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| Comparisons with Mexican Illustrations |
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Posted by: SiestaGuru - 25-05-2025, 10:45 AM - Forum: Imagery
- Replies (3)
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Hi, I found some noteworthy similarities in some older Mexican works with the VM. I hadn't seen these discussed before and so and wanted to share. All the mentioned codices are written after the supposed VM origin time, so the VM can not have used them as inspiration.
These two images are from Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca, supposedly written from somewhere between 1547 and 1560 on European paper.
The caverns in Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca are the Chicomoztoc, a mythical origin place for the Nahuatl people. The shape of the inner structure and the way the border of it is drawn in my opinion strongly resemble the structure on the VM rosetta. The fact that it is in a circle and that the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca drawing also contains this structure on top with intertwined half circle doodles, just like we often see in the VM further, as well as the plants on the outside add to my suspicion these could be related somehow.
Note that it's unlikely that this describes the exact same object, since Chicomoztoc is very specifically 7 caves, and the VM illustration has more 'cavities'
Another similarity I found in Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca is the following, again with a VM image on the rosetta:
What struck me here is that both objects have 'grass' growing out of them, and that the VM just like the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca example may have two 'pipes' coming out of it on the right hand side
You can find a scan of Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
It's quite the interesting book to go through, it's visually just as interesting as the VM in my opinion, but since we already know the language it probably doesn't get as much attention
Another interesting thing to look at are the books of Chilam Balam (17th and 18th century). Scans can be found here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
This book contains some astronomical diagrams which in my opinion resemble the VM in a few ways:
For comparison, here's the VM images of sun, moon and these 'little circle guys' you see both in the VM and in the books of Chilam Balam
Chilam Balam also contains a zodiac. I don't think it's an amazing correlation with the VM zodiac, but it's the worst either. It's at least a sign that the same subject material was considered here
Another book is 16th century codex tudela, scans here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
This book contains some hebral drawings, some really cool but clearly unrelated aztec drawings and what particularly struck me,though I may be overimagining things some very similar folio numbers. I also noted some similarities in the script with the VM, particularly that a couple of words appear to start with something that looks very similar to the common VM word prefix: "4o". A couple of the characters also vaguely resemble the gallows characters we see in the VM.
Finally, in codice dehesa from the 16th/17th century (scans: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), which apparently also discusses Chicomoztoc, I noticed a few characters that resemble a sloppy version of the overexaggerated gallow characters you sometimes see in the VM at the start of a page:
Brief analysis
I won't say that any of these are slam dunk evidence for a new world origin hypothesis. There's quite a few counterarguments against it like the carbon dating, medieval european style, material properties, etc. You also clearly do not see what you see in most Mexican codices: displays of humans/gods in elaborate and distinctive mesoamerican style clothes and accessories and in general a Mexican style is missing in the VM.
But I do think there's a few signs in here that there may have been some shared culture between the VM and some of these Mexican codices which I cannot easily explain through the columbian exchange. Particularly, it seems unlikely that Europeans came up with Chicomoztoc or inspired Mexicans to draw it in this particular way, while the style and contents of drawings on the Rosetta appear unique within Europe and do not seem to have had much impact.
Beyond the visual similarities between some of the images and some of the script and the general sense of unfamiliarity, I think it's also particularly noteworthy that the contents of some of these Mexican works has a similar sort of feeling to the VM of being partially scientific and partially religious/occult without containing the more familiar western religious/occult symbols. Belief in a sun god was widespread in mesoamerica and it would not surprise me if the VM astronomical diagrams in the VM have some religious sun god connotations
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| Another solution |
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Posted by: dfs346 - 24-05-2025, 06:39 AM - Forum: News
- Replies (5)
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Apparently equally applicable to the Voynich manuscript, the King James Bible, La Chanson de Roland, La Divina Commedia, Njal's Saga, The Tales of Genji, The Tibetan Book of the Dead ...
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| sorted anagrams |
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Posted by: extent_of_foxes - 22-05-2025, 01:38 AM - Forum: Theories & Solutions
- Replies (2)
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How's this for a method of creating a text with oddly low entropy?
- Start with a plaintext in a language written in an alphabet.
- Take each word and put the letters in some fixed order, possibly alphabetical, possibly some other order.
- If there are now clusters of duplicates of the same letter, maybe remove duplicates, or maybe slightly change the order to move them apart.
- Remove the spaces between the words, and insert new spaces wherever you like.
- Replace the letters with symbols, using a simple substitution cipher. Small shifts are allowed for aesthetic reasons, such as to move "c" before a gallows to create a benched gallows.
Based on a not-terribly-reproducible analysis of the first 10k EVA-letters of the manuscript, I came up with "qptkfscheoldaginmry" as a guess at the order of the letters. I then manually read through the first 10k EVA-letters and inserted spaces where the letters "jumped back in the order", that is, at the supposed breaks between words in the plaintext. This was surprisingly subjective. For example, my rules allow "qotor" to be a single word containing two of whichever letter maps to EVA-o, with one of them moved before the "t" to avoid the double "o". But it also seems that "qo" is a common two-letter word. So should "qotor" be split into "qo" and "tor"?
The most common apparent two-letter words are (anagrams of): qo ty ky ch ol dy sy sh or da so.
The most common three-letter words are (anagrams of): cho chy sho shy dar tor kol tol kor tey she ody car cha.
The most common four-letter words are (anagrams of): chor tchy chol kchy shol shor dain chey shey char keey pchy.
I notice some patterns among the common (anagrams of) words: cho sho chy shy, chor chol shor shol, tor kor tol kol. It's certainly possible that a real language could have words like this, especially if the patterns are not as strict as they appear to be, as an artifact of the sorted anagram process. It's still striking, though.
There are some words that just contain several EVA-e: ee, eee, eeee. Roman numerals, with "iiii" instead of "iv" for some reason?
I attempted to match the common words here with (anagrams of) common words in Latin, Italian (modern; I couldn't find historical word frequencies), and a very small corpus of historical French. Sometimes it seemed promising for a while but eventually none of my attempts worked out.
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| Question about unicity distance |
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Posted by: kckluge - 21-05-2025, 11:54 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
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I could swear there was a reference to unicity distance in a recent comment, and I was going to ask this there, but for the life of me I can't find it -- so here we go...
Unicity distance "is the length of an original ciphertext needed to break the cipher by reducing the number of possible spurious keys to zero in a brute force attack" (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.). It's a potential way of trying to fomalize the "too many degrees of freedom" critique of proposed Voynich solutions as well as other possible prunings (i.e., if you can't get a coherent stretch of plaintext from a 28+ character long stretch of the ciphertext you haven't proposed a credible solution of the text as a simple monoalphabetic cipher).
What I can't quite figure out is how to correctly compute the unicity distance for something like Brumbaugh's proposed cipher. To recap for those unfamiliar with his "solution", encipherment proceeded in two stages:
1) Convert from plaintext letters to digits using the following grid:
a, j, v = 1
b, k, r = 2
c, l, w = 3
d, m, s = 4
e, n, x = 5
f, o, t = 6
g, p, y = 7
h, q, u = 8
i, -us, z = 9
2) replace each digit with one of several glyphs corresponding to that digit
So, for instance, his hypothetical enciperhing of one of the labels near the upper right corner of You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. is
P E P P E R --> 7 5 7 7 5 2 --> (EVA) s a r ch a r
so each of the three instances of the digit 7 gets replaced by a different Voynich script glyph ('s', 'r', and 'ch'), while both 5's get replaced by EVA 'a' (for the purposes of this discussion ignore that EVA 'r' also maps to the digit 2 here -- that has to do with how Brunbaugh sees variant forms that get grouped together as 'r' in EVA...)
Is there someone out there who knows how to compute the unicity distance for a cipher like this, and if so could you walk me through it?
Thanks,
Karl
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| Historical ciphers, when they were introduced and their effect |
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Posted by: Koen G - 20-05-2025, 02:13 PM - Forum: Analysis of the text
- Replies (30)
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After having read the paper by Marco Vito that was highlighted by Mark here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. , I feel like we need a to the point overview of which ciphers were used in the 15th century, when they were introduced and what their effects would be. Could they make a plaintext more like Voynichese, or do they have an opposite effect?
Your input, additions and corrections will be very much required and appreciated. If this turns into something decent, I can make an easy to find version of it in the curated subforum. This might be helpful for newcomers.
1) Simple substitution. - Each letter of the plaintext consistently corresponds to a symbol of the ciphertext. (Example: Caesar cipher).
- Existed before the 15th century.
- Popular with solvers, but there is a broad consensus among scholars that the Voynich text is not the result of a simple substitution cipher.
2) Introduce nulls.- Some extra characters in the ciphertext don't correspond to anything. This can be used to obscure the most frequent characters, break up common bigrams etc.
- Existed before the 15th century (?)
- Effects: larger glyph set, increased entropy (sometimes or always?)
--> even LESS like Voynichese
3) Homophonic cipher- Each plaintext letter can be replaced by multiple ciphertext symbols. Hides frequency -> harder to crack
- Existed before the 15th century (?)
- Effects: larger glyph set; I would expect higher entropy but I'm not sure.
--> even LESS like Voynichese
4) Polyalphabetic, "Alberti" cipher- Allows the encoder to shift to a different substitution alphabet within the same cipher.
- Leon Battista Alberti, 1466 (-> significantly later than Voynich MS). Existed earlier e.g. in Arab sources.
- Effects: glyph set may remain the same; any textual patterns are obscured.
--> very distant from the structured and rigid Voynichese.
5) Steganography- Any method where the actual information is hidden within less suspicious data. Hard to rule out: the only limit is your imagination. Note: the Voynich manuscript appears encoded or "secret" throughout, so it would be an edge case of steganography to begin with if any actual info is concealed in what already looks like a ciphertext.
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| Histocrypt 2025 |
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Posted by: ReneZ - 20-05-2025, 11:19 AM - Forum: News
- Replies (1)
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This year's Histocrypt conference is held In Poznan, Poland, from 16 to 18 June.
Histocrypt (unusually) publishes its conference proceedings already before the event, and they are available here:
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| Special "nymphs" around Gemini |
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Posted by: Koen G - 19-05-2025, 07:40 PM - Forum: Imagery
- Replies (3)
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This is from a discussion in another You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., where Juan Sali linked to the four temperaments in You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view., 15th century You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. 26r.
The fact that these four figures are standing on four elements reminded me of something that's always fascinated me about the figures around the "Gemini" pair. There is so much variation in them. Just think of the "lustful man" behind the woman in a "seductive" pose. The other woman stretching both arms horizontally, rotating in part toward a rare frontal perspective. The young girl in a full, dotted dress.
But there's also four figures standing on something. And I remembered one of these things is grass. The grass one is separate, the other three are in a row. These are also all different: one nude figure is standing on a surface with some pattern, which is surrounded by a band with another pattern. One apparently young man is standing on something with two "scallops" on one end and a circle with four lines on the other end. The final one is standing on a similar thing but it does not have these additional features.
The following is NOT a proposed identification, I am just putting the figures together for comparison.
I don't think there is all that much to help us out here, apart from one thing. The young man, who may correspond to the "airy" Sanguine, has something going on with his arms/hands. Especially the hand that is lowered - might that be a bad attempt at a leather glove? Obviously gloves are worn for falconry, one of the Sanguine's attributes.
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