I agree with seeing glyphs on astrolabes but in what format would they be arranged so that there is meaning?
![[Image: regioaslabe2lrg.jpg]](http://www.sites.hps.cam.ac.uk/starry/regioaslabe2lrg.jpg)
9 is used often to abbreviate in various texts and on astrolabes, and as JKP and others have stated, it is usually found in the right places to do so. But then we need to know what the other glyphs stand for to know what the words are. But it seems too rigid a system for that to work.
Yes some could be numbers but i doubt there are only 4s and 8s and possibly 9s if the abbreviation glyphs do double or triple duty.
Maybe they all do double or triple duty, sometimes as letters or numbers, sometimes as symbols for concepts or words. But the trick is not just to say it could be, but to show that it is. And it has to be something that works across the whole manuscript.
So what kind of system could it be?
I was thinking of one that would encode place names along with distances and directions. But there are problems, if it is something like that it doesnt seem to fit any particular pattern that you could turn into a chart.
The more complex, the harder it would be to decode it, and although i do think they were trying to hide things in plain sight, i cant imagine a system being used that couldnt be decoded on the fly, since otherwise it would mean transcribing all the time to get any info out of it. Unless it was something like charts, where you would only use them once in a blue moon, like to create a new map if one got lost or became unuseable. But i dont see the pattern of it.
What do you think they could have been wanting to encode, that would take up so much space?
9 is used often to abbreviate in various texts and on astrolabes, and as JKP and others have stated, it is usually found in the right places to do so. But then we need to know what the other glyphs stand for to know what the words are. But it seems too rigid a system for that to work.
Yes some could be numbers but i doubt there are only 4s and 8s and possibly 9s if the abbreviation glyphs do double or triple duty.
Maybe they all do double or triple duty, sometimes as letters or numbers, sometimes as symbols for concepts or words. But the trick is not just to say it could be, but to show that it is. And it has to be something that works across the whole manuscript.
So what kind of system could it be?
I was thinking of one that would encode place names along with distances and directions. But there are problems, if it is something like that it doesnt seem to fit any particular pattern that you could turn into a chart.
The more complex, the harder it would be to decode it, and although i do think they were trying to hide things in plain sight, i cant imagine a system being used that couldnt be decoded on the fly, since otherwise it would mean transcribing all the time to get any info out of it. Unless it was something like charts, where you would only use them once in a blue moon, like to create a new map if one got lost or became unuseable. But i dont see the pattern of it.
What do you think they could have been wanting to encode, that would take up so much space?