Morten St George Theory

[Morten St. George]

Again, please let us know if you are able to find anything unique about the lettering on either side of the Sigillum Doornenburgensis, something that would help place the sigil in either time or place. Thanks.

JP,

I'm now reading that, in order to maintain secrecy, the authors of all medieval sigillum used universal lettering that cannot be dated, so I guess that takes you off the hook.

The following is a snippet from the Sigillum Doornenburgensis (SD) that I find particularly difficult:



In accordance with the SSM, these letters, from left to right, should stand for v - g - a - r - e.

Comments:

1. Like the "g" of "agolb" on the reverse side, the "g" of Gofgamel is extended with a horizontal bar that obviously is part of the "g" and not a stray mark. Was the letter "g" commonly written like that across medieval times?

2. The "a" of Alla (immediately following the "g") looks more like a "q" (or the number "9") than like other medieval a's including those on the same sigil. Do we find an "a" looking like a "q" elsewhere?

3. The "r" of Rabur (which follows the "q" of Alla) looks more like the number "2" than like the r's seen elsewhere even on the same sigil. Do you think the 2 could really be a 2, representing the two words "yaubva vaubua" that follow "agolb" (Allah) on the reverse side?

The isolated "h" of the SSM sigillum is eliminated on the SD and an "h" replaces the "t" of Theos for the first letter (correctly giving us 72 rather than 73 letters in total); otherwise the two sets of letters are the same and very likely the version that we need to use for decoding purposes.

Earlier I noted that the glyphs f and p are what distinguishes sets of 17 glyphs on f57v. Interestingly, in quire 20, those two glyphs tend to appear in the first line of paragraphs and nowhere else. Thus, instead of using a second set of pointers (as I had suggested) to insert the letters "u" and "h" into the output, we may only need to observe the quantity and position of those glyphs in the first line of quire 20 paragraphs.

Similarly, for the wheel containing the 72 Latin letters of the great name, VMS encoding has to be based on positioning, ie. on placing a glyph (one found among the 17 glyphs) under the desired Latin letter. The other glyphs (a great many of the glyphs found in quire 20) would therefore be nothing more than place markers (fillers) not directly used in the encoding.

As I continue my research, I expect to be able to refine these decoding theories. With a bit of luck, I might even be able to say something serious about decoding the VMS before the end of the year. Already I feel that we are making significant progress.