The Voynich Ninja

Credit to original poster on reddit - You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

I'm not sure if this has been posted here before (can't find if so).
Some info below, if you would like anything further it will (hopefully) be contained within the links.

Collection of encrypted correspondence - You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection - You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

Summary
Collection of encrypted correspondence between the compiler and various correspondents, in approximately 150 alphabets, accompanied by transcriptions of the letters in Arabic. The compiler cites Shihāb al-Dīn al-Jindī al-ʻAlāʼī, Burhān al-Dīn al-Qudsī, and Taqī al-Dīn Muḥammad ibn Jaʻfar al-Ḥusaynī as authorities for some of the alphabets. The manuscript is incomplete, lacking its beginning and end. Occasional marginal notes. Some worm damage in margins.

Publisher
University of Pennsylvania

Language
Arabic

Origin
Possibly written in Syria, in the 15th century.


Script
Written in naskh script.



LJS 51
About the Lawrence J. Schoenberg Collection - You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
In 2011, University of Pennsylvania Libraries Board members Barbara Brizdle Schoenberg and Lawrence J. Schoenberg donated their manuscript collection of nearly 300 manuscripts and documents to the Penn Libraries, half of which are from medieval and Renaissance Europe. With its emphasis on the history of science and the transmission of knowledge across time and geography, the Schoenberg Collection brings together many of the great scientific and philosophical traditions of the ancient and medieval worlds. Documenting the extraordinary achievements of scholars, philosophers, and scientists active in pre-modern Europe, Africa, and Asia, the collection illuminates the foundations of our shared intellectual heritage.


Here are some glyph comparisons which I find interesting to one extent or another, I like EVA: "t" and "qo" most.
I have left out "extended EVA" and other odd glyphs other than the first page weirdo, there's probably more good comparisons others can find.

I went to around 38v, plus some near the end. There's a lot of pages in between. 

There’s also an 8-like character in what I guess is the first page You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..
[attachment=10517]

[attachment=10518]
If the red annotations added above the first characters are correct, this appears to be a simple substitution (with word spaces removed).

More red annotations on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view..  There’s a character that looks like | with three dots above it that has no plain-text equivalent. So it could be a null or (much more interestingly) a word separator.
[attachment=10519]

That clover shape does seem fairly consistent throughout while the cipher glyphs tend to change page to page, in all the pages with red annotations I saw it is left blank. 

Not sure if anyone on here is able to read any of the plain text?

I have a good book on Arabic Cryptography which I could share although the files are probably too large for here.

I did some work on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., where I noticed a sequence (looking like l99o) repeated 3 times in both cipher and plain text.
Since I can’t type Arabic, I transcribed the red letters using the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (ASCII based). I certainly made a few errors in the process, since some Arabic characters are similar to each other. ‘:’ stands for the |-with-three-dots.

Transcription:

f w A : H s r t A h : w w A : E
r b t A h : w w A : w H $ t
A h : w w A : A s z A h :
l q d : S n E : A l d h r :
b Y : m A : t r Y : f Y A : l Y
t : $ E r Y : A m A : q d :
k f A h :


I used the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. to “deromanize” the Buckwalter text:

فوا حسرتاه ووا عربتاه ووا وحشتاه ووا اسزاه  لقد صنع الدهر بى ما ترى فىا لىت شعرى اما قد كفاه

The “deromanized” text matches well the plain-text from the page.
[attachment=10524]

Claude, ChatGPT and google translate provide comparable translations from Arabic.

Claude.ai Wrote:Oh my sorrow! Oh my tears! Oh my loneliness! Oh my grief! Time has done to me what you see. Alas, I wonder, has it not been enough?

The recurring fragment I noticed apparently is an exclamation:

Claude.ai Wrote:ووا (wa-wā) - and oh

Conclusions:

• These are simple substitutions (much simpler than contemporary European diplomatic ciphers).
  
• They use a cipher character to represent word separation. Since the Arabic script typically represented word separation by different glyph shapes, rather than spaces, it makes sense that they had to find ways to manage this in a cipher-text. European diplomatic ciphers simply dropped word spaces, but this could introduce too much ambiguity with an abjad. 
  
• Ciphers are presented “by example”, showing the cipher-text together with a poetic plain-text. This is again different from European diplomatic practice that used cipher tables.
  

Oh wow, thanks Marco! 
There's something quite thought provoking about reading someone's worries about running out of time, 600 years later.


I skimmed through the pages again last night and noted "a" being used on a page, and that fol. 63v is unique, it has a cipher not found elsewhere that I thought was interesting

It's a cool stuff, I especially like "plant cipher".
Still it seems like a simple substitution, one sign for one letter.

From my research by far the most advanced ciphers from the time which the Voynich manuscript is carbon dated are Northern Italian diplomatic ciphers, particularly Milanese ciphers.
However, an interesting question independent of Voynich research remains, which is to what extent these diplomatic ciphers were influenced by Arabic Cryptography. What, if any, transmission of knowledge of Cryptography was there from the Arab world to late medieval Italy(or even the other way)? And if there was transmission of knowledge where, when and how did that occur.
The cipher alphabet of the Voynich clearly has a lot in common with diplomatic cipher alphabets, but they in turn also seem to have quite a bit in common with Arabic cipher alphabets. To what extent was there crossover between them and to what extent are any similarities coincidental?

That's interesting, what makes the Milanese ciphers more advanced? I was under the assumption Arabic ciphers were more advanced in general, but I must admit I probably read that somewhere and just took it on face value. 

I would think some advancements were probably just natural, I can imagine someone solving ciphers often and realising they need to hide their vowels better to make their ciphers stronger, but are there examples of more complex ideas popping up in both sets of known ciphers around the same time?

(03-05-2025, 07:18 PM)Bluetoes101 Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.That's interesting, what makes the Milanese ciphers more advanced? I was under the assumption Arabic ciphers were more advanced in general, but I must admit I probably read that somewhere and just took it on face value. 

I would think some advancements were probably just natural, I can imagine someone solving ciphers often and realising they need to hide their vowels better to make their ciphers stronger, but are there examples of more complex ideas popping up in both sets of known ciphers around the same time?

This thread should give some context:>

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There is a big difference in the sophistication of diplomatic ciphers between end of the 14th century and the middle of the 15th century. On the basis of all the evidence that I or anyone else to my knowledge has seen this increase in sophistication was very much lead by the Chancellery of the Duchy of Milan, most likely during the reign of Filippo Maria Visconti.