A little bird (hi, Terri) told me about a flurry of activity on the Voynich mailing list prompted by some posting by Sean Palmer, who Cipher Mysteries readers may remember from his pages on Michitonese and the month names. Well, this time round he’s gone after a rather more ambitious target – the internal word structure of Voynichese.

Loosely building on Jorge Stolfi’s work on Voynichese word paradigms, Sean proposes a broadly inclusive Voynichese word generator:-

^                      <---- i.e. start of a word
(q | y | [ktfp])*      <---- i.e. one or more instances of this group
(C | T | D | A | O)*   <---- i.e. one or more instances of this group
(y | m | g)?           <---- i.e. 0 or 1 instances of this group
$                      <---- i.e. end of a word
...where...
C = [cs][ktfp]*h*e*    <---- i.e. basically (ch | sh | c-gallows-h) followed by 0 or more e's
T = [ktfp]+e*          <---- i.e. gallows character followed by 0 or more e's

D = [dslr]             <---- i.e. (d | s | l | r)
A = ai*n*              <---- i.e. basically (a | an | ain | aiin | aiiin)
O = o

Sean says that his word paradigm accounts for 95% (later 97%) of Voynichese words, but I’d say that (just as Philip Neal points out in his reply) this is because it generates way too many words: what it gains in coverage, it loses in tightness (and more on this below).

Philip Neal’s own Voynichese word generator looks something like this:-

^
(d | k | l | p | r | s | t)?
(o | a)?
(l | r)?
(f | k | p | t)?
(sh | ch )?
(e | ee | eee | eeee)?
(d | cfh | ckh | cph | cth)?
(a | o) ?
(m | n | l | in | iin | iiin)?
(y)?
$

Though this is *much* tighter than Sean’s, it still fails to nail the tail to the sail (I just made that up). By 2003, I’d convinced myself that the flavour of Voynichese wasn’t ever going to be satisfactorily captured by any sequential generator, so I tried defining an experimental Markov state-machine to give an ultra-tight word generator:-

It wasn’t by any means perfect (there’s no p and f characters, for a start), but it was the kind of thing I’d expect a “properly tight” word paradigm to look like. But even this proved unsatisfactory, because that was about the time when I started seeing o / a / y as multivalent, by which I mean “performing different roles in different contexts”. Specifically:-

  • Is the ‘o’ in ‘qo’ the same as the ‘o’ in ‘ol’ or ‘or’?
  • Is the ‘a’ in ‘aiin’ the same as the ‘a’ in ‘al’ or the ‘a’ in ‘ar’?
  • Is word-initial ‘y’ the same as word-terminal ‘y’?

Personally, I think the answer to all three of these questions is an emphatic ‘no’: and so for me it was the shortest of ceonceptual hops from there to seeing these as elements of a verbose cipher. Even if you disagree with me about the presence of verbose cipher in the system, I think satisfactorily accounting for o / a / y remains a problem for all proposed cipher systems, as these appear to be knitted-in to the overwhelming majority of glyph-level adjacency rules / structures.

Really, the test of a good word generator is not raw dictionary coverage but instance coverage (“tightness”), by which I mean “what percentage of a given paradigm’s generated words does the instances-as-observed make up”.

Philip’s paradigm generates (8 x 3 x 3 x 5 x 3 x 5 6 x 3 x 7 x 2) = 1,360,800 possible words, while my four-column generator produces – errrrm – no more than 1192 (I think, please correct me if I’m wrong): by contrast, Sean’s generator is essentially infinite. OK, it’s true that each of the three is optimized around different ideas, so it’s probably not entirely fair to compare them like this. All the same (and particularly when you look at Currier A / B sections, labels, etc), I think that tightness will always be more revealing than coverage. And you can quote me on that! 😉

London, UK, 11 Nov 2010. In a surprising twist worthy of Voldemort himself, A-list children’s author and philanthropist J.K.Rowling has stepped forward to claim responsibility for the popular Internet cipher mystery meme “The Voynich Manuscript”.

She now says it all was a 1990 publicity stunt for an early release of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone”, which was – much like Norwegian band’s a-ha’s 1985 hit single “Take On Me” – released multiple times before gaining market acceptance from young readers. Rowling’s first version (“Harry Otter and the Voynich Manuscript“) was set in “Hogshead School of Wizardry” and introduced many of the timeless elements of her story that toy conglomerates have since stripmined so mercilessly, but where all the characters were animals – for example, Ron Weasel, Hermione Echidna, and the ancient Albus Iguanodon (though note that Rubeus Hagfish played only a minor role).

In an attempt to promote her book to publishers, Rowling assembled her own ‘Voynich Manuscript’ on cafe tables in Edinburgh on old vellum she’d bought in a jumble sale, and added a threadbare cover story linking it to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II that ought to make any sensible historian shake his or her head in appalled disbelief: the fake manuscript then somehow ended up in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (much to its curators’ embarrassment). But once some early Internet chat group participants got hold of low-quality “CopyFlo” scans of it and decided to try to ‘crack’ its cipher, the rest is cryptographic and cultural history.

“To all the codebreakers who have fruitlessly spent decades on this, I can only apologize for my viral marketing prank”, says Rowling. “Honestly, I tried to flag it was a fake on the first page but perhaps the clue was simply too obvious:-”

As a postscript, Rowling did subsequently manage to get all copies of “Harry Otter and the Voynich Manuscript” pulped: however, copies of her intermediate version (“Harry Snotter and the Handkerchief of Doom”) do still occasionally come up at auction. Jim Reeds was unavailable for comment yesterday.

Even though things are pretty quiet here in Cipher Mysteries Mansions, there’s still a backlog of minor Voynichiana to deal with. Wish me luck, here goes…

  1. Here’s a Russian-language 2010 ‘Internet Edition’ facsimile of the Voynich Manuscript. Might end up cheaper than the Gawsewitch edition, who knows?
  2. Here’s a webcomic from 2003 where the artist (David Morgan) draws the frames, people suggest text, and he loosely merges them together into something. Merely a bit of Voynich name-dropping, nothing as contrived as XKCD etc.
  3. Here’s a logo inspired by mixing up Voynichese and pictures of neutron stars (love the brief). What’s particularly nice is that the artist included all his inbetween sketches (so you can see why only one Voynichese letter made it through to the end). Just so you know, it was for a “group of what might be best described as soldier/mailcarriers in a science fiction erotica novel“. Yeah, we get a lot of those in Surbiton (probably in The Victoria, I suspect), they also need logos to distinguish themselves. (Note: the site can be a bit slow to load, but it normally gets there in the end).
  4. Another music track named “Voynich” for your MP3 collection.

Such a stupid thing for a bright kid to do: pinballing through her mid-teen rebellion, Jena Kyng had wanted to demonstrate some kind of unbranded online tribal allegiance, and ended up with two lines of Voynichese across her lower back (from the end paragraph of page f67r2, as if anyone off-list really cared). Though in many ways, she’d had a lucky escape: imagine ending up with that bozo Gap logo as a tattoo – now that would have really sucked.

But since then, her whole A-grade student train had derailed: and once bad boy boyfriend #1 had morphed into worse boyfriend #2, it was surely just a matter of time before her steadily-growing drink, drugs and abusive partner habits all conspired to help her paint herself into a truly dismal corner of society. All that Voynich research graft lay long behind her: why bother about history when you can see no future?

Countless times since she’d tried to fit herself into straight-ass day jobs, but the minute she got asked to work extra, she’d elevate the royal middle digit… and then it was just a matter of days before the order came from on high to clear her desk. And so, like Michael Palin, Jena’s life now danced defiantly from inhospitable pole to pole – though she somehow doubted Palin could shake his aging Pythonic tush half as as well as her. It’s a skill, she liked to console herself, however minor in the big scheme of things.

So, welcome one and all to her latest home from home, the Green Lizard Club in Muskogee, Oklahoma – ‘Green’ because the owners had replaced all the seedy lighting with LED lamps, thus helping its patrons to feel as though they were saving the planet while stuffing high-denom bills into pole-dancers’ lithely minimalist underwear. Sure, it’s a big fat eco-gimmick: but everybody loves eco-gimmicks, right?

All the same, tonight had been shaping up to be a stultifyingly mediocre night to cap a shockingly shabby week. Jena’s only ray of hope left was the bunch of startup guys – no, not the wind turbine crew (who came in once with some terrified-looking VCs but never returned), but the social media gaggle on Table 3. Bright people, no doubt, but… social media in Muskogee? As if Dave McClure is ever going to drop by here, of all places. Well, not unless he’d absolutely insisted on a live demo from some MIT Star Trek teleportation spin-out. How vividly Daveski would swear if he found himself unexpectedly re-materialized on Okmulgee Avenue, eh?

So, when the lanky one with a testosteronal chin (a bit like a pumped-down Matt Damon) called over to her, she twisted her mouth into her second-best smile (“positive, life-affirming, it’s-great-to-make-money-off-you-geeks”) and danced towards the group. As you’d expect, they knew her name already, but of course she couldn’t give a rat’s ass about theirs. Life is easy when you just don’t care.

“Hey Jena”, Matt Jnr shouted over Hooverphonic’s sweet music, “I think there’s a problem with your tattoo.”

Well, she thought, m-a-y-b-e: but that was when she noticed The Handsome But Odd Guy in the group, mouth slightly open, looking straight through her with his puppy-dumb X-ray eyes. “A problem?” she replied, her PanAm Smile still intact.

“Our guy Rain Man wants to know why you have a Latin poison book for a tattoo”, the tall guy continued. “Oh, and just so you know, Nate’s got Asperger’s, which for him means he codes like an angel but doesn’t like to get out of the office much.”

“No, I’m pretty sure it’s not a poison recipe”, Jena replied turning towards him, a wave of minor cracklets starting to break round the edge of her working smile. “It’s from an astronomical page of…”

multa michi circa venenorum materiam“, Nate was reading, “dubia occurrent quorum declaratio nixi. Pretty funny tattoo you’ve got there, Miss.”

There was an odd, whooshing sound in her head, as clusters of Jurassic synapses creakily reassembled a fossilized memory from way back when she was still a basically whole person. Yes: it was an incipit she’d seen before, back in her Voynich research life. And if so, then it was probably from Thorndike’s History of Magic & Experimental Science, most likely her favourite Volume IV. So, it would be… the second half of Antonius Guaynerius of Pavia’s twin treatise on plague and poison, composed before 1440. Might Guaynerius have been the Voynich Manuscript’s author? The raw electricity of the possibility surged up and down her, like lightning trying vainly to reach ground. But… even if the idea just happened to be consistent with the radiocarbon dating, nothing that speculative could be true, it was all some spooky coincidence. It had to be, right?

Against her will, Jena was starting to get just a little freaked out. If any of this was even remotely right, the guy Nate must be some kind of idiot savant, unable to tie his shoelaces but able to read the frickin’ Voynich Manuscript. She sneaked a sly glance at his shoes: slip-on Vans. As if I couldn’t guess, she thought. “Does your friend actually know Latin?”, she asked as casually as her quickening pulse would allow.

“Latin?” the lanky guy replied. “He’s always seemed happier talking in Python or C++ than English. But anyway, what is that crazy shit alphabet on your back?”

“Oh, it’s from the Voynich Manuscript, a kind of weird cipher mystery thing”, she said in the best noncommittal voice she could muster. “But I think I’d better show your man the next line down, see if he can read that too.”

She moved down to the startup guys’ table, and turned to face away from them. Down went the already skimpy silver lamé pole dancing underwear an extra two inches to reveal the only line of red writing in the whole of the VMs. Way back in her Voynich research days, she’d often wondered whether this might be the single line that would some day serve to crack its cipher system. So what would Asperger’s Nate make of it?

“It’s a beautiful thing”, the Odd Guy mumbled. “But I can’t make out the first word, may I move closer, Miss?”

“Uhhh… sure”, she said.

Nate moved right up close, and ran his index finger tenderly over the red letters with a kind of Braille-reading intensity. Instantly, her long-submerged memories of holding the Voynich Manuscript at the Beinecke Library surfaced, and exploded in the physicality of his touch. For that moment, her skin was the Voynich’s vellum, her tattoo was the Voynich’s ink, and she felt utterly entangled in time and space with the Voynich’s author (whoever he or she happened to be).

But… then Jena noticed out the corner of her eye that all the other startup guys were taking out their wallets, placing hundred dollar bills into a pile on the table, and shaking their heads.

“Sorry”, said Nate in a completely different (and totally normal) voice as he stood up, “I can’t make it out, Miss.”

“Hey…”, said Jena as each of the guys high-fived Nate, “what’s going on here?”

One of the group’s regulars, a bald-headed guy with comedy glasses – perhaps the in-house web designer?, she wondered – was laughing into his hand. “Sorry, Jena, it was just a joke. Nate bet us a hundred bucks each he’d get inside your panties tonight, and we all thought he had precisely zero chance.”

“You did this for money?” Jena spat at Nate. “You made a fool of my ass to make yourself some freakin’ money?”

“Oh no”, said Nate handing her the cash, “the money’s for you. These guys work for me, I just enjoyed the challenge. When Larry” – he pointed at the bald-headed guy – “showed me a picture of you on his cameraphone, I thought you looked cute, and – you know – one thing led to another.”

“But all that Antonius Guaynerius stuff”, Jena spluttered, “how on earth did you…”

“Ah, all your old postings to the Voynich mailing list are still online”, Nate smiled. “Didn’t take long to find something to bait the line.”

“You bastard”, Jena said sotto voce, “you… smart bastard” – but this time she could feel her eyes twinkling, for the first time in a couple of years. “You… gonna come back soon?”

“I think I will”, said Nate. “I rather like the view from this table.”

All of a sudden, Jena fancied doing some problem-solving herself.

Sometimes you read a book by an author still finding their writing feet: lively ideas, but clunky characterization and occasional phrases that make you blink and read them a second time for all the wrong reasons. So it is with Glenn Cooper’s “Library of the Dead”, with its anti-(ish)-hero Will Piper, the FBI’s soon-to-retire forensic profiling star: if you bear all those first-novel-nerves in mind, you’ll probably enjoy the book. Having said that, easily the worst-turned phrase of the book comes on page 93:

He studied the annals of sex crime sedulously…

Is there a spelling mistake in there? It had me completely foxed, but perhaps you’re wise to all that. 😉

Here’s a nice little thing that might possibly earn a Cipher Mysteries reader 100 US$!

Once upon a time in Copenhagen, a bright mathematics professor called Julius Petersen briefly stepped into the world of codes and ciphers. He wrote and published a pamphlet on cryptography called Système cryptographique, as well as a series of eight fortnightly articles on the subject for the weekly magazine NÆR OG FJERN (‘NEAR AND FAR AWAY’) – these ran from issue 150 (16 May 1875) to issue 164 (22 August 1875).

Though the articles did not actually say Petersen had written them, they are very much à la main de Petersen: and according to Professor Bjarne Toft, “we know from other sources that [Petersen] was the author (or one of the authors)“.

The point of interest for us is that the author(s) signed his / their name(s) in this unusual encrypted fashion:-

By 46, 9, 4-57, 3, 5.

This has left Bjarne Toft so mystified that he has offered money to anyone who can crack it:-

Does the dash ‘-‘ indicate that there are two authors? If so, the other could be Frederik Bing, who was an extremely good mathematician and a close friend of Petersen. Bing was mathematical director in the state life insurance company. And are the numbers dates? Or what??

I have offered a prize of 100 US$ to anyone who can give a convincing solution (convincing for me that means!).

Here are some things that might possibly help you crack such a tiny cryptogram (even smaller than the Dorabella Cipher!):

  • Petersen’s full name was “Julius Peter Christian Petersen”, so his initials were presumably JPCP;
  • Petersen’s friend’s full name was “Frederik Moritz Bing”, so his initials were FMB;
  • The cryptogram looks an awful lot like a tiny book cipher (along the lines of the Beale Papers);
  • If it is a book code, no obvious attempt has been made to use high numbers;
  • If it is a book code, common letters would presumably tend to appear as smaller numbers, less common letters slightly larger numbers, with extremely rare letters potentially very large numbers: so the pattern here would seem to be “rare common common dash rare common common“;
  • Surely the number one candidate book for testing the “book code” hypothesis would be Petersen’s Système cryptographique. Yet Worldcat lists no copies in the UK, so it would be down to someone to have a look at one of the scant few copies owned elsewhere…

Over to you, armchair cryptogram detectives…

With “write what you know” apparently ringing loudly in his ears, Brad Kelln constructed his fictional protagonist Jake Tunnel to be, just like him, a Nova Scotia-based psychologist (and is Kelln married with young kids too? Almost certainly). But probably unlike Kelln, Tunnel’s best friend at college Benicio Valori constantly globetrots on behalf of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith on the lookout for claimed miracles, in a very Gabriel-Byrne-in-Stigmata (1999) kind of way.

Hence when an autistic boy on a primary school tour of the Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscripts Library is shown the Voynich Manuscript in a permanent glass display case [this never actually happens, but never mind] and is miraculously able to read it, Benicio is sent by the CDF’s morally-suspect-yet-self-harmingly-devout Cardinal Espinosa to check it out. Once again, all very Alfred-Molina-in-The-Da-Vinci-Code (2006), though of course this is no more than a slightly updated version of the centuries-old ‘wicked Jesuit’ trope for whom the (holy) end always justifies the (unholy) means. Oh, and the autistic kid is pretty much Simon Lynch in Mercury Rising (1998), who goes on a similarly mad road trip with Bruce Willis. La-di-da.

Rapidly, the boy is revealed to be the last of the Nephilim, a race of (what X-Files scriptwriters would term) ‘human-alien genetic hybrids’ fleetingtly mentioned in the Bible and about which Erich von Däniken has spent the majority of his life writing phantasmagorically imaginative historical nonsense. And hence the Voynich Manuscript is revealed to be the Nephilim Bible, a document so earth-shattering it would Rock The Very Foundations Of The Church If Anyone Were To Read It And Reveal Its Secrets etc.

Complicating the plot are Shemhazai and Azazel, the two cursed ‘Grigori’ aliens / angels who landed on Earth seventy generations ago and whose intergalactic miscegenatory misdeeds quite literally spawned all this trouble. Despite having awesomely glowing megatronic powers, the pair mooches around the book, languidly chasing after Benicio and the boy in an almost Rastafari laid-back stylee. And complicating the matter yet further are the CDF’s dysfunctional twin thugs Maury and Jeremy, who are also tasked with chasing after the protagonists.

Kelln’s book covers a lot of ground and tells its story briskly, but I couldn’t help but feel a bit cheated by it in two main ways. Firstly, even though it’s written by a hard-working forensic psychologist, none of the characters presents any noticeable character depth or development: sure, they move around the board rapidly enough, but they basically remain Ship, Boot, Dog, Iron, Hat, and Car for the duration of the game. Secondly, there are so many parallels between “In Tongues of the Dead” and Kevin Smith’s thoroughly enjoyable (1999) film Dogma that it’s hard not to see Kelln’s book as a dourly humourless anagram of the latter. For example, Shemhazai and Azazel are basically Bartleby (also a Grigori) and Loki crossed with Jay and Silent Bob; Maury and Jeremy are basically the Stygian Triplets; Metatron and Bethany Sloane are basically Harold Grower and Jake Tunnel; and so on.

As you can probably tell, I’m getting a huge screenplays-circa-1999 buzz off Kelln’s book, and not in a particularly good way: ultimately, it seems like he has fallen into the old trap of writing not about what you know, but about what you have seen at the movies. Brad writes perfectly well – but given that he’s a psychologist, where did all the psychology end up? 🙁

[Here are links to chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Enjoy!]

* * * * * * *

Chapter 3 – “Unjust Desserts”

“I suppose you just happened to pick this up at a rummage sale?”, said Emm, minutely scrutinizing the jacket’s material through her Swiss army knife’s magnifying glass.

“No, it was my grandfather’s – Mani Harvitz, he was a WWI codebreaker. He knew John Manly well, so must have known all about the Voynich Manuscript, I guess.”

“Hmmm… so why’s it in such good condition?”

“Ah”, said Graydon as he leaned over to pick up his club sandwich, “there’s a family story. On the boat back to the US from some European trip in the late 1920s, my grandpa fell seriously ill – and that turned out to be the tail end of the whole encephalitis lethargica epidemic.”

“Oh my God”, said Emm appalled, “the whole Oliver Sacks ‘Awakenings‘ thing, right?”

“Right. My grandfather stayed in a kind of catatonic state for decades – he died before I was born. Somehow I ended up inheriting his favourite jacket.”

Emm paused, looking at him through narrowed eyes, furious mental calculations plainly rattling through her head. The moment she turned her magnified gaze around to the small piece of parchment. Graydon stuffed an ungraciously large lump of sandwich into his mouth, trying hard not to moan with pleasure at his accelerated relief from starvation.

“Well, at least we know what he was doing”, Emm said, her shoulders relaxing a little as she began to take off her white cotton gloves.

“Errrm… which was… what?” Graydon replied, trying hard not to open his overfilled mouth too widely.

“For a start, he was visiting the Knihovna národního muzea v Praze – the Czech National Library, you can tell from the handwritten shelfmark. And here’s the giveaway he was stealing this”, she continued, pointing at the vellum’s left hand side , “the clean edge where Mani cut it out – probably with a smuggled-in razor blade – before stashing it in his secret pocket.”

 “Jeez, so now I’m on a lunch date with Gil Grissom. Did you happen to notice any anomalous beetle larvae?”

“You ate your sandwich first, you tell me. Was the salad unusually… crunchy?”

But now it was Graydon’s turn to go vague and starry-eyed, triggered by a cascade of half-memories from his capacious mental warehouse of Voynich trivia. “I reckon the connection here is… Edith Rickert. See, my grandpa had had this massive crush on her from the codebreaking office, but she was utterly devoted to working with John Manly and so turned him down: basically, Mani got married on the rebound. I went through Rickert’s letters in the archives: the last one from him promised to travel up and show her something she’d be very interested in. Didn’t say what it was, though.”

“So, if Edith Rickert was into the Voynich…”

“Way back then, Wilfrid Voynich called it his ‘Roger Bacon Manuscript’, but I don’t think she was ever fooled.”

“OK, whatever the damn manuscript was called, it seems pretty likely to me that the thing hidden in this jacket was a Voynich-related fragment your grandpa stole from the Czech museum library to try to impress Rickert.”  Emm said as she finally reached over to her plate. “You know, exciting her mind to get her into bed.”

“People do recommend that, but honestly, it’s never worked for me yet”, said Graydon. “Personally, I tend to find a nice lunch far more effective.”

Emm laughed, nearly choking on her sandwich, before frowning and pointing an accusatory finger at him. “Don’t you get any ideas – it would take much more than a club sandwich to get me into bed.”

“Whatever you say, Scully. Oh, the desserts here are pretty good, by the way.”

“Cheeky bastard!”

“And you’d definitely have to promise not to wear those cotton gloves”, continued Graydon grinning. “That would be wrong on so many levels.”

“Well, as long as I get to keep my magnifying glass and ruler, though.”

“Cheeky bastard!”

They both paused awkwardly, eyes scanning the other, resolutely reading between each other’s lines.

“Look”, said Emm as she began putting her things back into her clutch bag, “I’ve… I’ve got to get back to work now, before Mrs Kurtz starts punching the film crew. Could turn ugly.”

“That’s good”, said Graydon, noticing that even he didn’t believe the sound of his own words. “Ummm… thanks for dismantling my jacket and giving me a whole new research lead. Might even save my PhD. Oh, and I’d be very happy to help you with your cleaning, any time.”

“That’s great”, she replied, but her face was looking away as she stood up to leave. “Anyway, the Voynich film crew are filming an interview with Marina Lyonne this afternoon, I guess you probably know her, right?”

Graydon’s face dropped faster than a Wile E. Coyote grand piano. “Yeah, I know her”.

Ouch-a-rama.

His Voynich über-skeptic ex-wife was in town.

Oh, Marina, Marina, Marina: she knew the Beinecke curators very well – far too well, in fact  and she had a score of scores to settle with him. And this was more than just a bad moment for her to turn up wielding her +10 Axe of Grudgery, this was surely the worst imaginable moment.

Whoever said “one step forward, two steps back” was surely wearing X-ray specs, looking at the workings of the heart…

…writing a letter? In what is probably the hidden-writing news story of the year, “The UK spy agency MI6 experimented with using semen as invisible ink“, under the steady hand of department head Mansfield Cumming. “Next time you’re banging out a message, 007, use a pen.”

(As James Bond himself would say, “this stuff writes itself“).

The original story is here, but you’ll probably enjoy reading the comments on Cory Doctorow’s BoingBoing post more, as they basically run through most of the spy-who-loved-me seminal puns you’re ever likely to come across.

Just so you know, this is one of the newspaper-friendly saucy tidbits culled from the just-published MI6: The History of the Secret Intelligence Service 1909-1949 by Keith Jeffery, who is no doubt fully aware that the pen is (indeed) mightier than the sword. 🙂

Here’s a great “hidden history” news story from Der Spiegel (in English), that manages to link Ptolemy, Roman trading, Istanbul, Nazi history, and archaeology – well worth reading!

A long-standing mystery about the early history of Germany is that nobody has really had much of an idea where its towns were. Yet the Romans left plenty of references to trading with miscellaneous German peoples, to crossing Germany to get to the Baltic, to arranging politically expedient assassinations, etc: and every once in a while a huge cache of buried treasure turns up. So there plainly were people there… but where were their towns?

Helpfully, the famous 2nd Century CE Alexandrian Greek geographer and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy included a nice-looking map of ‘Germania Magna’ in his Geographia, which almost certainly drew on many earlier documents and accounts (Ptolemy never went there himself). Frustratingly, however, the countless attempts by scholars to make the towns indicated there match up to modern towns have failed to please, perhaps because the earliest copy of it they had access to was medieval, dating only to around 1300. Hence the map became infamous as something of an “enchanted castle”, a Voynich Manuscript-like intellectual quicksand apparently designed for PhDs to drown themselves in.

However, a Berlin-based team of academic surveyors and mappers now claim – after a six-year struggle – to have finally worked out how to remap Ptolemy’s 94 German town coordinates onto actual coordinates. What made this possible was the dramatic discovery in the Topkapı Palace library in Istanbul of an earlier copy of Ptolemy’s Geographia (a reproduction of which is due for publication in 2011): the team’s results appear in a new book “Germania und die Insel Thule” (“Germania and the Island of Thule”).

Incidentally, I noted a while back that Professor Gülru Necipoglu had mentioned at a conference in 2006 that a new inventory of the Topkapı Palace library had been uncovered, so perhaps this copy of the Geographia turned up as part of some wider efforts at carrying out more systematic documentation there. Let’s hope so, as many historians believe that this library is likely to contain many more as-yet-unknown historical treasures.

Generally, I have to say that I’m somewhat surprised by this story: firstly, because I’d have thought that the #1 thing any sensible 21st century historical geographer would do would be to map the datapoints into Google Earth for everyone to see; and secondly, because it fails to mention that this ought to yield a bonanza for metal detector hardware shops in Germany, as countless armchair treasure hunters dust off ancient Teutonic myths for clues to legendary gold and silver caches to unearth. Happy hunting!

PS: a great big hat-tip to Matthew Kagle for passing the story on, much appreciated! 🙂