I'm not sure whether to post here, or to ask the moderators for a whole category called 'History of Voynich Studies' or something of that kind.
Time-lines are so important in my work that I may over-estimate their importance for other people, but I do like to have such things in order so that I can read from beginning to end to see how a theme has been developed, distorted, done justice (or not) over time.
As far as I know, these are the only mentions of matters related to any 'Cuman theme' (not 'theory') in Voynich studies . If members can add items of which I'm ignorant, please do.
If the moderators want to re-locate the thread, that's fine.
----- 2004. First 'Cuman-related' item. Not sure what got Leonard Fox onto that track, but on November 6th. of that year he wrote to the Jim's [first] Voynich mailing list about his own friend and colleague Peter Golden who had already written several essays on the Codex Cumanicus and who had already pointed out that the text's Turkic language was "quite closely related to Karaim"... 'Karaim' is how Golden and Fox speak of the Karaite dialect spoken by Jews of the Crimea. Fox said in that message that he could confirm the the similarity, because Karaim (or Karaite) was the language of his own childhood.
In 2004, Fox already had a completed English translation of Simon Szyszman’s book “Le Karaisme: ses doctrines et son histoire,” but was looking for a translator.
2011/12. I spoke about Cuman before 2012, and about Karaites from rougly that time, but elsewhere. 2012 is the first mention on my Voynichimagery blog. There are 13 posts which come up if you search 'Cuman' though they'll all be in the context of historical and cultural background clarifying the implications of the imagery or my reading of it.
2016. Koen tells me that Emma referred to the Codex Cumanicus in Feb. 2016, while talking more generally about language-groups and Turkic languages in connection with the structures of the Vms text.
2014-2018. The video by the Turkish family says they've been working on the text for four years. (Video published, unbeknownst to me, on Feb.22nd)
Feb 27th. 2018: My post goes up saying, "my opinion is that the language is very likely Cuman and the script quite likely derived from Uyghur script, influenced by others which I think include Sephardi script." A few days earlier, on another blog, I'd quoted a passage from a letter written by a Catalan Franciscan during the first half of the fourteenth century.
Feb. 28th.2018 Nick Pelling posts the Turkish gentleman's video with some others which, altogether, left a less pleasant taste.
March 1st. 2018: Conversation gets going at Voynich ninja, in a post called 'Calgary engineer believes he's cracked the mysterious Voynich Manuscript'.
As a personal note: I'm rarely excited by ideas asserted by members of a group already united by bonds of friendship, earlier collaboration, or common adherence to a theory. In this case we have four people, three highly competent in the historical lingusitics side of Turkish/Cuman/Karaim and me, who has come to the same view by a very different route through contextualising and analysing the Voynich imagery. None of us has worked with the other; none of us has a theory-in-common that we're all trying to promote. None of us (so far as I know) has any private correspondence with the other. And, to top it off, Cuman/Old Turkish/Karaim is far from what anyone would expect to occur, given the century-old ideas still so pervasive.
Four people well qualified, reaching the same general point of view without communicating with each other and (as it would seem) without even knowing what the other was doing. Well, I like it.
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Earlier today I could read the article (right now I get an error) . It stated that a one-page translation had been accomplished and that it would take two years to translate the rest.
No details, but it (the VM) seemed to be Turkish.
Even though I think this attempt won't hold water, it will be interesting to see some details.
Hello! Sorry for the English (use google translator):
* If in the 3rd ring (counting from the center) there are 18 symbols (which are repeated 4 times) (see You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) and assigned numbers from 0 to 17, a significant number appears in the 1st ring: 531 (at the height of the neck of the man with the face that does not hold anything in the hand)
531/18 = 29.5 → moon synodic period
18 → lunar months
531 → days corresponding to the 18 lunar months. Period in which 4 total solar eclipses or 4 total lunar eclipses can occur, a quartet of total eclipses at regular intervals of 6 lunar months
* As I understand, in the fifteenth century (in 1493-1494) there were 4 total lunar eclipses in 2 years, every 6 months (tetrad)
* In the central drawing there are 4 men, 2 of them hide → eclipse?
* The stretched arms can symbolize a sun-earth-moon alignment (eclipse)
* The men who hide themselves have both arms stretched → tetrad of lunar eclipses?
f57v: Can it be a contraption related to the lunar cycle to predict eclipses, among other things?
A greeting!
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________
Hola! Perdón por el inglés (uso traductor de google):
* Si en el 3er anillo (contando desde el centro) hay 18 símbolos (que se repiten 4 veces) (ver You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) y se le asignan números del 0 al 17, aparece un número significativo en el 1er anillo: El 531 (a la altura del cuello del hombre con la cara vista que no sostiene nada en la mano)
531/18 = 29,5 → Periodo sinódico luna
18 → meses lunares
531 → días correspondientes a los 18 meses lunares. Periodo en el que pueden ocurrir 4 eclipses solares totales o 4 eclipses lunares totales, un cuarteto de eclipses totales en intervalos regulares de 6 meses lunares
* Según tengo entendido, en el siglo XV (en 1493-1494) hubo 4 eclipses lunares totales en 2 años, cada 6 meses (tétrada)
* En el dibujo central hay 4 hombres, 2 de ellos se ocultan → ¿eclipse?
* Los brazos estirados pueden simbolizar una alineación de sol-tierra- luna (eclipse)
* Los hombres que se ocultan tienen ambos brazos estirados → ¿tétrada de eclipses lunares?
f57v : ¿Puede tratarse de un artilugio relacionado con el ciclo lunar para predecir eclipses, entre otras cosas?
This Thursday, David and I will have a chat with Adam Lewis, a student at the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma in Washington, who is writing a thesis entitled “An Anatomy of Failure: Analysis Attempts to Decode the Voynich Manuscript”.
If there is any question you'd like us to ask, you can post them in this thread.
I'd be glad to know if anyone has noticed this before so I can read their comments before doing more. Obviously vague ideas that it is 'not new' are no use. If you can, please add a name, link and/or quotation from the precedent if there is one.
Thanks
Civo aul di vir adilo amulo voo quimod. Aes vo vi osd amdim, qeilo. Quivi aleses vo doz veilz, vi vos qui, vo vit. Avilo qui vim amám quim as am elo volo, aslo. Amul auz vi. Vim vivon am zams, qeivo does. Alo qui amerdo amlesz, ams fez amzr, ams vilo amdo ams. Ams vilo quido vim oesa, am ales vila am aram. Ares dvi vom, aleses quilo amos amsr, qeim dmom am ela ames. Amoro. Mz vilox dim amz vilor, am cil. Am vilo cim alo amles alam. Am aleses, vim cis. Ciro cira, ams qeim. Diro, aloam cim amsl. Et qui vialez tdo maeres qeima. Quim vi vir.
The plant on You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is a weird one, but that goes without saying. I have no idea of what it could be; but just came across an image in the Leiden Dioscorides "f094a" which reminded me of it. Note how the saw-like leaves extend horizontally and the way they overlap to form one surface. This alone wouldn't be enough, but there's also a similarity in the screen-shape of the flowers. Even the arrangement of the roots is similar, although the VM has more of them. Unfortunately I don't read Arabic so I don't know which plant this is.
First to clear away a few chronic anachronisms and likely misapprehensions
1. We can do away with any notion that the Vms' drawings are the work of a European 'artist' or even of a European architect.
The dates 1404-1438 (give or take a couple of years) set the Vms in a period before the 'artist' was other than an artisan, who learned his craft from the basics up, and it is a basic law of iconography and provenancing that muscle-learning cannot be unlearned. In other words, just as someone who spent ten years in school, hand-writing every day cannot get their hand to 'unlearn' how to write, even if they try to imitate a baby's efforts, so too no-one who had been trained in medieval Europe as a painter of manuscripts, paintings etc. could undo it. Same for a Renaissance architect - who could not 'forget' how to think in terms of three-dimensions and perspective. Similarly the artisan was not trained to indulge in 'self-expression' and such importance for an individual was hardly stressed in the way we imagine natural today in our own society.
2. Professional techniques co-incide, not overlap. That is, a scribe might use herringbone stitch to mend a parchment, and a seamstress might use the same technique for a hem, but that doesn't imply that either had any knowledge of the other's professional-technical area.
Right - so there are three distinct professions and one - writing in gold - which might overlap with a couple of the others in using techniques involving scratching or cutting through - we tend to call it all by the same word, 'sgraffito'. The separate activities are:
(i) building - making pretty patterns on the exterior by adding one or more layers of paint or render and then cutting through or scratching to create patterns: we'll call that architectural sgraffito. It has a long tradition in the west, but though very often imagined responsible for every use of sgraffito in Europe, it was quite a separate thing - a folk-custom, pretty much, which some Renaissance people picked up again for their buildings because they imagined it a relic of ancient Romans or Greeks.... which in a way it was.
(ii) Separately from this, pottery decoration developed a cutting or scratching technique which we also call 'sgraffito' but this type is attested first in Asian ceramics by about the 7thC. Certainly by the 10thC we find it in Nishapur, and it was something of a mad 'rage' in the Mediterranean - first in trade centres such as Fustat and in the eastern Mediterranean. It is certainly found in close connection with Sankai (3-colour) glaze in Nishapur, Fustat and Corinth before the end of the 12thC and it was immensely popular to the fourteenth. It is safe to date its peak of popularity from the mid-12thC to the 14thC, in Byzantine and in Islamic regions. There's more one might say, including the possible depiction of a sankai glaze in the Vms' root-and-leaf section, but I'll leave the ceramic part at that
(iii) painting: though we find folk-art use of e.g. drawing through varnish or through paint - notably in Spain, sgraffito really came into its own in European painting during the 'Mongol century' as the newly-opened routes east brought in return - principally through Genoa and, to a lesser extent through Venice, the most stunning fabrics made of silk-brocade, gold-woven brocades and various others whose technical names I won't bore you with, though the merchant books distinguish them. Fabrics weren't 'girly stuff' in those time, and the greatest volume of all traded commodities across borders apart, perhaps from slaves, were fabrics. Trade in fabrics, both inter-regional and international was the most phenomenal money-maker. Bigger than spices, and bigger than jewellery or food. And that importance is part of the reason that the precisely accurate depiction of fabrics was demanded by the patrons. In Cennini's book - meant for apprentices - he doesn't use the word sgraffiti when explaining how to render brocade and has to describe the sort of thing he means, but by the time of Vasari's handbook, Vasari doesn't bother describing it and assumes his reader knows what it is, and why it is done.
(iv) a fourth type of sgraffito was used to aid adherence of gold ink or gold-leaf to vellum or parchment . (If you want to find out more, the search term should be 'chrysography'.
It seems to me that whoever scratched the pigment in folios of the Vms either did so accidentally - as may well be the case - or they did so quite easily because they had been accustomed to scratching pigment - as a technique used in one of those four professions.
Sgraffito in Renaissance painting is one stage within a series of technical stages, so that it is embedded within a complex process that involved layers of gesso, egg binder, gold leaf and pigment. It isn't 'scribbling' and it was never casual or purposeless. Not as it appears in the Vms.
This is as long as a blogpost, so I'll cut it here. I don't think the Vms sgraffito is the work of an accomplished Latin EUropean artist; it could be the work of a scribe, but if so why should be employ a technique which had little purpose in Byzantine or Latin manuscript art apart from when writing in gold? I don't think anything in the manuscript justifies attributing the sgraffito to a builder's labourer. So that leaves us - temporarily anyway - with ceramics.
And here's the kicker -
ceramic artists were brought in to work on early Renaissance paintings.
A few of the easily accessible references
Jaroslav Folda, Byzantine Art and Italian Panel Painting
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. (also shows Sankai glaze).
Detail from folio 102r that may or may not be meant for Sankai glazed ware - The reference to Nick Pelling's post is because that's where I first saw the picture. Nothing to do with the written part of the post. :0
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the link to Pelling's blog is because that post contains the illustration that told me we might be looking at Sankai glazed ware. If we come even as far west as Corinth, the date is most probably 13thC-earlier 14thC... which is exactly the period to which most of the early appraisers assigned Beinecke MS 408. So if it were Sankai (I reasoned back then), the chances were that we'd been looking too late, and too far west, for the informing sources. Nick's illustration proved very helpful in pointing me to the right time-frame for the current manuscript's near exemplars.
Well, that's the barest bones of the matter. Note how the definition of sgraffito shifts, depending on the professional environment. This definition is for high-art work using gold-leaf.
Can't say whether this is news to anyone else, but there is a second cloud band in the VMs rosettes. The original one is in the Central Rosette, just outside the circular band of text. The one more recently added to my investigations is found in the center rosette on the right hand side. Both examples were brought to the current discussion by D. Hoffmann.
Cloud bands are relevant to VMs investigation because of the cosmic comparison of Oresme's illustration (BNF Fr. 565 fol. 23) with VMs f68v, as proposed by E. Velinska.
If this comparison is sufficiently strong to show that there was an actual, structural connection between these two cosmic representations that exists despite their visual differences, because those visual differences were intentionally created, then there should be no problem connecting the cloud band of the central rosette with the VMs cosmos of f68v. Firstly. this is because the VMs clearly has other examples of cross-page connections and, secondly, because of the high degree of pattern similarity in the designs that compose both of these examples.
The Oresme cloud band is an excellent example of the scallop-shell patterned cloud band. Technically, it is built on an exaggerated nebuly line where the bulbous extremities have been depicted in a series of small arches, to give the characteristic scallop-shell shape. These running arches are similar to an engrailed line in heraldry.
The cloud band in the VMs Central Rosette is quite similar, with the difference that the engrailed characteristic runs throughout the entire nebuly line pattern, rather than only across the tops of the bulbs. This requires the engrailed line to be flipped when crossing the mid-line.
The cloud band in the VMs Right Center Rosette is even more elaborate. Like the Central Rosette, the engrailed line continues throughout. The interesting feature that I noted was that each bulb in this example contains a second line segment that follows the engrailed pattern. So I suggest that this pattern might be called 'double-topped'.
This double-topped construction has a hint of something familiar, but I can't pin it down. Unfortunately, many of the illustrations posted to the old 'wolkenband' thread seem to have gone to URLs
Does anyone have an illustration that shows a double-topped cloud band?
Not only does the second cloud band make it a pair of cloud bands side by side, but the Central Rosette contains a pair of Stolfi's markers. Both of which help advance the pairing paradigm.
[The pairing paradigm holds that, in some areas of the VMs research, the material that is relevant to finding the proper course of investigation will be found in pairs.]
I reread D'Imperio's The Voynich manuscript: an elegant enigma (Thanks to Rene Zandbergen for reminding). Now I have time to learn more concernicng the other theories about the Elixir of life. I've found in D'Imperio a short description of professor Brumbaugh's theory: "... the manuscript as a treatise on the «Elixir of Life «, designed to interest the Emperor Rudolph II by a forger who wished to make it appear to be the work of Roger Bacon. An ”encyclopedic sequence of drugs», possibly compiled from a variety of earlier manuscripts, is followed by astrological lore: the folios featuring nude female figures may deal. Brumbaugh thinks, with «the biology of reproduction, the theology of psychic reincarnation, or the topical application of the elixir». (1975. pp, 348-349). (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., M. E. D’Imperio, p. 22)
I want to adress to Rene and to all forum members who could help. Is it possible to find free-available articles about Brumbaugh's theory in details (in English or translatable with Google)? Of course, 70's was not the time when the internet, blogs and on-line libraries existed, but, maybe, somewhere his articles are saved. I've found only article in which he was criticized for his method of deciphering (May 6, 1975, The New York Times Archives, Page 41, the article You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.) and his paid book The Most Mysterious Manuscript: The Voynich "Roger Bacon" Cipher Manuscript. Brumbaugh's theory, as I understand, was quite much-talked-of in that time. I’d like to know the details as it pretty interests me, although I don't believe that the VMs is a hoax in any sense of this word.
![[Image: more-micrography.jpg]](https://voynichimagery.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/more-micrography.jpg)
![[Image: sgraffito-in-high-medieval-art.jpg]](https://voynichimagery.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/sgraffito-in-high-medieval-art.jpg)
