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| Various Graphs and Analyses |
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Posted by: srjskam - 30-11-2025, 06:11 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (17)
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I've had two stints of Voynich fever, once in 2015 and the second time a year ago. On the second round I produced some graphs and analyses and thought about posting them here, but never got to it. It keeps bugging me, so I'd better post this stuff to get some peace of mind...
Everything is very unpolished, not nice enough to write blog posts about, but maybe this could inspire someone. Most of these analyses examine a different aspect, but there isn't really enough substance to merit a new thread for each. Mistakes are to be expected. I've mostly done the analyses with Python in JupyterLab (Pandas, MatPlotLib etc), using various transcriptions, mostly Takahashi for older stuff and ZL. I'm usually mostly interested in paragraph type text and omit labelese.
I don't claim anything here is new. Sometimes I went out to replicate old results, and I'm well aware of the fact that in Voynich research 99.9% of all results have been thought of by a dozen people before.
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| How many people penned the main Voynichese text? |
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Posted by: Koen G - 29-11-2025, 05:01 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (32)
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I'm curious to see how the opinions are divided on the matter of "how many scribes". I like to know this, since for example in a video I might say "the majority view is...", but I need to know whether my impression of the majority view is correct.
This is an anonymous poll, vote for the answer you think is most likely. No need to take the opinions of others into account, nor to be absolutely certain. Just vote how you feel. Discussion in the thread is allowed, of course.
It is only about the main text of the manuscript, so ignore all marginalia, month names, page numbers etc etc. Also ignore any Authors or Masterminds or other background figures. Count only the people who put Voynichese to parchment.
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| The prisoner scenario: a though experiment |
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Posted by: oshfdk - 28-11-2025, 02:48 PM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
- Replies (33)
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Most theories, I think, try explaining various strange aspects of the manuscript under the following assumptions:
1) The manuscript was created voluntarily, the author(s) wanted to create it.
2) The author(s) had a lot of freedom in choosing the materials used and could fully control the production of the manuscript.
3) The author(s) has some clear intention about the future use of the manuscript, after it's completed.
While all of these could be true, I think it's much easier to explain some strange properties of the manuscript under scenarios that challenge these assumptions.
Just a few of more or less silly examples to explain what I mean. These are not proposed scenarios, these are thought experiments to demonstrate the iffiness of many assumptions that a lot of solution theories make.
1) A person (say, from a distant land) is sentenced to death and she or he offers to create a book of secret foreign knowledge in exchange for saving their life. Having no secret knowledge she of he invents a custom script and says that the contents can only be revealed after the work is completed. The whole manuscript is just a ruse to postpone own death. The longer and the stranger the MS is, the better.
2) The author is a hermit and only has access to limited quantity of materials and tools. The author writes to pass the time with no clear plan, develops a new writing system in the process, all this takes decades. She or he leaves a lot of works and notes behind on paper, but all of them are destroyed by the elements, the only exception is a sample codex made on scrap vellum.
And my favorite one so far (mostly because under this scenario the manuscript may have interesting non trivial content) is "the prisoner scenario".
A person is imprisoned for creating some provocative teachings or any related thought crimes. Part of the sentence bans the prisoner from writing ever again and prevents any contact with the outside world. If caught the prisoner will face a harsh punishment. Maybe there is a scant chance of being freed in some 30 years when some new king takes the throne.
Still, being a person of ideas, the prisoner wants to complete the work of their life and create one more manuscript for posterity, even with no clear understanding of who and when will be able to read it.
What is needed for this?
1) Some material durable enough to survive decades and possible mishaps.
2) Format small enough to be hidden.
3) Ink and impromptu writing tools.
4) Never get caught - writing at night, under moonlight, etc.
5) Plausible deniability if the manuscript is discovered - nothing should link it to the author, not only the contents should be enciphered, there should be no way to match the handwriting, so a custom script should be used. And the appearance of the manuscript should certainly be quite different from an expected work of the author, something innocuous, maybe an astrological herbal?
6) Ensure the future safety of the manuscript: maybe add a bit provocative images and unique foldout maps to make sure whoever finds this manuscript wouldn't throw it away and with time will decipher it. But the author has to err on the side of the caution, it's more important to not let the captors decipher it if the codex is found in prison, so the cipher itself is exceptionally strong.
It takes months or maybe even years to find a way to get all the materials needed by maybe bribing the food delivery guy or making friends with one of the guards.
Most of the job has to be done at night with barely any light, including mixing inks and mending the writing tools. This causes a lot of imperfections, but this doesn't stop the author, the author has a LOT of time on their hands. It doesn't matter if one page takes a month to complete, so the author is being careful and slowly fills page after page with tiny letters and decoy images.
Was it ever completed? Who found it? Nobody knows.
One thing that makes this scenario intriguing is that under it we are indeed the intended target audience of this manuscript. It was written for posterity, maybe the author didn't expect it to take 600 years, but the whole intent of this manuscript was to be deciphered and read by future generations.
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| Palmierite (and atacamite?) |
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Posted by: ReneZ - 28-11-2025, 09:05 AM - Forum: Physical material
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(28-11-2025, 08:32 AM)Jorge_Stolfi Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I had to remove a line from the article about the mineral You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. that claimed that it was used as a paint pigment in the VMS. Just because the McCrone technician copy-pasted the output of their spectrum-matching software onto the report, without checking what palmerite was.
I just removed that reference to the VMS from the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. article. And another one from the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. article. See the respective Talk pages. Please let me know if you find other cases.
To be honest, from where I stand the removal of the plant ID hypotheses is fully justified, but the removal of the line about palmierite is doing the opposite: replacing information from a technical report by an opinion of a non-expert.
Strictly speaking, the report says: "possibly minor amounts of lead sulfide and palmierite", so at least the word "possibly" (or equivalent) should have been there.
However, I don't want to make a point of it, because the whole article says noting at all, and having just the Voynich MS reference doesn't really make any sense.
In earlier days there was a similar discussion about atacamite, which some people thought was non-European. This material was found in other pieces of art in Italy, though. (This is from memory so "C.E.").
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| How quickly did the VMS leave the possession of those who understood it? |
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Posted by: Skoove - 28-11-2025, 05:07 AM - Forum: Provenance & history
- Replies (25)
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Just for a fun discussion, I thought I would ask for peoples opinions on when the VMS left the hands of its original creator(s)? I know that some believe that those who created it didn't understand it, either because it is gibberish or because they were simply scribes for an author who was the only one who knew. As far as I know, we have relatively good evidence that by about 1575 the manuscripts was in the hands of those who didn't even understand what it was supposed to be, let alone be able to read it.
I think that there is other physical evidence in the manuscript that prior to this, it was already in the hands of someone who didn't understand it. Namely because of the incorrect binding, incorrect painting, POSSIBLE retracing by someone who didn't get what the original glyphs were and also the marginalia?
Since the incorrect binding happened not too long after the creation of the manuscript, I personally think that within a generation or two the manuscript somehow left those who had originally devised it then began being passed around as a curiosity by others who had no understanding of it.
I'm not sure if this conjecture would really help in solving any part of the script, but if it became 'displaced' so quickly after its creation it might suggest that it was not a wide spread task or it was only intended for usage by a single individual.
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| [split] Questions about academic publication of Voynich papers |
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Posted by: Rafal - 27-11-2025, 11:24 PM - Forum: Voynich Talk
- Replies (14)
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Quote:There is an extra expense that authors must pay to make a study open-access. On the balance, I decided it would be worth it in the long term to pay that up-front cost.
I will ask maybe a naive question. if you publish in Cryptologia do they pay you for that or do you pay them for that?
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| Naibbe cipher paper |
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Posted by: magnesium - 27-11-2025, 01:24 PM - Forum: News
- Replies (19)
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My open-access paper describing the Naibbe cipher is now out in Cryptologia: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
Thank you all very much for letting me present the cipher at VMD and for all your insightful feedback on the forum. It greatly improved the final paper.
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| Is the VM inspired by late-antique and medieval riddle books? |
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Posted by: JustAnotherTheory - 27-11-2025, 08:32 AM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
- Replies (7)
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Hi,
I may have a theory about the contents of the manuscript, based on the illustrations. I haven't seen this idea before so I thought I'd post it here and get some feedback from long-time researchers of the manuscript.
In a nutshell, I propose that the manuscript, or at least large parts of it, is inspired by late-antique and medieval riddle books. Examples of such riddle books include:
- The Bern Riddles
- Aldhelm Riddles
- Riddles of Symphosius
- Enigmata Eusebii
Such books were common (and popular) in the 1400s, as they were often copied by scribes and compiled into Codexes containing one or more riddle books. Each book contained about 100 riddles, which were written in Latin hexameter, and the goal was to find the solutions that corresponded to the descriptive Latin riddles.
Now the thing with these riddle books is that they contain very vivid, often imaginary descriptions and anthropomorphisations of plants, astronomical phenomena, celestial cycles (sun and moon), zodiac animals, containers, vessels, baths and channels. A person who would actually (literally) draw these riddles would end up with fantastical botanical plants, nonsense looking tubes, weird animals and strange descriptions of celestial phenomena. I'll give a few examples below.
Starting with the botanical section, multiple riddle books show eery matches to the VM: Symphosius alone contains vivid, imaginary descriptions of roses (Riddle 45), poppy (Riddle 40), beet (Riddle 42), as does Aldhelm with Riddle 98: Elleborus (hellebore), Riddle 77: Ficulnea (fig tree). The Bern Riddle book has Riddle 13: De Uite (grapevine), which to me would match the illustration on folio f17v, Riddle 14: De Oliua (olive), Riddle 15: De Palme (palm tree), Riddle 37: De Pipere (pepper plant), Riddle 39: De Hedera (ivy), etc... The Bern book has a wealth of other plants and fantastical botanical descriptions.
Note that these riddles are often written in a visually strange manner, so as to "guide" the solver to the solution by metaphores. Here is an excerpt from Aldhelm Riddle 98: Hellebore:
"A purple flower, I grow in the fields with shaggy foliage.
I am very similar to an oyster: thus with reddened dye of scarlet
a purplish blood oozes by drops from my branches.
I do not wish to snatch away the spoils of life from him who eats me,
nor do my gentle poisons deprive him utterly of reason.
Nevertheless a certain touch of insanity torments him
as, mad with dizziness, he whirls his limbs in a circle"
As you can see, if one were to LITERALLY draw this plant, it would look very strange. All of the riddles are like this, which begs the question, were they used as inspiration for the VM.
As for the balneary folios, there are several interesting candidates: Symphosius' riddles contain many such riddles, for example Riddle 89: Balneum, Riddle 70: Clepsydra (water clock), Riddle 71: Puteus (water well), Riddle 72: Tubus ligneus (wooden pipe). Some of these contain references to tubes or tube-like objects.
Astronomical or astrological riddles are abundant in the above mentioned books. Some of them are highly reminiscent of folios in the VM: Eusebiua mentions the leap day evey fourth year (Riddle 26: De die bissextili, very reminiscent (at least to my eyes) of folio f68r3), Riddle 29: De aetate et saltu, Aldhelm has Riddle 58: Vesper Sidus (evening star), Riddle 48: Vertico Poli (Sphere of the heavens), Riddle 79: Sol et luna (sun and the moon), Riddle 8: Pleiades, ... The Bern Riddles contains astronomical references as well, Riddle 62: De Stellis (stars), ...
A few curiosities or striking coincidences also exist. An example is Aldhelm riddle 24: Dracontia. It describes the act of being produced by the head of a dragon, which we can see in folio f25v, where there is a dragon's head creating a plant. Or Aldhelm Riddle 55: Chrismal, which describes a multi-layered tube-like container for holding holy oils (which were used at the time of the creation of the VM), which eerily ressembles the curious objects in folios f102r1 and f102v1.
You can find all the riddles, in original Latin as well their English translations on this (awesome) website:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
There re also pretty good lists of the riddles on Wikipedia, I'll paste a few of them here for reference:
- The Bern Riddles: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- The Aldhelm Riddles: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Aenigmata Symphosius: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
- Engimata Eusebii: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
At the time of creation of the VM (around 1400s according to carbon dating of the vellum), many Codexes existed that collected these riddles into a single book. This would have made it easy, for someone looking for inspiration for many different plants, celestial objects, baths, ... to do so from a single codex.
What do you think? Could the VM be (at least partially) inspired by contemporary riddle books?
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