18-03-2016, 12:12 PM
Quote:In my opinion, the fundamental mistake in dealing with Beinecke 408 is that most people don't take it at its face value. Some guys tell me it is a ciphre but are not able to solve it, which is ridiculous for a 15th c. ciphre or they give me lots of statistics about how some glyphs are behaving but can't tell me what their statistics mean or read or translate a single glyph, not to mention the Far East and New World theories. It's been this way since the ms. was rediscovered and if you have no results in a hundred years you should sit back and think again. Beinecke 408 is a 1st half 15th c. Latin European manuscript and should be treated as one, most likely it is a highly abbreviated text. If there is something that looks like a 15th c. abbreviation stroke it should be treated as such and one should try to find out if there is an abbreviation and what it means. It is the same with other things, e.g. the sign that looks like the etcetera abbreviation, the Arabic numerals and so on.
Hmm, calling a text "highly abbreviated" and not being able to read it is as "ridiculous" as it is to call it a 15th century cipher and not being able to read it, isn't it?
Actually, there is a very old concept, currently denoted as steganography (the term was introduced by Trithemius, if I'm not mistaken), which aims at presenting something to look not what it is, in order to obfuscate the useful message.
To return to the &163 symbol, it would be interesting to read any assumptions about what that character may exactly mean with regard to the object depicted to the right (and what is that object itself).