[split] f28v

[Mark Knowles]

I must admit that I am mystified by the IHS idea as it seems highly tenuous, at best.

I find Nick Pelling's idea of the writing representing a date much more plausible, though I am by no means at all confident in that. I forget which precise year he suggests, but it us something like 1465(if Nick reads this I daresay he can tell which year it is.). He suggests the numbers have been rearranged as part of a mini cipher.

To me what we see looks something like:

41?r

If(big if) the last two join symbols represent two numeric digits then this could be something like->

4135

or

4125


Looking briefly online there seem to have been different representations of Arabic numerals in the medieval period, so it is hard to say in which possible ways the author might have written those numbers.

However the last two symbols, may not really be two and could also be symbols corresponding to letters or something else.

Even if we have four digits then what can we make of a number of the form 41** with the 4 underlined. Now, if, broadly speaking inline with Nick's suggestion, we can permute these digits such that our string becomes 14** suggesting a year in keeping with the 15th century dating then that would be interesting; where the underline indicates permutation is required. Of course, if this is true, the key question of importance is what the last two digits of the number must be, as any assistance with dating the Voynich would be invaluable.

All that I have written here is highly speculative, but arguably less speculative than the basis of this whole post.