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devil's advocate: the case for glossolalia |
Posted by: geoffreycaveney - 05-03-2019, 06:56 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (15)
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Hello everyone,
I hate to start posting here on such a skeptical note, but I am hopeful that if we can refute the skepticism, perhaps it will give us new leads to investigate the actual language and meaning of the text, if any.
I want to state first and upfront that *I hope my following arguments are wrong*. I want this text to be meaningful, I want us to decipher it, I want us to be able to read it and understand it.
A bit about my experience working on this ms text: It would remind one of the Churchill quote about success being the ability to go from failure to failure without losing one's sense of enthusiasm, or the Niels Bohr quote about an expert being somebody who has already made every mistake it is possible to make in a given field. I feel that I am somewhere in that process, just without the success or expertise at the end.
Over the past several years, I have attempted to decipher the Voynich ms text as the following languages: Coptic, Old Irish, Old Norse, Elfdalian, Gutamal, Orsamal, Old Gutnish, Finnish, Old Prussian, Middle High German, Old Albanian, Syriac/Aramaic, and Hebrew. My favorite response from a scholar was the laconic, "The identification of the Voynich manuscript as an Orsamal document would be a truly revolutionary discovery." Classic. (For the record, I was trying to link the Voynich character inventory to a runic alphabet.)
Here is my conclusion, and my challenge to any other would-be Michael Ventris who wants to succeed in deciphering this ms text:
It is not enough to propose deciphering of individual isolated words and names and labels. It is not difficult to do that with a handful of isolated words and letter values for the characters in them. The problem is, if you then continue with the rest of the characters, and the letters in the alphabet of the target language, you will quickly run out of characters, and many consonants in your target language will go entirely unrepresented in the Voynich ms character text.
As a test, try expressing *one whole paragraph* in the text - any paragraph you like! - with your deciphering system. You will likely find that it comes out far too repetitive, with far too few letters repeated far too frequently, and far too many other letters missing entirely. It will not look like actual writing in an actual language at all.
Thus, I cannot take individual letter and word readings seriously, until I have seen what an entire paragraph looks like with the method. Based on my own experience, I can tell you that it probably won't look good.
The only way around this is to introduce ambiguity into one's system, by making one Voynich character represent multiple consonants of the target language, or by presuming substantial misspellings in the target language whereby the author used one letter to represent other similar letters, which amounts to the same thing. Then one has a different problem: if every character can be read as three different letters, then every 4-letter word can be read as 81 different words! It is hard to read such a text, and hard to have any confidence about any one particular reading of any word.
This is why, if the text does represent any language at all, I think it must be a vowelless abjad. There just aren't enough characters, nor enough variety of character combinations, for the Voynich inventory to incorporate both all the vowels and all the consonants of any language. Surely it was not an accident that John Stojko's purported deciphering into Ukrainian, had to make it a *vowelless* Ukrainian. And I can tell you, from experience again, that even with a vowelless abjad theory, it is *still* difficult to represent all consonants without introducing ambiguity into one's deciphering system!
I recently read the thread about "what the heck is an 'otaly'?" and the comments of several experienced researchers about the Voynich ms text as a "defective script". For the classic example of such a thing, look up "Book Pahlavi". Have fun trying to read anything in that script! Here's the problem: without knowing the historical context of the writings and texts and manuscripts and all of the historical cultural heritage surrounding them, *the Book Pahlavi texts would in fact be indistinguishable from random meaningless character strings*. In late Book Pahlavi, the "words" have effectively become the equivalent of logograms: you can only read them if you already know what the whole words are. Sounding out meaning from the letters is next to impossible. *If Book Pahlavi were unknown, and we only found one 200-page text of it from the medieval period, we would never be able to decipher it or read it.* No way. Even if we had full knowledge of the Middle Persian languages and all the Aramaic historical dialects that influenced it.
By the way, I think the question about "otaly" is also a very good point. It makes me question the significance of all of the labels throughout the ms, which is unfortunate. I followed up on the lead and took a look at all the pages where the "otaly" label appears. I look at the top row of labels on f88r, and see a group of small words that are far too short, and far too similar to each other, to represent distinct names or identifications of distinct plants or roots: "oral", "oraly", "oldar", "otoky", "otaly". This is not a set of plant names or parts; this is an elementary grammar book exercise of words that begin with "o", with very small and slight variation in the order of letters that follow it. As meaningful text labeling plants or parts or roots, it is hardly a plausible set of words at all; but *as glossolalia, it is a perfectly logical sequence*.
Likewise with the top row of labels on f99v: "otoldy", "otor(chy)", "oldy", "dar(ary)", "otaly", "olsy", "arol", "otoky". Very slightly more variation than f88r, but not much. The optimist in me wants to find similarities in the plants next to the two "otaly"s, and the two "otoky"s, and so on. The skeptic in me looks at the whole two rows of words and thinks, "These are just strings of similar syllables with slight variations."
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So there you have it: my arguments against the possibility of any plausible convincing interpretation of this text as actual language. Once again, I hope I am wrong. I have spent substantial effort trying to decipher this thing. I would love to be proven wrong, preferably by myself Seriously, I would be very impressed and pleased if anyone produces a convincing deciphering that attains the support of reputable professional scholars of the given language. But I am skeptical, based on my own experience.
Consider on the other hand the following descriptions of the Voynich ms character text:
"[It] consists of using a certain number of consonants and vowels, in a limited number of syllables that in turn are organized into larger units that are taken apart and rearranged pseudogrammatically, with variations";
"[It] consists of strings of syllables, put together more or less haphazardly but emerging nevertheless as word-like and sentence-like units because of realistic, language-like [structure]".
This sounds like a more or less accurate description of the Voynich ms character text, does it not? I think anyone who has spent a substantial amount of effort researching this text will understand what I mean.
Alas, however, the above quotes are actually not descriptions of the Voynich ms: They are the linguist William Samarin's descriptions of Pentecostal spoken glossolalia in his landmark 1972 book on the subject. (Simply look up the Wikipedia page for "Glossolalia" to find all these quotes.)
Samarin concluded that this glossolalia is "only a facade of language", that it is "meaningless but phonologically structured human utterance, believed by the speaker to be a real language but bearing no systematic resemblance to any natural language, living or dead." He argues that the syllables are not organized into words, and that "it is neither internally organized nor systematically related to the world man perceives."
I repeat (qokeedy qokeedy qokeedy): I hope I am wrong. This is a depressing and disappointing argument I am making and conclusion I am suggesting. But we have to be honest with ourselves and compare the evidence we have for any meaningful language hypothesis of the Voynich ms, vs. the strength of the above glossolalic description of the Voynich ms.
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Now just in case I am wrong, as I hope I am, here are my few thoughts about the language of the text
Like I said above, if it *is* any language, I strongly believe a vowelless abjad script makes more sense than an alphabet with vowels. I repeat: surely it was not an accident that Stojko's Ukrainian "deciphering" was a *vowelless* Ukrainian. Again, if you disagree, please produce a complete correspondence key of all Voynich characters and all letters of any alphabet with vowels, and we'll see how any paragraph of the text comes out.
Recently I had liked my Aramaic hypothesis a lot. But I came to find that my transcription had too many ambiguities, leading to the problems that I describe above.
Hebrew is much more plausible, to be honest. There were substantial Jewish communities living throughout many parts of Europe in the early 15th century, including in northern Italy and nearby areas of southern central Europe. They did not speak Hebrew as an everyday colloquial language, but they read and wrote Hebrew quite regularly and well, and not just as a liturgical language either. There is a substantial variety of literature written in medieval Hebrew in Europe. D.N. O'Donovan's "Voynich Revisionist" website had an interesting recent article about possible connections to Kabbalah in the Voynich ms and Panofsky's old comments about the topic. I think all of this makes a certain amount of sense. A few years ago The Guardian published an article about Stephen Skinner's view that a Jewish physician in 15th c. Italy wrote the ms, based purely on all of the illustrations.
But I have found that my hypothesis still runs into plenty of problems as soon as I start to try to decipher the text of actual sentences and paragraphs. (Again, the Pleiades and Zodiac labels and other labels are nice to generate hypotheses for letter values of characters. But the proof of the pudding is in the paragraphs.) Here's one idea: rather than each character being a letter, perhaps each pair of characters is one letter. Now you would think, with 15-25 Voynich characters, that you would get an inventory of many hundreds of character pairs or bigrams. But not so! The character text of this ms is so repetitive, with so little and narrow variation, that if you divide the words into the most natural and common bigrams, of course allowing for the odd final "-y" or initial "d-" or "q-" or medial "e" or "i" to occur by itself and not as part of a bigram, then amazingly you only find about *20* or so, yes only TWENTY or so, *bigrams* that occur with any substantial frequency! In fact, as I have tried to pair Voynich *bigrams* with Hebrew *letters*, amazingly I find that I do not run out of Hebrew letters to correspond to the bigrams, I *run out of Voynich bigrams* to correspond to the Hebrew *letters*! Yes you read that right, this ms does not even contain enough frequent *bigrams* to represent a complete abjad without any vowels.
Nevertheless, such a bigram inventory seems to come far *closer* to being capable of representing a language's full abjad or alphabet, than any single character inventory theory that I've ever tried or ever seen. With bigrams, I have issues with a couple or few letters of an abjad. Whereas with single characters and an alphabet, one has issues with substantial portions of any language's consonant inventory.
Of course bigrams have their problems too. The "words" are only half as long as they appear to be. So in this case it really must be a vowelless abjad, as with vowels written no language's words could be this short, even if we take the Voynich words as syllables and take the liberty of joining two of them to make an actual word. For example, returning to "otaly" again, which really is an excellent test case to bring up in many ways, with my bigram theory we only have two letters here plus a probably low-information generic ubiquitous single character ending "-y". And this 2-3 letter word has to represent both plant/root labels, as well as the nymphs in four of the Zodiac sign diagrams. Now it could just be a day number or name that recurs in multiple months (like "15th" or "Ides"), which happens to be a homonym with a plant/root name that appears on two different pharmacological pages. Indeed there are a *lot* of homonyms in an abjad when you don't mark the vowel diacritics. Still, I admit there's not a lot of information in such a word if it is composed of bigrams.
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In sum, I think the Hebrew vowelless abjad bigram hypothesis I just presented above is as good as any other hypothesis that's out there, if not better. But I cannot honestly say that it is more convincing than the glossolalia hypothesis!
The poker pro Mike Caro told a funny story about a student of his, a middle-aged man who was a really bad poker player. Caro recounts that the man used to lose $25,000 a year playing poker. With the help of Caro's poker lessons, the man improved so much that he only lost $5,000 a year playing poker. But Caro had to admit, the man's wife had an even better financial strategy for him: quit playing poker! Caro could help him a lot, but not enough to be better than quitting.
I get the feeling that my hypothesis, and all of our best hypotheses, are like Caro's poker lessons, and the Voynich ms is the unfortunate man: our best theories can seem to have the potential to reduce the level of opacity of the text significantly. But the glossolalia / meaningless nonsense hypothesis is like the wife's advice: it may not be fun or interesting, but it's probably better than anything we've been able to come up with so far.
I have no desire to quit trying to decipher the Voynich manuscript. But I try to keep in the front of my mind the realistic probability that it may well just all be elegantly written meaningless nonsense.
I sure do hope that I myself and others here can refute my arguments and prove myself wrong!
-Geoffrey Caveney
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f86v3 |
Posted by: davidjackson - 04-03-2019, 09:55 PM - Forum: Imagery
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F83v2. A fascinating folio, if only because of a) the chicken scratches and b) the fact that it is, IIRC, the only place that I know of where a proper bird is drawn.
A few years ago I drew up a blogpost on this page where I compared it to You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and I haven't much changed my opinion.
If the VM author drew not one but two identical birds in the same schemata then a very specific reason compelled him to and several years of research haven't turned up much that isn't a) esoteric and b) non-contemporary.
Now, the thing that interests me is that we can then draw a further comparison to f57v, You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. represent the four secondary winds of Greek mythology. Albeit this was written in the first flush of youth, with some rather over-enthusiasm, which was later, very commendably, tampered by the experience and wisdom of Diane in the comments section of that blog post, and I must remember to thank her for this.
So let us carry on with this Greek idea. What other folios can we link to classic Greek explanations of physical phenomenons?
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The sad story of the nebuly line. |
Posted by: R. Sale - 03-03-2019, 01:20 AM - Forum: Imagery
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This is the sad story of the nebuly line. The nebuly line is one of a historical collection of various line patterns and, taking this collection as a set of patterns, they are best defined and identified through the illustrated heraldic lines of division. Such artistic patterns have existed prior to or outside of medieval heraldry, but the relevant heraldry, with its patterns and definitions, clearly existed well in advance of the VMs parchment dates as a widely known part of European culture. To define the nebuly pattern specifically, it is a regular meandering line, similar to a wavy line or sine wave, but one in which the individual crests and troughs are bulbous. Exactly how bulbous and how many fancy frills can be added to the basic design was an area much explored by medieval artists and is a topic that has been well examined here.
The story begins with the VMs investigator who long has been totally oblivious to everything in the paragraph above. The VMs pictures are strange. The VMs language is unknown. The violas are wilted – or inverted. And then there are the pages of exotic plants. Many investigators have suggested potential identifications for the apparent VMs monographs, some more convincing than others. This is a natural form of positive investigation, one that is based on the assumption that the illustrations are intended to be representational and then on finding the plant that best fits the necessary parameters. This is a typical investigation into the identity of the VMs plants, while trying to interpret the content of the VMs as a normal expository statement. This is the collective effort to move VMs botany forward. Those results have been interesting and informative. And if everything would have worked out better, this would be a happy story rather than a sad one.
But it is a sad story. The violas are all wilted. All attempts to interpret the VMs based on ‘face value’ have failed. Or at least they appear to have failed, depending on the criteria for success and the definition of ‘face value.’ Depending on how each investigator sees the VMs façade. And the sad story of the nebuly line has long been sad because none of those early investigators had the slightest notion about the nebuly line. There has long been a failure to recognize the examples in the botanical section where a clear nebuly line was used to represent a leaf margin three different times. The positive view of botany forward attempts to explain this as an exaggeration or an extinct variety or something. And the prior conditions of obliviousness still apply. Ignorance is bliss.
Now for the sake of discussion, let’s take the opposite perspective. Instead of the positive aspects of moving botany forward, what are the negating aspects of viewing botany backwards? Instead of seeking matches for specific botanical traits portrayed in the illustrations, consider asking what are the obvious botanical errors or mistakes in the VMs? The violas have wilted and there are three nebuly lines. And whatever the botanical reality might be, there are still three nebuly lines hidden in the leaves of the botanical illustrations. Has botanical research provided a single example, let alone three? Yet the sad part is that the investigation has always gone in the botanical direction. The modern investigators, as students of botany, attempt to find a natural explanation. The investigations of the past never went in the *other* direction because there was no recognition of the defined existence for the nebuly line. Only the investigator, who is sufficiently acquainted with the basics of medieval heraldry, would be able to correlate these VMs leaf margins with the proper heraldic name and definition. While, to the contrary, it might be assumed that, at the time of the VMs parchment dates, a better familiarity with heraldry would have promoted a greater chance of this recognition.
It is only in the past few years that the identity and existence of the nebuly line in the VMs has been recognized. And subsequent investigation of nebuly lines soon discovered a multitude of examples scattered throughout the balneological section of the VMs. And while the distractions there are numerous, they are, after a prolonged investigation, apparently just distractions after all. The solution to the VMs is not achieved right away in a single step. Like the botanical section, the balneological section is one that is open to multiple threads of speculative investigation which lead in various directions away from more significant options. The example of a nebuly line that is relevant to further investigation has instead been tucked away in an odd cosmic illustration on VMs f68v. Its relevance is confirmed by etymology and the 43 undulations. The sad story of the nebuly line is about a culturally identified line pattern long hidden in an unrecognized cosmos. The story of the nebuly line is sad because it is a record of missed opportunities. The failure to comprehend something that the author has placed in any document under investigation is surely going to affect the way in which that document will be interpreted. The inability to pick out and name things that exist in the illustrations totally thwarts the capacity for interpretation that is congruent with the author’s intentions. At the same time, the use of everything from nebuly lines to armorial and ecclesiastical heraldry shows that the VMs author possesses significant elements of traditional and historical knowledge that many modern investigators have apparently lacked. That’s how it is. The trick is to evaluate the functions of the parts, not their appearance, in order to see how disguise has been used and deception has occurred without the loss of identity.
One specific fact, when known, can function as a key to new areas of discovery; when unknown, it cannot. And in the case of the nebuly line, it is a key that opens an intellectual pathway to the renewed recognition of certain traditional, cultural elements that are present in the VMs illustrations and have long sat unrecognized. The proper interpretation of the VMs cosmos f68v, is a premier example. The existence of the heraldic fur called papelonny and the heraldic association involved in the origins of the ongoing tradition of the cardinal’s red galero are others. As an early and significant key to a traditional interpretation, yet one that has long been simultaneously disguised by medieval trickery and omitted by the modern failure to possess the essential facts, the presence of the nebuly lines, now being recognized, brings this sad story to an end.
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Portolan Map Possibilities |
Posted by: Linda - 02-03-2019, 05:45 PM - Forum: Imagery
- Replies (36)
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I am starting this thread to collect information that might support the hypothesis that quires 13 and 14, and possibly others, encode information from which a portolan map could be drawn.
This hypothesis is an extension of others, in that quire 13 imagery can be interpreted as a periplus, and quire 14 can be interpreted as a map, but which of course is not a physical mapping, but may contain hints as to how to draw a portolan map which would pull information from the imagery and text to draw a reasonably accurate map that can be recognized as such.
The rosettes may indicate the windroses that must first be drawn. I believe some of the imagery with regard to the rosettes, and within quire 13 may provide clues as to the locations of the centers of these circles, and places they link to.
For instance, the NW rosette shows what may be Vesuvius, the famous volcano. I believe the Alps are shown in the spiral, and as this is centred in the rosette, i posit that a windrose is to be drawn in the vicinty of the Alps, with one of the lines going through Naples.
In quire 13 on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. there stands a nymph in what appears to be Lake Garda, which is situated near the Alps. She holds a tool which could be a caliper or possibly a compass, and may indicate the exact location of the above noted rosette's center.
Resources
Here is a link to a cartography site which is involved with drawing portolan maps to back engineer the process.
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Historical Examples
I will also be checking known portolans for similarities in case this may aid in corellating the data points against the text, or to help search for more clues in the imagery. So far the Catalan Atlas, one of the most famous of the portolan maps, seems a good match with what I have posited so far, and is also the map with pangolin-scale-like mountains, ie may have been referenced on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. in its portrayal of what I take to be the Alps. It is also said that the Venetian maps concentrated on the periplus info, ie they concentrated on shorelines, whereas the Catalan school included inland details. Due having seen indications of riparian alternate routes in quire 13, I believe this would indicate an alignment with the Catalan style of maps produced in Majorca and Barcelona, or someone following in that tradition.
Found in Pisa, thought to be made circa 1275 but could be 1375
1325-1350
Pietro Vesconte, 1311 Venice
Pizigani brothers, 1367 Venice
Cresques Abraham, 1375 Majorca
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116v blog comment |
Posted by: -JKP- - 01-03-2019, 09:14 AM - Forum: Marginalia
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Diane O'Donovan has a new blog that I was not aware of until very recently (Nick Pelling alluded to it on his blog).
In it, she wrote:
"I’ve recently seen it asserted, with no evidence offered and my request for directions to the original argument refused with some vigour, that someone has argued a case for considering inscription of the German (and only the German) marginalia so closely contemporary with the rest of the work that we should believe the whole manuscript to be, in some sense, a product of German culture."
She did not identify who wrote (or said) this and I've never seen anyone assert this (nor have I seen anyone refuse directions to an argument "with some vigour").
Has anyone else seen a recent assertion that "the inscription of the German... marginalia" means "we should believe the whole manuscript to be... a product of German culture"?
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Rosette volcano as Vesuvius |
Posted by: Linda - 28-02-2019, 08:58 AM - Forum: Imagery
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Hey there.
Someone recently said it would be ridiculous that this image could be identified as a specific volcano, but I figure the idea might have some merit, and i think there may be visual evidence to support this idea.
That pic is from pre 79 AD, as it was buried in the Pompei eruption, i.e. this is sometime before the eruption. Note the knob to one side, the bump on the other side. Some angular difference in the view, but not much. Sometimes it looks like the knob is in the back on the fresco, but i think it is on the side. Also because when you compare with a painting from the west, it is a quarter turn away. So the vms and fresco are both views from southwest.
This one, from the west, from about 1575, shows the hole that existed before the eruption of 1631. Probably pretty similar to what would have been the case in the early 1400s. If you turned it 45 degrees clockwise, would that not be just about right, including the belly-like protrusion? Except the caldera is not drawn in the vms, just the vesuvius part, that is why it doesn't look the same on the lower left.
Here is a view from the top that shows various stages in its life.
Here is its situation, you can see that the 1575 painting would be from the vantagepoint of the eastern edge of the pozzuoli circle, 3 o clock. That would put the vms and pompei view from the gulf, right angle to the shore and volcano between naples and pompei, approximately the same distance away.
What do you think? Can this be considered as plausible?
Not high enough? I figure this is a similar angle to the pompei fresco, you can see the caldera in the fresco as the part with black paint, lower left corner.
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[split] (lack of) scribal mistakes / corrections |
Posted by: -JKP- - 13-02-2019, 10:29 AM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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On the one hand, I am quite sure there are scribal errors in the VMS, there are things that LOOK like errors (are out of character with the rest of the textual patterns) and there are places where actual corrections can be seen.
On the other hand, Jewish scribes were taught to copy the Torah WITHOUT ERRORS. They were simply not permitted to make errors. Out it goes and start again.
So... where does the VMS fit? I don't know. There are errors that may be identifiable, and then there are errors that would not be evident unless one understood the structure or meaning behind the text.
I don't get the feeling that the number of errors in the VMS is large (there's a fair degree of consistency). The feeling I get is that it may have been pre-written (pre-ciphered?) and then copied. It's fairly orderly and tidy. It seems like almost an impossible task to create the rosettes page in one go. Getting things to fit comfortably in a circle (and in a group of circles) is not easy. Usually it requires rough sketches first.
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F79r as Mesopotamia |
Posted by: Linda - 06-02-2019, 09:39 PM - Forum: Imagery
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You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. shows the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, and explains how the silting of the Persian Gulf has caused the features that exist today. It also tells us there existed a river civilisation that has been lost to rising water levels.
Rivers are shown as tubes. The wolkenbands are coming from a hole, the Euphrates arises. The blue tells me this is fresh water, mountain runoff and/or springs. The scalloped bits at the start of the river tells me the rivers cut through rock. There are hot springs involved, as indicated by the red band around the river tube.
Neotectonic map of Turkey shows the faults in the area of the rising of the Euphrates. Numerous hot springs are noted near the Armenia Turkey border. The Euphrates rises near Mount Ararat, a dormant volcano.
Next we see a mountain which is feeding both the Euphrates and various streams which eventually become the Tigris river, denoted by the new tube. The Tigris rises near the southern Taurus mountains. Note that true to life, it starts south of the Euphrates, to the eastern side of it, north is up on this page. There are then two tubes. That they are side by side and short is an obfuscation, Mesopotamia means land between the rivers, but then no land is drawn in the quire, it is only the water. The two then come together as one, which is the case in reality as well, the Shaṭṭ Al-ʿArab is a 200km silty river fed by both that flows into the Persian Gulf.
The other parts are a deconstruction of northern part of the Persian Gulf as caused by the river silt. Note the curvy shaped bays and the double bump in the middle.
Symmetrical curvey bays. They are upside down but the circles, or ports, are the parts attached to the gulf, so once you attach them in your mind to the top of the gulf, they will be correctly oriented. The greenishness of the water means it is brackish, caused by backflow currents of sea water into these areas.
The silt and the currents splitting off created the double bump that occurs where modern day Iran and Iraq meet at the top of the Persian Gulf.
Deconstructing the process also obfuscates the diagram, it is not so much a direct visual than a string of visuals which must be reconstructed in one's thoughts in order to see the whole.
The tube in the gulf is showing ancient knowledge that the gulf was not always there in the configuration we now know (or knew in the 15th century), that the river continued southward, but rising water levels swallowed it up. Given that the oldest known civilizations started in this general area, such knowledge being retained would not be beyond the realm of possibility.
It need only be between stage 3 and 4 that we are talking about, the Sumerians were there around the end of stage 4.
What do you think? Can you see what i see? It is more like reading the individual images as a story than looking at a picture, but it is all there.
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