No text, but a visual code

[-JKP-]

It doesn't take 200 pages to describe how to locate stars.

I just looked at a star chart a couple of days ago. It had the magnitudes and the latitudes/longitudes for a list of bright stars, the ones they considered most important, and it was half a page.

Now I know if you are mapping all the stars of all the constellations that they used to describe at the time, that it takes a number of pages of charts—I've seen those too, but they are never 200 pages long.

There are also charts for positions of the moon and they can be a few pages long, but they are almost always in chart form.


As for astrolabes, if you can fit all the information on an astrolabe that is the size of a lunch plate, why would it take 200 pages to reproduce the information (and why bother)?

Also, descriptions of the locations of stars are more positionally varied than VMS tokens.


The text in the VMS varies a little, we have Curriers A and B and there are line and paragraph patterns. There are also somewhat undulating pockets of patterns where certain glyphs show up more often than others or where the rate of repetition is higher than in other places. Imagine a field that is relatively homogenous, but there are small clumps of grass that are a bit taller or a slightly different color from the rest.

But, for the most part, the VMS is almost disturbingly homogenous from beginning to end.



I don't disagree that the VMS might be symbolic. I don't disagree that it might be about astrology or a simple version of astronomy.

But right now the fact that it might be symbolic is just an idea. Until you can demonstrate HOW the information is encoded in some meaningful way in the actual tokens, preferably a couple of lines of translation... it's just an idea.