Anton's observation is very good, entirely original and merits both congratulations and our admiration.
The comments made afterwards did startle me, I confess - given that I have already published enough, in enough detail and with historical, cultural and contextual notes to fill a small book altogether.
I don't make the stuff up you know. It doesn't originate from my head, but from a prior grounding and some time spent in the profession.
The drawing in question is a map ... more exactly, a chart... Its centre is meant for Arin (whose notional location shifted over time). I should think - though I am not certain of this detail - that this Arin was in the Yemen, and probably near the old dam of Mar'ib.
That location intersects precisely with other information provided by the primary source, and also with the historical matter which I've only briefly mentioned so far in connection with the astronomical 'bathy-' folios.
The three-dot detail is not the marker for north, but for South.
That's not guess-work, either, nor speculation nor 'common sense' nor theorising.
The symbol is a very old one - well known to historians of art, as it happens, and its application in the map shows it related to a custom by which the three stars which marked the notional 'southern Pole' were likened to the three holes in an anchor. The symbol survived through millennia to appear even in European works of the earlier medieval period. In a couple of the Celtic-influenced monastic works most closely deriving from Coptic and Ethiopian monastic precedents, we see it employde it as a 'shield against the south' - an apotropaic mark in those cases because south was supposed the direction of hell and its fire.
It is also made as a 'shield' in the Voynich map.
Later, in Europe, the three-dots became a general pattern to mean stars, and finally just a pattern.
By the twelfth century, European art appears to have forgotten its original significance (as the Voynich map has not), and in (e.g.) Latin herbals of the 12thC, a form of the '3-dot' appears with the Paeony, where it is now plainly a symbol for the triune deity of Christian belief and one sees the figure of a demon being repelled.
The use of this motif, in the form it has in the map, is a sign of age and cultural origins for the drawing's first enunciation
I know that will sound too complicated and generally TMI, but I want to be clear that when I reach a conclusion it is a conclusion from evidence not from imagination and false analogies devised by reference to some theoretical-fictional narrative. (Which is not to say that's what all members do; it's what often happened in the past, and still does in some cases).
[rest removed, to shorten]
The comments made afterwards did startle me, I confess - given that I have already published enough, in enough detail and with historical, cultural and contextual notes to fill a small book altogether.
I don't make the stuff up you know. It doesn't originate from my head, but from a prior grounding and some time spent in the profession.
The drawing in question is a map ... more exactly, a chart... Its centre is meant for Arin (whose notional location shifted over time). I should think - though I am not certain of this detail - that this Arin was in the Yemen, and probably near the old dam of Mar'ib.
That location intersects precisely with other information provided by the primary source, and also with the historical matter which I've only briefly mentioned so far in connection with the astronomical 'bathy-' folios.
The three-dot detail is not the marker for north, but for South.
That's not guess-work, either, nor speculation nor 'common sense' nor theorising.
The symbol is a very old one - well known to historians of art, as it happens, and its application in the map shows it related to a custom by which the three stars which marked the notional 'southern Pole' were likened to the three holes in an anchor. The symbol survived through millennia to appear even in European works of the earlier medieval period. In a couple of the Celtic-influenced monastic works most closely deriving from Coptic and Ethiopian monastic precedents, we see it employde it as a 'shield against the south' - an apotropaic mark in those cases because south was supposed the direction of hell and its fire.
It is also made as a 'shield' in the Voynich map.
Later, in Europe, the three-dots became a general pattern to mean stars, and finally just a pattern.
By the twelfth century, European art appears to have forgotten its original significance (as the Voynich map has not), and in (e.g.) Latin herbals of the 12thC, a form of the '3-dot' appears with the Paeony, where it is now plainly a symbol for the triune deity of Christian belief and one sees the figure of a demon being repelled.
The use of this motif, in the form it has in the map, is a sign of age and cultural origins for the drawing's first enunciation
I know that will sound too complicated and generally TMI, but I want to be clear that when I reach a conclusion it is a conclusion from evidence not from imagination and false analogies devised by reference to some theoretical-fictional narrative. (Which is not to say that's what all members do; it's what often happened in the past, and still does in some cases).
[rest removed, to shorten]