuscript - the State of Play" post, which I thought was far too good to leave dangling in a mere margin. She wrote:- If you read the 14C dating of the Vinland Map by the U of Arizona, you will find that they calculate the ...

I was sitting on a train trying to reconcile the Voynich Manuscript's vellum dating (1404-1438) with its art history dating (1450-1470), while also pondering the various layered aspects of its codicology (such as the pictures apparently behind some the water nymphs), when an unexpected thought popped into my head. Might the VMs have its (erased) plaintext as a palimpsest beneath its ...

It's been an interesting day: Edith Sherwood's Voynich website got Slashdotted - given that Cipher Mysteries picked up 4900 visitors from that tsunami of geeky clicks, edithsherwood.com itself must have had (say) 30000 or more. And then (just now), ORF released a teaser press release for next week's "DAS VOYNICH-RÄTSEL" documentary to their (German-language) website. So, the ...

Two up-to-the-minute papers on the Vinland Map (the Beinecke's other "VM") for your delectation and delight. Firstly, a 2008 paper by Garman Harbottle called "The Vinland Map: a critical review of archaeometric research on its authenticity" in Archaeometry, 50, pp.177-89 - this tries to discredit / undermine the analytical & spectroscopic chemical analyses of the Vinland Map by McCrone (1974) and Clark (2004). And ...

I recently stumbled across a forum discussion comparing the Voynich Manuscript to the "Maybrick Diary" (oh, and the Vinland Map, too) inasmuch as they are all high profile documents that have been dubbed fakes or hoaxes. James Maybrick was a Victorian cotton merchant from Liverpool high ...