The “Ptolemy Code” cracked, metal detectorists rejoice…

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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! 🙂

The Voynich Translation – Chapter 2

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

* * * * * * *

Chapter 2 – “Game On”

Vivid dreams of a towering manuscript library on fire: the Renaissance inks and paints boil, become gas and swirl upwards into an angry elemental wind, textual spirits entombed for centuries but now set free to roam the atmosphere, their haunting transmuted into a gigantic elemental pall above New Haven, a Jovian minium spot written upon the Earth’s skies, a full stop in the book of the sky for many-parsec-distant alien telescopes to read…

“Hey, Mr Graydon Harvitz! I nearly didn’t recognize you!”

He started from his mid-day café reverie, nearly knocking his second half-cold latte over onto the sprawl of Voynich Manuscript scans as he half-rose, no less surprised by the sensation of his newly-shaven chin on his fingertips than by Emm’s voice.

“Yeah, well, what with my committee appearance coming up, it was time I cleaned up my act. A bit, anyway.”

Emm reached over to his shoulder, her long fingers swiftly transcribing the diagonal weft and weave of his grandfather’s ancient twill jacket, one of the few things Graydon had inherited. She paused for a second longer than he expected, reading the material’s texture as if it were a familiar book, her eyes briefly absent from the room. “Ah”, she said, “you like antiques as well”.

“When history surrounds you, you can’t really avoid it”, he replied grimly. But the truth was, he wore it in a superstitious half-hope that his grandfather’s whisky-soaked ghost might lend a hand on those occasions when he particularly lacked cryptographic inspiration. Which had been… most of the time this last few months. “Hungry?”

“As a horse – any protein-rich House Specials on today?”

“Naah”, he replied, “it’s all carbohydrates à la mode. But their Club Sandwich is pretty good.”

“Good call!”, she smiled, “I’ll be the hunter-gatherer, back in a minute…”

Graydon watched with no little curiosity as she lightly sashayed across to the counter, attracting both jealous and covetous eyeballs from the other customers as she went. Yet… even though Graydon had survived his epic (and admittedly much-delayed) battle with the razor this morning, he still felt like nothing whereas Emm really was something: where was the balance in the equation? What was in it for her? And moreover…

“What exactly does a cleaner do?” he asked as she carefully squeezed a fresh latte and her cappucino into two of the polygonal gaps between the printouts on the table.

“Well… we clean things – old things. Such as your favourite manuscript. The Beinecke’s curators have put off fixing it up for years, but let’s face it, the Voynich does need a bit of TLC, right?”

“I guess so”, he said. “I must admit my heart’s in my mouth every time I have to unfold the rosettes page. On balance, I’d prefer my tombstone not to say ‘the idiot who trashed the VMs‘.”

“Just so you know, sorting it all out is my next job, once ze feelm crew ‘az returned to La Belle France. Their director has already annoyed Mrs Kurtz, so I don’t think they’ll be here long.” She snatched a brief sip of her coffee, looking sideways through the café’s glass front. “Technically, I should just be able to get on with it, but… I’m going to need your help.”

Graydon exhaled relief as a smile rolled across his face. “And there I was thinking it was my eyes you were lusting after.”

“No, it’s your mind, you fool. Ordinary manuscripts are easy to tidy up because everything has its place. But in the case of the Voynich, I’d prefer my tombstone not to say ‘the idiot who wiped the code off the VMs‘. Without knowing what might be hidden where, being a cleaner isn’t such an easy gig.”

“Ordinarily”, he said, leaning forward conspiratorially, “I’d be a sucker for a beautiful woman so blatantly calling me to adventure, but… I also have the not-entirely-small issue of a ticking clock and a funding gun pointed at my head. And it’ll probably be no big surprise to you that my work on the manuscript is not quite as advanced as had been hoped.”

“So… is that a yes or a no?”

“Actually, as with everything else with the Voynich, it’s an ‘I-don’t-yet-know‘. I need to figure out in my mind whether hanging out with a supermodel doing cool codicology is worth risking my PhD for.”

“OK, no problem”, Emm said, quickly resting her forehead forwards onto her hand. Despite the amused self-deprecating smile on her face, Graydon could not help but notice a wave of stress flash through her eyes. “Maybe it’s not an either-or thing. Anyway, I’m just dying to ask you – what is that bulge in your pocket?”

“Jeez”, Graydon gagged,”what finishing school did you go to?”

“No”, she sighed, “not your pants, your jacket. If – as I’m pretty sure – it’s pre-1950, it really shouldn’t have a purely decorative pocket on the front. So… what’s it for?”

Graydon looked down at it as an oddly restrained silence fell over him: even though he’d worn his grandfather’s jacket countless times, he realised that he’d never properly looked at it before.

“Come on, then, pass it over”, she hustled, getting out a pair of white cotton gloves, a small ruler and a tiny flashlight from her Biba chainmail clutch bag. “I’ll have a closer look. Do you have a cameraphone?”

“Errr… yes I do”, he said, taking his Nokia out of the jacket as he passed it over the table to Emm, her eyes alive with the detail. “Though, I haven’t actually used it yet.”

“Here’s your chance to learn. You’ll need to photograph this seam here before and after I cut the thread, so I can restore it later.” Shining her light on the top seam with the ruler placed alongside it, she waited impatiently while Graydon haltingly navigated through the phone’s Byzantine user interface all the way to its camera submenu. At the clatter of the fake shutter sound effect, she lurched into action, selecting a microscopic pair of scissors from a diamante-studded Swiss army knife. One deft snip later, she was tweezing out the single long thread that had fastened the top edge in place for God-knows how many decades.

“Keep photographing, Gray… yup, we’ve got a hot one for you, Penny…”

The waiter arrived with their Club sandwiches, but Graydon slid them to one side of the table: for all their previous hunger, suddenly neither had any appetite for food at all.

At first, all they could see was a sliver of a pale brown edge: but this grew one tiny fraction at a time until Emm had finally pulled out a small scrap of aged parchment, covered in fingerprints and dirt. At its top was an inventory reference written in a mid-Victorian European copperplate hand – but in the centre there was an 8×8 table of unusual letters.

Up until now, these curious letter-forms had – for all their study – been unique to a single historical document.

But not now.

Unmistakeably – incredibly – the grid contained letters from the Voynich Manuscript.

“Game on!”, moaned Graydon, shaking his head in disbelief. “Game on!”

“Wow”, gasped Emm, her mouth dry with the tension, “even I didn’t really think codicology could beat sex.”

“But… maybe it’s not an either-or thing?”

The Voynich Manuscript’s paragraph stars, explained…?

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I’ve long wondered about what’s going on in the Voynich Manuscript’s final (and, many think, ‘boringest’) quire, Quire #20: I summarized a lot of current Q20 research here last month. But just what Q20’s paragraph markers – whether they turn out to be stars, comets, or flowers – are remains a mystery… basically, why are they there at all?

You see, because each star sits at the start of a paragraph and (as Elmar Vogt helpfully pointed out) many are arranged on pages in what seem to be repetitive x-o-x-o-x-o patterns, it seems fairly safe to conclude that these are mostly decorative, and hence there is probably nothing much “written in the stars”. Of course, anyone who desperately wants to go a-huntin’ for a biliteral ciphertext hidden there is more than welcome to try (go ahead, feel free to knock yourself out), but I don’t honestly think you’ll squeeze much juice out of that lemon, sorry. And wipe that sour look off your face, OK? 🙂

Yet even so, the brutal fact remains that the paragraph stars are there: and given that pretty much everything else in the VMs mutely screams of carefully-executed disguised intention, I think we should expect there to have been a perfectly good reason for their existence, however mundane that might actually be. So probably the best question to be asking is: what function (however minor) could these stars be performing? What did they help the author(s) do?

Until a few days ago, this was pretty much the brick wall my chain of reasoning had hit: but then I read an interesting post by Rich SantaColoma on the ‘weirdo’ red glyphs on f1r (the very first page of the Voynich Manuscript). In particular, Rich points out the striking similarity between the first “bird glyph” (the first symbol of the second paragraph in the VMs) and marginal paragraph markers in some 16th Century Spanish manuscripts, the Codex Mendoza [1541/2], the Aubin Codex [started in 1567] and the [probably fake!] Codex Cardona, while in the comments to Rich’s page, Ernest also mentioned the Codex Osuna [1565] and the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel.

Ultimately, Rich’s reasoning comes down to this: in these Spanish manuscripts, the glyph is simply a decorative “Y”-shape, short for “Ydem”, which is used in lists pretty much the same way as both “item” and “ibidem” (which we still use in its differently-shortened form “ibid.“), so it seems reasonable to infer that this is what’s happening  on f1r of the VMs too.

All fair enough: but regardless of whether Rich’s idea turns out to be right or wrong (and it’s desperately hard to build up a really convincing case on a single instance of a single shape), what struck me most was the parallel between the paragraph stars and these similarly itemized lists. (But no, I’m definitely not proposing that Q20 is a Powerpoint presentation from the Renaissance).

So… might each star simply be an embellished / disguised “y”, short for (say) “ydem” / “ytem” / “idem” / “ibidem” / “item”? Actually, I think yes: look at the following picture (which contains all the paragraph stars from f104v), and I’ll show you how I think the “y” was hidden in the first four stars (highlighted in bright red), make up your own mind for the rest:-

Now tell me the second best explanation for these! And yes, I do know that some of the (probably later) pages in Q20 have tail-less stars, but the basic hidden-in-plain-sight steganographic conceit was probably getting a bit boring by then, 300+ stars later. 🙂

New Voynich A/B hypothesis…

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More than 30 years ago, ex-US military codebreaker Prescott Currier was looking at the Voynich Manuscript, when he noticed not only that the handwriting changed (though he was uncertain how many different scribes were involved), but also that the language itself (or, more precisely, the rules governing how Voynichese letters meshed with each other) changed. He called the two major Voynichese ‘dialects’ thus identified “A” and “B” (though it turns out that quite a few pages are subtly intermediate between A and B).

Hence one large shadow hanging over any discussion of Voynichese is the issue of why such a clearly constructed language / system as Currier A (which was almost certainly written before Currier B) needed to be modified to make Currier B. After all, as Jerry Pournelle used to say every couple of months in Byte magazine, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it“, surely?

And yet it seems that the Voynich’s author did fix it: so, might the presence of statistical differences be a clue that Currier A was in some way broken? To me, this implies that we should try to quantify and model the differences between A and B pages, so that we can see what aspects of A were modified to make B pages, just in case this exposes some subtle weakness of the A language. Basically, what flaws in the A language were the A→B hacks trying to cover up?

As part of this whole process, I’ve recently been looking closely at the ‘l’ character in EVA transcriptions of the Voynich Manuscript, and what the different treatment of ‘l’ characters on A and B pages might be able to tell us. It’s well-known that ‘l’ is very commonly preceded both by ‘o’ and by ‘a’ – but does this behaviour change much between A pages and B pages?

According to my online Javascript analysis tool:-

  • In A pages, ‘l’ is preceded by ‘o’ 72.7% of the time, and is preceded by ‘a’ 22.9% of the time.
  • In B pages, ‘l’ is preceded by ‘o’ 43.7% of the time, and is preceded by ‘a’ 29.0% of the time.
  • Freestanding ‘l’ (i.e. ‘l’s not preceded by ‘a’ or ‘o’) occur 118 times in A pages, but 1706 times in B pages.
  • ‘ol’ usually appears preceded by a space (97% of the time in A pages, 96% of the time in B pages)
  • Freestanding ‘l’ usually appears preceded by a space (90% in A, 95% in B).
  • The summed counts for ‘ol’ and freestanding ‘l’ remains roughly the same (5.1% in A, 4.7% in B)

What is most interesting about this to me is that it seems to be saying that ‘ol’ and freestanding ‘l’ function in very similar ways, but in the transition from A to B, freestanding ‘l’ seems to have replaced ‘ol’ in about 37.5% of cases. That is, it seems to me that ‘ol’ and ‘l’ (when not preceded by ‘a’) might well represent exactly the same token: which is to say that, al’s aside, ol = l.

So, according to my current forensic reconstruction, ol and al were verbose tokens in the A pages, but because ol appeared so often (4.57%) in A pages (thus bloating the size of the ciphertext), the author finessed this in B pages. By replacing many ol’s with l, ol’s percentage went down to 2.67% while freestanding l went up to 1.66% in B (relative to 0.27% in A).

I’m pretty sure that Glen Claston’s concern about the bloating effect of verbose cipher was shared by the VMs’ author, and that at least some of the changes between A and B were done in order to tighten up the output. Why else fix it if it wasn’t broken?

The John Dee of Mortlake Society AGM…

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A nice email arrives from Anne Reeves of The John Dee of Mortlake Society: there’s an AGM scheduled for Tuesday 19th October 2010 at 8pm at St Mary’s in Mortlake (£5 for non-members, but includes a glass of wine), though you can turn up to chat from 7pm. According to the JDoMS’s newsletter, their guest speaker will be Jenny Rampling, who will give a talk on “Dee the Alchemist“. Rampling is a Wellcome Research Fellow at Cambridge’s Department of the History and Philosophy of Science, is doing a PhD on 16th century intellectual history, and even organized a two day conference on Dee at St John’s last year… so doubtless knows her stuff.

Given that I didn’t know that Dee had any strong connection with alchemy beyond owning a copy of the Voarchadumia (which reminds me that I still haven’t got round to reviewing that here, sorry!), this sounds fairly intriguing. Most of the ‘alchemical-Dee’ literature I’ve seen seems pretty speculative and thin (e.g. I’m far from convinced that the Monas Hieroglyphica is Dee’s alchemical pièce-de-resistance, even if lots of alchemists did appropriate his Prince-like monad), so it should be quite fun.

Oh, and if you can’t wait that long for your fix of Dee-related arcana, she’s also giving a talk at the British Society for the History of Mathematics Autumn Meeting and AGM on 2nd October 2010 in Birmingham, entitled “John Dee and the Elizabethan mathematics of everything“, which focuses more on his Mathematicall Praeface to Henry Billingsley’s (1570) “Elements of Geometrie“. Just so you know! 😉

Possibly Voynich-themed Japanese music (etc)…

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Here’s another (possibly?) Voynich Manuscript-themed musical composition on YouTube you probably haven’t heard of. The notes that go with it say:-

Circle: N-tone
Album: Side material “FLOW”
Artist: ziki_7 [Dust_Box_49] (which seems to be some kind of Japanese musical fanzine?)
Original: ヴワル魔法図書館 (which is Japanese for “Voile, the Magic Library”, whatever that means)

Make of it what you will – it reminded me in places of semi-ambient computer game soundtracks circa 2001, which I don’t think is a completely bad starting point. Enjoy! 🙂

“Silk Road prostitution” Voynich theory…

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One historical cipher mystery I haven’t really put a lot of time into is the “Oak Island Mystery” or the “Money Pit Mystery” (perhaps I’ll post about that another day). One reasonably well-known Oak Island researcher is Keith Ranville, a Cree “self-taught researcher born in Manitoba“, who in 2005 “relocated to Nova Scotia to further research and advance his theories on the subject“: if you’re interested, here’s a fairly extensive description of Ranville’s main 2007 Money Pit decryption claim.

But now he’s crossed over into our world, and this month (September 2010) put forward his own tentative interpretation of the Voynich Manuscript posted in his “Oak Island Treasure Mystery Canadian Journal of New Research (Latest News)“. Which is that the Voynich might possibly be a Silk Road pimp’s log book / accounting book, artistically camouflaged to resemble pictures of spices and drugs (the herbal pages) and persian rug designs (the circular designs on the nine-rosette page), with individual prostitute availability somehow encoded into the zodiac pages.

As Keith Ranville notes, “Al Capone had a bookie accountant” to track all his various criminal activities (that was how Capone was eventually caught) and “maybe this is the same kind of principle going on with this elaborate voynich manuscript?” You’ll have to make up your own mind on this: don’t shoot me, I’m merely the runner messenger…

The 14th European Skeptics Conference – does it really exist?

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The next European Skeptics Conference starts in Budapest in a few days’ time (17th-19th September 2010), and features Klaus Schmeh giving a talk on the Voynich Manuscript.

Though Klaus has invested a lot of effort into building up a hardline skeptical position on VMs theories (basically, that more or less everything written on it is either pseudoscience or pseudohistory), I personally don’t think this is particularly fair. Compared to the frankly fantasmagorical literature on the Phaistos Disk or even the wistfully nationalistic fancies floating around the Rohoncz Codex, I’d actually say that the majority of VMs theories do tend to rest on a far less rumpled bed of historical evidence and tortuous historical reasoning (if you put the alien Nazi Atlantean end-times theories to one side).

Yet it is also true that VMs theories also often share the same historical methodological flaw (some people would call it an “antipattern”). What I call the “Big Man” fallacy is the conviction that the only way of constructing a convincing explanation for the VMs would be to weave it into the narrative of a well-known historical (but occult- or cryptography-tinged) personality. As examples of this, you could quickly point to theories name-checking Roger Bacon, Leonardo da Vinci, Trithemius,  John Dee, Edward Kelley, Francis Bacon and perhaps even (I’ll say it so that Klaus doesn’t have to) Antonio Averlino.

Of course, the awkward truth about the Renaissance is that for every one half-decent such historical candidate, there were probably a hundred better qualified ones long lost in the fog of time: so the odds are always strongly against anyone succeeding in taking on the Voynich in the absence of proper scientific / codicological data to build upon.

Perhaps this marks the line between cynicism and skepticism I mentioned a few weeks ago: whereas a cynic dismisses any such speculative exercise as a unsupportable waste of effort, a skeptic realizes that the challenge of acquiring proper, revealing historical information is always going to be significant, and so struggles to retain a core of optimism. Is getting to such an extraordinary end line worth precariously balancing optimism and pessimism for? I think so, but… opinions differ! 🙂

Owl House Voynich tattoo gag…

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Here’s something you don’t see every day: an online comic with a Voynich tattoo gag. The Owl House’s theme is “problem solving and paranormal investigation“, which are apparently (take note, Scooby Doo fans) “not mutually exclusive“.

Of course, until we can actually read the VMs, the real problem with having a Voynichese tattoo is that – unlike “Mum” or “I ♥ Chantelle” – it might be saying just about anything. Imagine finding out that your prized “otedy dal daiin cheey” tattoo translates to “Lick My Hairy Butt”… perhaps it would be better to stick to a dolphin instead, eh? 🙂