07-02-2016, 07:34 AM
(This post was last modified: 23-04-2016, 12:40 AM by -JKP-.
Edit Reason: Fixed Tironian typo
)
It's my belief that a number of the plants (at least a few) are duplicated in the pharma section and that the ones in the pharma section may be simplified versions of the big plant to fit the space.
I mentioned this in one of my blogs, but the example in the blog isn't the most convincing one, I used it because it was relevant to the T & T article:
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There are some pharma plants that resemble the big plants more closely.
I think the plant pictures are meaningful. I think the nymph pictures are meaningful also. There are biological processes symbolically represented in several of them.
But we have to ask whether the labels and the main text were added by the same person who drew the pictures. It's the simplest explanation and since the drawings are often symbolic, it's not a stretch to believe they could be accompanied by encrypted text.
But...
I'm quite sure the VMS is an unfinished document. There are many signs that this was probably the case.
The missing "labels" on some of the pharma pages appears to strengthen this possibility. So... if the VMS is unfinished, was it interrupted after the drawings were done and someone else added the text, possibly for an entirely different purpose? I've seen unfinished herbals with no text at all (and some with no drawings even though there was space for drawings). If you consider the prevalence of war and diseases (including plague) that could quickly and unexpectedly take or disrupt life in the middle ages, it's not surprising that this happens.
I would guess that the first two things that 90% of people try to do when they first encounter the VMS is to:
1. Try to solve it with a simple substitution code.
2. Try to puzzle out the labels that are next to recognizable pictures, most likely looking for nouns
In other words, these two approaches have probably been tried tens of thousands of times by historic persons and amateur Internet cryptographers.
And no one has succeeded even though the VMS is packed full of "labels" in different contexts (plants, pharma, astrology/astronomy, balneological, etc). That tells me they might not be labels in the traditional sense or that they are encoded in a unique way—perhaps in a way that requires a second document as a lookup tool.
I don't know if you've ever looked at medieval documents describing Tirolean Tironian notes. I don't mean the ones that show a chart of a couple of hundred characters, I mean the manuscript that is hundreds of pages long with thousands and thousands of symbols to represent each word or long syllable.
It's an unwieldy system, bordering on the ridiculous. Given how uneven most people's handwriting tends to be, and the slight differences between symbols, I can't imagine anyone being able to read anything that's encoded this way, including the person who wrote the document using this method. You can go from the symbol to the cipher document, but there's no efficient way to refer a shape back to its original meaning and the system is far too verbose to actually learn by heart.
But... going on that concept, you need both manuscripts to decode something written this way. Maybe there was another document with long lists of glyph combinations as a reference manual for the VMS.
There is some reason inherent in the way the VMS is constructed that has prevented very smart cryptographers from deciphering it, given that there are so many labels that could normally be used as clues. Which says to me, those might not be labels in the traditional sense OR there may be additional material needed to 'read' them (e.g., they belong with other text on the page or on another page or in another document).
I mentioned this in one of my blogs, but the example in the blog isn't the most convincing one, I used it because it was relevant to the T & T article:
You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
There are some pharma plants that resemble the big plants more closely.
I think the plant pictures are meaningful. I think the nymph pictures are meaningful also. There are biological processes symbolically represented in several of them.
But we have to ask whether the labels and the main text were added by the same person who drew the pictures. It's the simplest explanation and since the drawings are often symbolic, it's not a stretch to believe they could be accompanied by encrypted text.
But...
I'm quite sure the VMS is an unfinished document. There are many signs that this was probably the case.
The missing "labels" on some of the pharma pages appears to strengthen this possibility. So... if the VMS is unfinished, was it interrupted after the drawings were done and someone else added the text, possibly for an entirely different purpose? I've seen unfinished herbals with no text at all (and some with no drawings even though there was space for drawings). If you consider the prevalence of war and diseases (including plague) that could quickly and unexpectedly take or disrupt life in the middle ages, it's not surprising that this happens.
I would guess that the first two things that 90% of people try to do when they first encounter the VMS is to:
1. Try to solve it with a simple substitution code.
2. Try to puzzle out the labels that are next to recognizable pictures, most likely looking for nouns
In other words, these two approaches have probably been tried tens of thousands of times by historic persons and amateur Internet cryptographers.
And no one has succeeded even though the VMS is packed full of "labels" in different contexts (plants, pharma, astrology/astronomy, balneological, etc). That tells me they might not be labels in the traditional sense or that they are encoded in a unique way—perhaps in a way that requires a second document as a lookup tool.
I don't know if you've ever looked at medieval documents describing Tirolean Tironian notes. I don't mean the ones that show a chart of a couple of hundred characters, I mean the manuscript that is hundreds of pages long with thousands and thousands of symbols to represent each word or long syllable.
It's an unwieldy system, bordering on the ridiculous. Given how uneven most people's handwriting tends to be, and the slight differences between symbols, I can't imagine anyone being able to read anything that's encoded this way, including the person who wrote the document using this method. You can go from the symbol to the cipher document, but there's no efficient way to refer a shape back to its original meaning and the system is far too verbose to actually learn by heart.
But... going on that concept, you need both manuscripts to decode something written this way. Maybe there was another document with long lists of glyph combinations as a reference manual for the VMS.
There is some reason inherent in the way the VMS is constructed that has prevented very smart cryptographers from deciphering it, given that there are so many labels that could normally be used as clues. Which says to me, those might not be labels in the traditional sense OR there may be additional material needed to 'read' them (e.g., they belong with other text on the page or on another page or in another document).