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Science

Star Charts From A Strange Book From The Past 89

Posted by timothy from the perhaps-someone-is-laughing-at-us dept.
serutan writes: "Today there is a really unusual Astronomy Picture of the Day that talks about a centuries-old book, written in an unknown language that is undeciphered to this date. The 265-page book, with its curly script and weird illustrations, reminds me a lot of a bizarre modern book called the Codex Seraphinus, but for real. Any crypto experts care to take a whack at this?" Update: The image was transitioned and the entry can be found Here - cd
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Star Charts From A Strange Book From The Past More

Star Charts From A Strange Book From The Past

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  • Very interesting (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Trane Francks ( 10459 )
    It seems to me that analyzing the script used to write the text would be well suited to a distributed computing architecture. It's great to be doing setiathome, but how about cracking the cipher? I'd love to know what this is all about. It could be very illuminating.
    • Before we could "crack" it, we'd need to know certain things in order to write an algorithm that would run on this distributed computing architecture of yours. if we knew these things, it's likely we'd already have a few machines, or a room full of them, plugging away at this. unfortunately, it's not like it is in the Star Trek- we can't just hold a few pages up to the camera and have the universal translator work on it for us. :)
      • > Before we could "crack" it, we'd need to know
        > certain things in order to write an algorithm that
        > would run on this distributed computing
        > architecture of yours.

        Actually, I was thinking more of the first step being a simple analysis of the script. For example, we want to see how any given character matches known script in other languages of the time. We'd want to look for patterns that might indicate whether we're looking at a text-based dissertation or comlex mathematic formulae (or both).

        You're correct that certain things need to be known, but preliminary analysis need not assume that we're breaking code. The first thing is to match the patterns in the document against known alphabetic/pictographic/numeric patterns. That is a huge task and absolutely worthy of a distributed computing approach.

  • gotta love... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Morphine007 ( 207082 ) on Monday August 26, 2002 @08:57PM (#4145242)

    ...this quote:

    During World War II some of the top military code-breakers in America tried to decipher it, but failed.
    A professor at the University of Pennsylvania seems to have gone insane trying to figure it out.

    • During World War II some of the top military code-breakers in America tried to decipher it, but failed.

      Funny, I would have thought those guys had more pressing matters to attend to during that period of time. Maybe they worked on it during their lunch breaks.

      A professor at the University of Pennsylvania seems to have gone insane trying to figure it out.

      Just think about this dude's wife! She must have gone super-bonkers living with him!

      Ah, the fine line between madness and genius...

      GMD

      • Funny, I would have thought those guys had more pressing matters to attend to during that period of time.

        Well, the reasoning probably was, "If we break this code, we could potentially use it or a derivative of it as our own code."
    • I think I'd like my computer to stay sane, thanks. What about the programmers who have to make the distributed deciphering program? Maybe it is more like Hiro Protagonist making the tools to analyze that mind-breaker static scroll thingie in Snow Crash. (Can you tell it's been a while since I read it?)

      Tell me more about this book. Have they figured out its alphabet? Like, the repeated and repeatable characters? I should think it wouldn't be too hard (heh. easy to say.) to turn it into ... something. Then again, we may be working on the assumption that it is actually meaningful. It could just be the writings of a rather disturbed person. Or a genius. Or... not.

      So what's the holdup here? Some OCR, some statistical analysis, see if the syntax looks like any other language we know well, and then, as it seems to go, come up with nothing and/or go mad. I like those odds!

      Why can't we have a site someplace that says 'here is a problem. OK brainiacs, lets have a solution.' and everyone gives their ideas and other stuff. Hm, ok, so it is sounding kinda like slashdot... only without all the news. and other unique things...
    • That's one professor that never learned his lesson during his gaming sessions of Call of Cthulu.
      • +5 Funny Man...

        Another good example would be the cases of scientists going insane/crushing themselves trying to decipher alien math and geometry symbols in Delta Green... The one who disemboweled himself and wrote the solution to the problem he'd been working on in his own cell wall also comes to mind.

  • Centuries old? (Score:5, Funny)

    by devphil ( 51341 ) on Monday August 26, 2002 @09:05PM (#4145277) Homepage
    written in an unknown language that is undeciphered to this date. The 265-page book, with its curly script and weird illustrations

    Wow. They have been working on Perl 6 for a long time.

  • It's that strange books in dead languages with lots of Astronomy illustrations are best left UNDECIPHERED!

    I can see it, three weeks from now, a new article:

    Well Meaning Hackers Awaken The Great Cthulhu

  • I know who wrote this... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It was clearly a doctor. All my prescriptions are written in a similar style.

  • Just how odd is this ? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Raiford ( 599622 )
    I don't anything about ancient languages or texts but it would seem pretty odd that something written in the 15th century would be of a complete unknown origin to all the scholars of the world. How many other examples of undecipherable ancient texts are there out there somewhere ??? Anyone have an idea ?

  • It is not so strange... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Dancing Tree ( 536870 ) on Monday August 26, 2002 @09:38PM (#4145393) Homepage
    ...that no one has deciphered it yet if it is not in any language but is in someone's own personal code (which would then have to be deciphered into whatever their language was, living or dead, and then translated). What if the person who coded it couldn't spell? What if the book is a decoy or ruse written by someone to draw attention away from a truly important book that they possessed? Maybe it was made up by some shyster and sold to an unsuspecting scholar or emperor as a "lost" treatise on the stars that tells all if only *you* can figure it out. You don't need to know how to spell or even write to make up a book like that (in fact it probably helps if you can't do any of those things!) This doesn't mean that it isn't from the 15th century. There were just as many con artists then (if not more) as there are now.

    • Re:It is not so strange... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gadfium ( 318941 ) on Monday August 26, 2002 @09:50PM (#4145442)
      Yes, it almost certainly was written by someone in their own private language. The alternative is to assume that it was written by aliens, or something like that.

      The analyses of the text show that it seem to indicate that it is a real language, not just gibberish, since there is a detectable grammar (just not one we know) and vocabulary. There are more different words than one might expect from the languages of the time.

      I'd be surprised if there weren't at least a few spelling mistakes, since it was after all handwritten. The writing isn't always very readable either, but other than the language being unknown, it isn't deliberately encrypted.

      It seems unlikely to be a hoax, there's far too much work gone into it. It's probably the work of some unknown genius (or idiot savant).

      If we could translate it, it might have fascinating insights into the world of the time, novel mathematical and scientific ideas, or it might just contain his/her daily record of bowel movements.

      New Scientist had a feature on it a few months ago.
  • Aliens from the future. Actually, I learned "How to Build a Time Machine" [slashdot.org] earlier today and that set the plan in motion. This was actually written by me a few months ago and will, at some time in the future, be passed to alien invaders by my grandchildren, who are building their time machine now...

    They'll combine alien technology with my time travel ideas and return the manuscript to the past so that I can know my theories were correct. You've all been had!

  • IANAL(inguist), but... (Score:4, Funny)

    by J'raxis ( 248192 ) on Monday August 26, 2002 @09:58PM (#4145472) Homepage
    "It is written in a language of which no other example is known to exist. It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from nineteen to twenty-eight letters, none of which bear any relationship to any English or European letter system."

    The alphabet looks rather obviously European-based. First off, much of what I can make out, looks vaguely reminiscent of letters like g, d, m, n, w, and a.

    Secondly, that 3-like character near the end of the first line that sticks out like a sore thumb. Around the time this book was written, that character was a part of many northern European languages, including old English. I believe it stood for a /th/ sound, although I may be confusing that with the eth and thorn characters (other archaic northern European characters which still survive in Icelandic and a few other places).

    The very first character (which you can see in several places throughout) also caught my eye. It looks like a slightly-modified version of the "feature key" you see on Apple keyboards, which is a symbol of Viking origin [tuxedo.org].

    • Re:IANAL(inguist), but... (Score:5, Informative)

      by catsidhe ( 454589 ) <catsidhe@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @12:13AM (#4146141) Homepage
      I have some little knowledge of the Voynich Manuscript, and I must make some points:

      • The letters have no relation with any script, from anywhere at any time, let alone any roman or cyrillic hand. Any similarities are the result of it being written with the same sort of pen as was used to write the European scripts, and the constraints a dipped nib pen puts on the pen movements you can make on the writing surface.
      • The '3' character in roman scripts was a shorthand character, what is sometimes called a Tirolean notation. It has several meanings depending on context. eg., '-b3' == '-bus', '-q3' == '-que'. (ref. Cappelli, Adriano; The elements of abbreviation in medieval Latin paleography, Trans. D. Heimann and R. Kay, pp18ff)
      • The letters for thorn ( ) and eth (ð ) do indeed stand for the /th/ sound in 'cloth' and 'clothe'.
      • At the time the Voynich Manuscript was written, William Shakespeare was alive and writing plays. Old English had not been spoken for five hundred years.
      • The first character which you saw is one of several 'flag' characters. They are found in several forms, but are consistent throughout the manuscript, with varying degrees of ornamentation. There does not appear to be any connection with the 'command' or 'propellor' symbol.
      • The varying number of letters in the Voynich alphabet is a result of not knowing which symbols are graphemes and which are contractions. It is also unknown (but considered unlikely) if there is an 'Upper Case'. The equivalent would be not knowing that there is no meaningful difference between the symbols 'r' and 'R', but that there is a difference between 'R' and 'P'.
      • If I were designing a cypher I'd have extra noise letters in my alphabet that mean nothing which I would try to intersperse so as to throw off statistical analysis. I would also make the spaces irrelavent, maybe picking 5 or 6 of the nonsence letters that could be used interchangably and randomly to seperate words, again so as to throw off statistical analysis. I would also Mark Twain-ize my spelling, and also spell phonetically or not randomly since I woudl be able to understand both spellings. So that ( sh = x, th = q, ch = c, Circle = sirkl, "Alex shared the choo choo train with Isaac" => "Aleks xard qe coo cuu tran wiq Yzak" using !@# randomly and $%^&*( for space this becomes:


        #Al #eks%x a!@r!d@& &q!!e(# co o%!!cu u^tran$#w iq$@Y!za k

        • This is even more difficult, because we don't even know what is a letter, and what are collection of letters.

          eg: given your cipher (which is handwritten, BTW), we find a letter which looks like '#'. That could be a meaningful grapheme in its own right. It could be a contraction of 'tt'. It could be a part of the preceeding or following letter, and have no meaning seperately.

          Your theory that this is a cypher written in a natural language with phonetic spelling is one which others have already thought of. It is very plausible, especially given that there seem to be two 'dialects' in the Voynich manuscript. Two people's ideas of phonetic, perhaps? That doesn't make the decryption any easier though. There are several questions which must be answered first, such as
          • What was the original natural language?
          • What dialect did the Voynich author speak?
          • What was his accent? and of course,
          • What grapheme--phoneme relationship is there?????
      • The letters have no relation with any script, from anywhere at any time

        I'll take your word for it, since I have not studied this manuscript. However, I noticed that the letters look very similar to the modern-day Arabic alphabet, although the writing seems to go left-to-right instead of right-to-left. I wonder if the Arabic alphabet was an influence on the person who created this code?
  • I would be interested in trying to decipher this. Anynone know where I can find some more pages (or the whole book)?

  • Stupid Alias Quote: "It's a Rambaldi Document!" (Score:3, Interesting)

    by jmoo ( 67040 ) on Monday August 26, 2002 @10:22PM (#4145606)
    Actually quite intresting. I did a bit of searching:

    Pictures of The Voynich Manuscript [geocities.com]

    Seems a running theroy is this man Roger Bacon [levity.com] may have written the book.

    -You must not change the past! Don't do anything that effects anything. Unless you were suppose too, then for the love of God don't not do it.
    • The pictures of the voynich manuscript are linked on the page indicated in the announcement, so why you needed to search them?

      Also, Roger Bacon was who Rudolph II was told wrote it. I don't think that makes it a theory, especially since Bacon has never been known to have used this language before. In fact, because he'd recently lectured near the emperor's beat and because of the emperor's known dalliance in zoroastry (guess they were all occultists back in the day) there's every reason to believe that he was hoodwinked into believing it was Bacon's text. That's a closer approximation of the "running theory", IMHO.

  • SETI doesn't have a chance (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dotslash ( 12419 ) on Monday August 26, 2002 @10:36PM (#4145682) Homepage
    This book has some interesting implications. If we can't decipher an annotated manuscript that is but a few hundred years removed from our time, how could we ever possibly hope to decipher a message form an alien race?

    • Just because we can't decipher it doesn't mean we can't detect it and recognize it as intelligent. Sure, it would be cool if we could hear someone else out there AND figure out what they were saying, but in my mind, it would be at least as important just to hear something that SOUNDS coherent. But in reality, I agree that we don't have much of a chance of figuring out what they might be saying.

    • That is an interesting point. Although written language from English past, has already changed over even the past 15 years. Every century or so there seems to be a dramatic literary shift, and a new language is born. I'd say that the Internet will create a new version of english that will be hard to read 100 years from now, let alone 500 years.
      I think the hope with finding E.T signals, is that they will be mathematically based, so in theory there will be common ground for communication.
    • I've always wondered about that. We sent records on Voyager for instance. Now, any society as advanced as ours is today would have to look at that and reason that and somehow determine that the disc is not merely art, that the grooves do not represent language per se, but instead encode some physical phenomenon, and that phenomenon is sound (let's hope they have some kind of pressure sensors which approximate hearing). What are the odds that anyone finding Voyager would be able to figure out the disc? What would we do with a broadcast from an alien race for a device we had never conceived?
    • First of all, simply recieving a message from an alien race would be an accomplishment for SETI. Decoding it would, of course, be important, but much is still learned without doing so.


      Second, it is assumed that at the power levels we're currently able to pick up, any transmissions we recieve will be deliberate broadcasts. When communicating with somebody foreign to you, you don't start writing out questions and requests in your own language do you? No. You draw pictures. You use something more universal. Hopefully any aliens would do the same, constructing a message that is made to be deciphered easily, perhaps getting gradually more involved as we are taught their language and whatnot.


      So no, SETI is no more pointless now than it was before. You can certainly tell if you've found intelligence without deciphering a message, and hopefully you can decipher a deliberately sent message without much intelligence.

      • As I experienced in a railway cafeteria in Northern Italy, most tourists, when faced with a native who doesn't speak that debased form of English current in the New World, resort to SPEAKING LOUDLY AND SLOWLY.

        It is a well known fact that foreigners are not stupid, they are simply hard of hearing.

    • That's as silly as saying that if we can decipher a massage that was encoded so we couldn't read it, we could decipher anything including a message form an alien race.
    • The difference is, an alien race trying to communicate will deliberately try to make their message decipherable, whereas this manuscript might have been written in someone's personal code which was deliberately designed to be UNdecipherable.

  • Just old J.R.R. up to his old tricks (Score:4, Funny)

    by foobar104 ( 206452 ) on Monday August 26, 2002 @11:00PM (#4145818) Journal
    This looks an awful lot like tengwar to me. Has anybody done a rule-out for Tolkien involvement on this?

    ;-)

  • How about... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by C0LDFusion ( 541865 )
    ...the idea it could've been written by a Autistic Savant? Back then, people who could instantaneously locate patterns and translate languages without even realizing it was looked at as a form of genius, despite the other effects Autism would have.

    I'm thinking it could just as easily be a numerical star chart done in a base-8 or base-16 numbering system, which would throw off most regular attempts to decrypt it, especially if they're looking for words, rather than numbers.

  • My wife examined the actual Voynich Manuscript (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Allen Varney ( 449382 ) on Monday August 26, 2002 @11:20PM (#4145900) Homepage

    In 1998 my wife visited the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library [yale.edu] at Yale in New Haven, Connecticut, specifically to look at the Voynich Manuscript. She only got to see it for 20 minutes or so (the library was about to close), and needless to say she didn't crack the mystery. She did observe that some of the letters look like Arabic, and some of the plant illustrations reminded her of medieval herbals (books about herbs). She speculates that the author intended it as a spellbook to summon female spirits. It was a highly intriguing, frustrating, and very cool experience.

    • Why female spirits specifically? I would see it as a pretty good possibility that it may have been some old grimore- they often have stuff about stars, constellations, &c, but one specifically for female spirits?
    • My guess is that since the manuscript was sold to the Emperor Rudolph who was very interested in weird wacky stuff that it probably was made to be sold to him. In other words, it probably is a bunch of gibberish meant to look interesting.

      On the other hand, maybe it's a coded message from Roger Bacon on how to create free energy. ;)

      • My guess is that since the manuscript was sold to the Emperor Rudolph who was very interested in weird wacky stuff that it probably was made to be sold to him. In other words, it probably is a bunch of gibberish meant to look interesting.

        And that would probably be the conclusion of most scholars, if frequency and grammatical analysis didn't show it to have characteristics amazingly similar to actual language. That would be easy enough to fake today, but it's not so clear that it could have been done at the time. (Or, at least, that it would have been worth anybody's while, if all they wanted to do was fill a book with meaningless gibberish.)

        • it would have been worth anybody's while, if all they wanted to do was fill a book with meaningless gibberish

          Not too sure about this - he was scamming an Emperor after all. Doing a half-assed job could have landed him in prison or worse. I'm sure that a considerable effort was made by the scam artist in question to invent his own alphabet and then encode a number of random "mystical" tracts into it, fill the book up with "magical" images, and whatever other work was necessary to make it look "real" to the eye of a 15th century emperor.

          • Not too sure about this - he was scamming an Emperor after all. Doing a half-assed job could have landed him in prison or worse. I'm sure that a considerable effort was made by the scam artist in question to invent his own alphabet and then encode a number of random "mystical" tracts into it, fill the book up with "magical" images, and whatever other work was necessary to make it look "real" to the eye of a 15th century emperor.

            Sure, that's possible. I highly doubt that the book contains real working spells that allow the reader to open the gates of hell or turn lead into gold.

            What makes it interesting is that we haven't been able to decode it, despite all indications that it really does contain some sort of language.

  • The Codebreakers (Score:3, Informative)

    by Ellen Ripley ( 221395 ) <ellen@britomartis.net> on Monday August 26, 2002 @11:30PM (#4145939) Journal
    The Voynich Manuscript was discussed in David Kahn's 1967 grand history The Codebreakers. IMHO, this is an essential book; it gives historical scope to cryptographic activities in an era in which we must understand these issues.

    Ellen
  • I wrote that in first grade! Look, you can even see the happy face I put in the middle! Check out the fancy finger paint work...not too shabby, if I do say so myself.

  • Online scans of the Voynich manuscript (Score:3, Informative)

    by sl956 ( 200477 ) on Monday August 26, 2002 @11:41PM (#4146001)
    here :
    http://voynich.no-ip.com/folios/ [no-ip.com]

  • Easy (Score:1, Flamebait)

    by tswinzig ( 210999 )
    Let's see here... a strange language written in the shape of a ring.

    Well, I dare not utter it here, but in the elvish tongue, it means, "One Ring to Rule them All..."

    And so on.

  • Permanent link (Score:2, Informative)

    by wka ( 23275 )
    Since the APoD rolls over each day, the link in the story now points to the next day's Astronomy Picture of the Day.

    This is a permanent link [nasa.gov] to the APoD highlighting the Voynich Manuscript, for those reading the story after the rollover.

  • Then it becomes readable...
  • Damn -- Microsoft Spellcheck sure trashed that manuscript. That's what you get for telling Clippie to take it's best shot at english.

  • Irish??? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If anything, the script looks vaguely like handwritten gaelic latinoid script (Think book of Kells), but much less ornamented, and more like "day-to-day" writing. This script diverged from latin script in the 0-400A.D. period, but evolved and persisted until the 20th century, when Irish was standardised into contemporary latin script.

    Irish dialects make extensive use "shebhus" and "urus" - aspirates and eclipses, indicated by accents in the old scripts - sebhus were usually dots above the letter, but could be diamonds, for example [modern script, just put a h in instead]. I note the presence of diamonds above some letters, and the apple-command-signs could conceivably be uru-forms?

    The Irish also have set precedents of inventing their own alphabets: In addition to their own latin variant, they had the ancient ogham [evertype.com] script, which is just plain wierd, originally written along corners of rocks and cut wood by notching them. Some people think it's just a A.D.-era encoding of a latin script, but many Irish people think that it's much older, and that just because one finds latin and old-irish inscriptions in Ogham, doesn't mean it was first used for them, since one can quite conceivably phonetically transcribe english into cyrillic or greek or japanese, for example. Plus, ogham looks like random scratches on rocks to people who don't know about it, and plus, most ogham is beleived to have been written on wooden rods- "the poet's slats" in ancient irish literature, which would be long-decayed by now. "Modern" standard Ogham even has a unicode table entry :-)

    but all that's well known and would have been eliminated already, plus few of the words look particularly gaelic.

    However, there are little known, mainly lost, and very strange "secret" Irishoid languages - e.g. one called "Shelta" [sprintmail.com] that is the language that some members of the "Traveller" / "Tinker" [liv.ac.uk] racially distinct population in Ireland once spoke. [the page I've linked to looks to be 7/10ths made-up, I'm afraid, but, being in Ireland, I can confirm that travellers did have their own secret language, that they jealously guarded.] Travellers/Tinkers were somewhat like Romany gypsies in other countries in lifestyle, but unrelated - maybe it's shelta-in-irish-latinate-like-script.

    Such people would have been mad into their own astrology, which would probably have the old irish constellations rather than known ones [It is known that there were old Irish traveller constellations, just not what they were :-)] - If one were an Irish tinker, inventing one's own script for your own mainly-illiterate community's language, it would probably end up looking like "hitherto-unknown-language-in-gaelic-like-script." .

    Shelta isn't the only "secret" Irish language - Medieval guilds in Irish and Scottish* cities often had their own entire languages to guard their secrets - The dublin stonemason's seems to have been a dialect of Shelta with viking influences, for example.

    *Ireland and scotland were pretty much the same until the tenth century - Confusingly, before the tenth century, someone saying "Scotia" probably meant Ireland.
  • Seriously, if in 500 years time someone looks through my lecture notes, they would have trouble translating them too!
  • this [slashdot.org] Question posed by an anonymous reader ... Coupled WITH the time machine ... they found a marvelous answer, and sent it back in time in a form that we cannot translate/decode.
  • 1) red bull
    2) red bull
    3) red bull
    -or-
    4) red bull and vodka (your frag count will decrease drastically after this last one, but it can be more fun...)
  • sorry bout that, it was supposed to be a reply to this [slashdot.org] story.

  • this guy was ahead of his time. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by argStyopa ( 232550 ) on Tuesday August 27, 2002 @10:30AM (#4148343) Journal
    from: http://www.crystalinks.com/voynich.html

    "Historically, it first appears in 1586 at the court of Rudolph II of Bohemia, who was one of the most eccentric European monarchs of that or any other period. Rudolph collected dwarfs and had a regiment of giants in his army. He was surrounded by astrologers, and he was fascinated by games and codes and music. He was typical of the occult-oriented, Protestant noblemen of this period and epitomized the liberated northern European prince. he was a patron of alchemy and supported the printing of alchemical literature.

    The Rosicrucian conspiracy was being quietly fomented during this same period. To Rudolph's court came an unknown person who sold this manuscript to the king for three hundred gold ducats, which, translated into modern monetary units, is about fourteen thousand dollars. This is an astonishing amount of money to have paid for a manuscript at that time, which indicated that the Emperor must have been highly impressed by it."

    Wow, if this guy had lived 400 years later he'd probably have founded a dot.com, run the stock up to million$, and then vanished.

    Let's see, gullible king with lots of money, known for being eccentric....
    I'm thinking we're wasting our time, and some departed spirit is laughing his ass off that we're trying to decipher something that was no more than an elaborate con.
    • I'm thinking we're wasting our time, and some departed spirit is laughing his ass off that we're trying to decipher something that was no more than an elaborate con.

      If it was an elaborate con, then it was a terribly elaborate con. Analysis of the text indicates that it isn't just random gibberish, but has grammatical structure and linguistic frequency characteristics. Even if somebody knew how to write gibberish in those patterns at the time, it's hard to imagine why they'd bother.

      That doesn't mean that there's any useful information in there. It could have been written by a madman. But any unbroken code will interest people, if there's evidence that there really is some sort of language underneath.

    • Rosicrucians, eh? Heh. Ever read Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum [amazon.com]? Great book about all that nutty conspiracy stuff. Now that I've heard of this manuscript, I'd be surprised if it & the lore surrounding it weren't part of the source material Eco turned to while writing the novel...

  • Armenian? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Armenian [omniglot.com] script is shown in this link in a rather square style like for typewriters - but handwritten armenian may well be more rounded. In the 1500s and before, there would have been lots of variants - And there's nothing stopping it being an unknown cryptolect in an only-slightly-less-unknown variant alphabet.

  • I wonder if this could be a hoax. Given the dating, and at least the pics I could see, why couldn't it be? Some smart guy writes a book in some made up language (Ewokese?) to sell to overly gullible royalty or the super rich for tons of money and laughs all the way to the bank. Now Yale has it, scientists puzzle over it, and this guy is probably still laughing. Or perhaps it's from a race of aliens who couldn't draw all that well. The constellations could be from different points of view, and the language could be not human at all. Generally speaking, science and art mix poorly, so why not. They can travel great distances, but drawing the Sun and stars is an issue and they didn't have the gimp.

  • APOD mentioned something that shocked me when I read it: "The book labels some patches of the sky with unfamiliar constellations. " Unfamiliar?? Does this not suggest the author is viewing the stars from another point in space?? The stars can't possibly have moved that much since the 15th century... and with their limited star gazing equipment back then... it's definitely something to think twice about.
  • Maybe I missed it but they should start off
    by analyzing the inks used and the paper used.

    That should give them a great starting point.

    The analysis should include some form of dating.

    I was really surprised to hear of this manuscript
    and that it has not been deciphered.
  • See, if you look at it, not just AT it, but THROUGH it, it forms like a big 3D castle... OoooOOooh! Pretty.

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