Voynich Manuscript May Have Originated In the New World 170
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by
Soulskill
from the good-to-know-which-side-of-the-atlantic-we-were-trolled-from dept.
from the good-to-know-which-side-of-the-atlantic-we-were-trolled-from dept.
bmearns writes "The Voynich Manuscript is most geeks' favorite 'indecipherable' illuminated manuscript. Its bizarre depictions of strange plants and animals, astrological diagrams, and hordes of tiny naked women bathing in a system of interconnected tubs (which bear an uneasy resemblance to the human digestive system), have inspired numerous essays and doctoral theses', plus one XKCD comic. Now a team of botanists (yes, botanists) may have uncovered an important clue as to its origin and content by identifying several of the plants and animals depicted, and linking them to the Spanish territories in Central America."
Botanists did a thing (Score:5, Funny)
If we find out they can do other sapient stuff, like make fire and use Facebook, I may start feeling guilty about the whole composting thing.
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I will doubt your repentance until you also stop eating Girl Scouts without baking them into Girl Scout cookies first.
Clearly obvious... (Score:2)
It's 500 pages, right?
They needed a thick enough book to reach the cookie jar.
Re:Clearly obvious... (Score:5, Funny)
Textbooks in Academia are very often subject to the now normalized purposeful practice of being embiggened with useless redundancy and other such non essential and pointless filler to give them a high "thud factor" [wordspy.com], id est, a physical quality exhibited by a bound set of printed manuscript as its conversion of potential to kinetic energy -- most commonly expressed as free-fall -- ends abruptly upon colliding with the approximately parallel planar surface of a coffee table, desk or other such platform, such that the humanoid observer will cromulently valuate the manuscript as having a higher value due to this property being associated with other well respected volumes of physical information conveyance.
Yes, this from your 'best and brightest'. Your race is doomed.
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Oh for mod points!
+1, Hilarious.
Interesting as it points to how to decipher it.... (Score:5, Interesting)
According to TFA, plant names in Nahuatl (the language of the aztecs) have been identified.
If indeed people who wrote it were writing in Nahuatl, and perhaps in a dialect, they may have needed to make their own script (since there was none around).
So given time, perhaps it can be deciphered...
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Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it. (Score:5, Informative)
I think that some of your points are valid, but not this bit: "It's not plausible that everyone capable of reading the thing just died off without telling anyone." Given the impact of the Spanish conquest, I would say thay is perfectly plausible, morover it could have happened in a single generation. People don't seem to understand the impact of disease and slavery on the native American populations. Even educated people aren't going to have much time for reading between shifts in the salt mines, and when you're dead from smallpox you don't read much of anything. This thing could have been written for a tiny surviving readership, for posterity.
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Not to forget that the spanish invaders burned everything which looked like scripts or writing believing it was written in 'devils tongue'.
Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it. (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not even remotely plausible. You can't develop a writing system overnight.
Well not over night, but it doesn't take that long. [kli.org]
A Phonetic equivalence seems quite plausible, and you can whip up a phonetic equivalence chart for your private
use, or the use of a small group in a few hours.
And that might be the natural course of action for someone trying to document knowledge from an oral tradition.
That this book didn't contain the key to the symbols is also not that unusual. Maybe this scribe needed to retain
it for subsequent work.
Western letters drawn with a quill certainly speaks to the possibility of early Spanish origins deliberately trying to
encode information to be sent home such that it couldn't be used by just anyone. There may never have been more
than a dozen who knew the key or the symbology. Maybe they and the key went down with a subsequent ship,
even thought this book or perhaps a few others weren't on that boat.
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A claim completely unsupported by your link.
That's probably true for your and me who have grown up with a phonetic system. I wouldn't think it to be true of someone who didn't grow up in a phonetic system and to whom the whole idea is new. The one historic example with which I'm familiar to
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The Domincans created a Quechua/Spanish dictionary before Pizarro even reached Cusco, so it's not unreasonable. The dating is problematic though, unless perhaps it was created by the Portuguese or Venetian merchants that were suspected to have been using secret trade routs to bring rare items to Europe before the 'official' discovery of the Americas.
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I didn't say it was unreasonable, I said the OP's contention that it could be whipped up in a short time was unreasonable.
Not believed by anyone not wea
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There were maps of large sections of the coastline of the Americas extant in Europe and China well before the time of Columbus, including a globe (IIRC, from 1492) that showed the west coast of Mexico with Baja California and possibly San Francisco Bay. Interestingly many of the maps were accurate to within a degree or two of longitude. Magellan claimed to have a map showing the straight that bears his name, seemed to know that Tierra del Fuego was an island, and encountered a large shipwreck as he passed
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Timbuktu is a landlocked city hundreds of miles from the ocean. No shit it had no trading fleet of it's own.
And you're a clueless moron.
Re:Interesting as it points to how to decipher it. (Score:5, Informative)
That's not even remotely plausible. You can't develop a writing system overnight.
Sequoyah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"In 1821 he completed his independent creation of a Cherokee syllabary, making reading and writing in Cherokee possible. This was the only time in recorded history that a member of a non-literate people independently created an effective writing system.[1][4] After seeing its worth, the people of the Cherokee Nation rapidly began to use his syllabary and officially adopted it in 1825. Their literacy rate quickly surpassed that of surrounding European-American settlers.[1]"
So, yes, it's remotely plausible, in the sense that it's absolutely happened (at least) once.
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So, yes, it's remotely plausible, in the sense that it's absolutely happened (at least) once.
And it might even be the same sort of situation as Sequoyah. A native Aztec (or related dialect) speaker who can't read or write, but knows it is possible because the Spaniards could do it. So he or she creates a phonetic script and writes everything they can into the book.
The methodical nature of the book, with its natural division into somewhat identifiable subjects could indicate it is a knowledge dump perhaps for a posterity that might forget the past. Or maybe it's a crazy person with an opinion fro
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That's not even remotely plausible. The first and only thing surviving the invention of a writing system certainly wouldn't be a large codex.
Funny because the fact that such a large codex survives, would seem to indicate that indeed it's possible for it to have happened.
Writing systems based on an alphabet are, by definition, phoenetic. If you were to learn chinese, you'd probably use the roman alphabet to write down notes on how to spell it phoenetically.
Given that there probably are not a whole lot of speakers of Ancient Aztec it stands to reason maybe a phonetic representation of Aztec wasn't something easily figured out. (Remember the Nava
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Since when has "phonetic" completely changed meaning? Written English is based on an alphabet, but is not a phonetic language at all.
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Ofc you can invent a writing system over night. ... I was still stuck withe the idea that a single person invented this writing system for his own purpose (regardless of underlying language).
Tolkien did plenty, and so did I as a child between 8 and 14. And I bet I was not a singular case. After 12 or 14 I however was more into simple encryption and 'secret codes'.
However I get your point
I don't think that it necessarily would need to be an adaption of "one" script. A spanish scholar of that time might have
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Is there an Ebook (Score:2)
Is it available as an Ebook?
Re:Is there an Ebook (Score:5, Informative)
Is it available as an Ebook?
Yale [yale.edu] has digital scans and you can download the whole thing as a PDF.
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Is it available as an Ebook?
An ebook. Pah.
I'd rather like to have an audiobook edition... ;-)
For those curious about the tiny naked women... (Score:4, Informative)
Second image down:
http://www.midorisnyder.com/th... [midorisnyder.com]
Man, but medieval porn was tame.... :-)
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Somebody has a weird idea of what the human digestive system looks like.
HerbalGram? (Score:2)
What an unfortunate name for a (I presume) 'legit' botanical journal.
Codex Seraphinianus - a modern-day Voynich analog (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is this so hard to decipher? (Score:3)
I would've thought surely NSA could crack it by now....
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After five hundred years, the likelihood that any of the terrorist plots outlined in the Voynich Manuscript have either been carried out or abandoned approaches unity; there's nothing in it that would be useful for extending control over the current population.
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After five hundred years, the likelihood that any of the terrorist plots outlined in the Voynich Manuscript have either been carried out or abandoned approaches unity; there's nothing in it that would be useful for extending control over the current population.
Everyone underestimates the Illuminati...
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The Voynich Manuscript: An Elegant Enigma [nsa.gov]
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They weren't around back then to install a backdoor into the manuscript, or to pay off the writer to weaken the encryption.
Not an original idea (Score:3)
I'm pretty sure that at least one plant was previously identified as American , and that would be the sunflower [unicamp.br]. These botanists have taken the idea a lot further though. Their paper is well researched, but I will leave it to the peer review process to ultimately determine its veracity. The identification of Nahuatl words in the script seems a bit of a stretch IMHO.
Not new (Score:5, Informative)
It isn't a new theory that the Voynich Manuscript is Nahuatl. Here's a book from 2001 positing that very thing:
Keys for the Voynich Scholar: [google.com] Necessary Clues for Tahe Decipherment and Reading of the World's Most Mysterious Manuscript which is a Medical Text in Nahuatl Attributable to Francisco Hernández and His Aztec Ticiti Collaborators
The botany side seems to further reinforce this existing theory, as opposed to originating it.
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Post-contact. (Score:2)
They compared the flora to the period of the manuscript's assumed appearance - about a century after contact. Knowledge travels fast (as do people). The manuscript could have been written anywhere Europeans had gotten themselves into.
And we're talking the height of the Age of Exploration here.
You've been snookered (Score:5, Interesting)
Googling up the American Botanical Council shows that
1) they're unimportant enough that Wikipedia does not have an article aboutf them or their magazine
2) They are not part of any professional botanical organizations
3) Their facebook page calls them "Your source for reliable herbal medicine information" and shares links for organizatioins whose descriptions include phrases such as "holistic" and "alternative medicine".
4) Their own homepage is clearly aimed at the herbal medicine crowd and even includes a disclaimer that "The information on this site is intended for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for the advice of a qualified healthcare professional". Their magazine is called HerbalGram, for pete's sake.
I dare you to read their own site's news page at http://abc.herbalgram.org/site... [herbalgram.org] and conclude that they are anything but a bunch of alternative medicine crackpots whose belief about the Voynich Manuscript should be taken as seriously as their belief that it's worth giving a presentation at an aromatherapy conference.
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just because they may be alternative medicine crackpots does not mean that they are not experts in identifying exotic plant species. one might expect just the opposite actually.
train your brain to avoid the ad hominem.
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Turns out it's an enormous long con to sell us all herbal viagra?
Ha, "enormous long con".
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Looks like an herbal product trade group; that said, I'd hesitate to describe this particular one as "crackpots".
I expect the "Botanical" would be better read as "Botanicals", which is very roughly "plants used for non-food purposes".
That disclaimer is virtually mandated by US laws.
Full disclosure:
I'm an ag major who comes down on the side of conventional agriculture. While I was still at the university, I knew some people (professors included) interested in "alternative medicine", partly because of the res
Re:You've been snookered (Score:4)
I think that Tim Minchin has summed up alternative medicine in best way in his Storm poem
By definition", I begin
"Alternative Medicine", I continue
"Has either not been proved to work,
Or been proved not to work.
You know what they call "alternative medicine"
That's been proved to work?
Medicine."
Watch it if you have not already
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
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4) It works fantastically but the established drug overlords don't want you to have access to it because then you wouldn't buy their drugs.
XKCD got it wrong (Score:2)
It's the Perl of the dark ages.
Explanation is simple, really: (Score:2)
A botanist was working on a journal, ran out of tobacco, and decided to smoke some of the odd plants he was writing about rather than merely illustrate them.
Interconnected tubs? (Score:2)
That old book has nothing on my discovery. (Score:2)
Re:I deciphered it last month. (Score:5, Funny)
translated: d-r-i-n-k-y-o-u-r-x-o-c-o-l-a-t-l
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Wikipedia says [wikipedia.org] "The book has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438)", yet it contains information about Mexico.
Re:I deciphered it last month. (Score:4, Interesting)
Wikipedia says [wikipedia.org] "The book has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438)", yet it contains information about Mexico.
This is possibly way more interesting than the text itself. I can think of a few explanations:
1: Native Americans made books before Columbus arrived
2: Knowledge of America existed in Europe before Columbus's first journey
3: somebody predicted the invention of carbon dating and used an old blank book
None of them appears to be very likely. #2 is supported by the vinland map (roughly same age), but that one too is controversial. What we do know is that vikings settled Greenland and the lack of timber made them to go Newfoundland to cut down trees, apparently regularly until the vanished from Greenland in mid 14th century. It's unknown if they had contact with Europe and Greenland is somewhat too far north to provide knowledge of central American plants.
What if people travelled the world earlier than we normally expect. However for some reason the records are lost or never made. The age of exploration might not have been when the people learned of the existence of an outside world, but the time when they realized they were willing to invest in proper exploration. Later we learned stuff like Columbus was the one to figure out the earth is round, which is made up. The resistance to his journey was that he might not find land before reaching Africa (they didn't know the map), in which case the expedition would have starved to death before arriving. This was too great a risk compared to the price of the expedition.
One interesting part of traveling the world is that a roman grave was examined a few years back in Sicily. Despite being around 1800-1900 years old it contained a man born in China. There is no records of the romans having contact with China. However clearly they must have had some sort of contact as the man arrived in Italy somehow. Maybe our history books are too quick to assume based on preserved records alone. Lack of existence of evidence is not the same as evidence of lack of existence.
Re:I deciphered it last month. (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no records of the romans having contact with China.
There are such records. The Bible discusses silk, and the Romans loved it. The Silk Road was established about 1800-1900 years ago to supply the Roman empire with Chinese silk. Later the Romans attempted to breed their own silkworms.
As for extensive pre-Colombian contact, I would assume based on the exchange of plants, animals, metals, disease, and technology, that such contact would stick out in the historical record. In my opinion it's far more likely that the carbon dating was inaccurate or that the interpretation of the plants as American than that extensive pre-Colombian exchange existed.
Re:I deciphered it last month. (Score:5, Informative)
There was pre-Colombian contact, although perhaps not extensive. Central American and Alaskan jade show up in Chinese tombs of the 13th and early 14th centuries, and peppers from the Americas have been grown in Szechuan since ancient times.. IIRC, the Piri Reis map mentions Portuguese sailors visiting the territories shown on that map. A mummy in Paracas had TB, and another (in Tumbes?) had syphilis, both European diseases. Of course if you want to go further back the round stone heads of the Olmec show what are very clearly African faces, and black peoples were mentioned by Europeans when they arrived in Central America. Even further back the bottle gourd was cultivated in tropical South America apparently as soon as humans arrived in the area, and it has been an exclusively domesticated (as in, can't reproduce naturally) since at least 9,000 years ago.
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Oh, and I forgot the nicotine and cocaine found in Egyptian mummies, produced by plant which ONLY existed in the Americas.
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No contamination source has been found so far. Cocaine is not a popular drug among tomb excavators to my knowledge, and smuggling drugs in cadavers is normally only done with fresh corpses. In order for nicotine to have contaminated the inner tissues the mummies would have to have been stored in a humidor for a couple of years, and one would think the stench would be noticeable. The "serious criticism" so far seems to have its roots in the whole "ancient peoples were primitive semi-savages" bigotry.
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Syphilis is probably an American disease transported to Europe via Columbus. There is no written record of it in Europe before Columbus. Of course it could have been there already but not recognized, but the leading theory is it came from the new world.
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Interesting. It was not common in the Americas until the European arrival, when it became one of the great scourges (along with influenza, smallpox and tuberculosis), so I always assumed it was imported. Maybe it just became widespread by the Spanish soldiers' habit of raping everything with two feet.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Roman_relations
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The romans having silk does not mean they had contact with china. You know there is this mysterious ancient gild called 'traders'.
Traders tended to trade between main trading points, e.g. from china to persia from persia to north africa, from africa to rome, or what ever more plausible route you come up with.
And sometimes what they traded were slaves.
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I'm not sure what you think contact means, or what you think traders are, but traders are a good example of contact.
Re:I deciphered it last month. (Score:5, Informative)
3: somebody predicted the invention of carbon dating and used an old blank book
You jest. But paper was expensive, scraping or cleaning and reusing paper, even whole books, wasn't uncommon.
[More recent analogy is the BBC recording over classic TV shows to save money on video tape; now madly trying to find copies, even fragments, forgotten in old archives and basements at TV stations around in the world.]
[[Or the current Canadian government's attitude to science libraries.]]
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There is no records of the romans having contact with China.
Yes there are. [wikipedia.org]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_codices
The Maya had books. Lots of them. (granted, it is obvious that this isn't a maya book....we can read maya these days)
T
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4. Carbon dating is very inaccurate for something that recent.
It is post-Columbian (Score:5, Informative)
The manuscript contains several depictions that are clearly European: figures in European clothing, European equipment (e.g. a cross-bow) and some pages with Western (not indigenous American) constellations (e.g. Capricorn, the Balance).
So it is very clear, if it indeed shows American plants, that it must be post-Colombian and old parchment was used.
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L'Anse aux Meadows.
Just a single example of European knowledge in the Americas that predated Columbus.
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L'Anse aux Meadows.
Just a single example of European knowledge in the Americas that predated Columbus.
Irrelevant. The pictures in the Voynich manuscript are clearly not 11th century Norse but depict 16th century west European clothing and equipment and classic constellations.
Everything points to it being post-Columbian.
Option #3 is overblown (Score:2)
Printing something on an old blank book is hardly an indication that a forger predicted carbon dating. It rather indicates that one of the best standard starters for creating a forgery is to use original materials.
1) The Gospel of Thomas manuscript is printed on paper from the Middle East dating to about seventy AD, with inks local to the region and time period, but with pollen embedded in the ink that dates to 1100 AD italy. The manuscript upholds Muslim claims about Jesus, at a time when Muslims were mov
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Re:I deciphered it last month. (Score:5, Informative)
I thought it was fairly conclusive that it wasn't a cypher - the symbols simply lack the entropy to represent language. It's just what you'd expect from someone combining a few symbols in nonsense ways as a hoax, and not statistically what cyphertext looks like at all. A bit disappointing, really.
Re:I deciphered it last month. (Score:5, Interesting)
On the subject of it being a hoax... The Voynich is a parchment manuscript with many fold-outs, (center cut pieces of parchment were 10 times more expensive than a single leaf), and many expensive inks/dyes. It would have cost a small fortune to create at the time (several years salary for even a skilled bookmaker). If it is a hoax, it was a very well funded one, with no known purpose.
Re:I deciphered it last month. (Score:5, Funny)
Wait, you're saying that because it has an entropy similar to a book of the bible it's not gibberish?
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I was unaware of that verse. Thank you. Should make an interesting discussion point next time some poor Jehovah's Witness wanders across my doorstep.
Re:I deciphered it last month. (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe its just me, but when I first saw the thing the first thought that popped into my head was "its an alchemy book" and the more I read about the thing? The more i lean towards that conclusion.
I mean lets take a look at what we DO know from that time period, 1.- Alchemy was practiced by many court magicians at the time, 2.- Alchemy was also dangerous as its link with science made it awful close to heresy in the eyes of many of the clergy, also 3.- Competition was fierce, with many believing that lead into gold was possible the one who found that "method" would become legend, so because of this 4.- Secrecy was SOP for the alchemist, with the man that supposedly made the first air conditioning, Cornelius Drebbel, refusing to write down his method for doing so. Finally 5.- The court alchemist would be one of the few who would have the funds to afford such a book while also having both the knowledge of the natural world AND a reason to keep such knowledge secret.
Given this and without any proof that would lead one to believe it was something else I still lean towards an "alchemist recipe book", written using a cipher now long forgotten. Given what we know about the times and about the level of detail (as well as the cost as you pointed out) I would say it would be the most likely source of the book.
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Just to pick nits, the goal of alchemy was to produce the Philosopher's Stone, which granted eternal life to imbibers. Turning lead (or other base metals) to gold was simply the test of whether the Philosopher's Stone had been successfully produced or not.
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Chemistry, Material Sciences, Quantum Physics, and all other Science is essentially the same thing. The only thing (and really the most important thing) they have over Alchemy is that the procedures are openly presented for testing (thus requiring sharing and propagation). Their ideas become immortal. Life itself follows the same pattern of self improvement. DNA is a recipe for an organism. Mutations to it cause different trial and errors and through this experimentation the better solutions are natura
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Human dissection was also forbidden by the church. I've always thought that the images look like deliberately abstracted versions of magnified anatomical images, disguised as botanical drawings. But the manuscript is way too decorative and formal for a mere coded notebook. [Ditto for an alchemist's secret work.]
Much more likely to be an expensive hoax for a wealthy collector. Any resemblance to blah blah, is strictly coincidental.
That said, the hoax may have well been sold as a super-secret forbidden alchem
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It could have been a fake book by a fake alchemist used to fool the king into continuing the funding.
Re:I deciphered it last month. (Score:5, Interesting)
I've written software specifically to do analysis on this manuscript. There are patterns in the formation of the words that show beyond any doubt that it is not a random collection of letters. There are some very specific rules that would take significant effort to generate the words. For example, Gordon Rugg's theory / technique of generating random words using a grid is absolutely, positively not correct.
I'm certain that "words" in the manuscript do not represent words in the original language. They are merely chunks of ciphered text, which explains the unusually homogeneous word lengths, for one thing. I believe the length of the ciphered words is thus arbitrary and chosen by the person doing the ciphering. That also explains how word length and spacing can be perfectly justified and fit along the varied shape of images (consecutive lines must be different lengths to fit in the available space), yet the rules and patterns of the words still adhere even though the words appear to be of arbitrary length.
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Now that you mention it... it's obviously an early entry to the IOCCC [wikipedia.org].
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there are many minor languages where adjectives and adverbs are prefixes or suffixes, leading to very long words.
Holy Fahrvergnügen, Batman!
Try comparing it our knowledge of remaining centam indigenous languages.
Or, as Eric Idle once put it [madmusic.com], "Ham sandwich, bucket and water plastic duralex rubber McFisheries' underwear." (Or was that from the Voynich Manuscript?)
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Thanks to this, from 2003 to 2007 Germany had an actual law with a name a whopping 67 characters long. That name was "Grundst
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That's not quite a sensible response: he said that the words were unusually homogenous in length, not that they were unusually long.
Re:I deciphered it last month. (Score:5, Informative)
I thought it was fairly conclusive that it wasn't a cypher - the symbols simply lack the entropy to represent language. It's just what you'd expect from someone combining a few symbols in nonsense ways as a hoax, and not statistically what cyphertext looks like at all. A bit disappointing, really.
That is wrong. The word entropy is similar to English [newscientist.com], and, while the second order entropy [ixoloxi.com] is low, it is similar to Polynesian languages.
This is a nice nice review [isi.edu] of Voynich studies.
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Carbon dating proves it was written in the 1400's. Who exactly was the writer trying to hoax? For what purpose?
Re:I deciphered it last month. (Score:4, Funny)
Judging by the technology and the timeline, it can only be the work of Dr. Who.
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Carbon dating proves it was written in the 1400's.
I'm not so sure about that. It seems to me that carbon dating of the parchment and ink can only say that the materials are from the 1400s, but cannot say anything about how long they were in storage before the ink was put on the parchment.
Could writing materials that had been in storage for a couple of centuries have been sent to the New World on some of the Spanish ships? If the owner of a stationary shop got a government contract to supply parchment and ink to an expedition going half way around the worl
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Unlikely. Vellum and parchment were expensive, and bookworms and moths were likely to infest stock that was just shoved in a corner and forgotten for 5 or 10 generations. If they had extra they just wouldn't have bought more, it's not like monasteries and publishers had warehouses full of excess stock.
Re:I deciphered it last month. (Score:5, Funny)
So you're saying that it's the original Loren ipsum with illustrations?
"Dolorem ipsum" means "pain itself" (Score:5, Interesting)
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Vellum is expensive, even today. It's inconceivable that they would've use it to teach kids how to write. I doubt even Bill Gates would teach his kids how to write on vellum.
The standard teaching method back in the day was to have students write on sand or clay surfaces, which could be wiped and used again and again.
Predicts the internet (Score:5, Funny)
A series of tubes? With naked women in it?
How could that be anything but the net?
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What does this tell us about your digestive system?
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Well, from the linked resource [yale.edu], you can download the whole thing as a PDF. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
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Well, from the linked resource [yale.edu], you can download the whole thing as a PDF. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
archive.org has several different formats as well.
https://archive.org/details/Th... [archive.org]
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I got mine (years ago) from Aegean Park Press, P.O. Box 2120, Walnut Creek, CA 94595
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http://ambushprinting.com/voyn... [ambushprinting.com]