The part of Egypt's history I think is relevant is the one when Greeks and Romans sat on the Egyptian throne. Starting around 300 BCE. When I show older examples, that is because they remained more or less the same throughout the Greco-Roman period as well. Still in the first centuries CE, the Egyptian capital of Alexandria with its Library was considered a center for learning, and many scholars from Europe spent time there.
As far as the transmission of the imagery goes, I largely follow Diane's opinion. The Voynich images do not look especially Greek, nor Roman, nor Egyptian, nor European. They can only be explained as hybrid forms, which is to be expected if material is maintained and copied during 1500 years. Diane thinks this material was maintained with a great amount of care because it remained useful in intercontinental trade and navigation. The manuscript looks totally weird because it shows images that were originally Hellenistic, but copied by later cultures with their own sensitivities and taboos and so on.
Everybody's first instinct is to think of MS Beinecke 408 as a strange medieval work. Mine was as well, and Diane's was as well if I'm not mistaken. And that's only normal: it is an item made in 15thC Europe, after all. But a large part of the manuscript industry was copying copying copying. And if you payed some professionals to copy every line of a weird book, they would - though some things would probably have to be filtered out to not cause offense.
So when I show a correspondence between an Egyptian pattern and a Voynich one, it has to be seen like that: I think the images originated, for example, in Alexandria, got altered by in-between cultural sensitivities, and were copied line-by-line onto MS Beinecke 408's vellum. (this is only about the imagery - I'm leaving out the text because that would make it way too complicated)
As far as the transmission of the imagery goes, I largely follow Diane's opinion. The Voynich images do not look especially Greek, nor Roman, nor Egyptian, nor European. They can only be explained as hybrid forms, which is to be expected if material is maintained and copied during 1500 years. Diane thinks this material was maintained with a great amount of care because it remained useful in intercontinental trade and navigation. The manuscript looks totally weird because it shows images that were originally Hellenistic, but copied by later cultures with their own sensitivities and taboos and so on.
Everybody's first instinct is to think of MS Beinecke 408 as a strange medieval work. Mine was as well, and Diane's was as well if I'm not mistaken. And that's only normal: it is an item made in 15thC Europe, after all. But a large part of the manuscript industry was copying copying copying. And if you payed some professionals to copy every line of a weird book, they would - though some things would probably have to be filtered out to not cause offense.
So when I show a correspondence between an Egyptian pattern and a Voynich one, it has to be seen like that: I think the images originated, for example, in Alexandria, got altered by in-between cultural sensitivities, and were copied line-by-line onto MS Beinecke 408's vellum. (this is only about the imagery - I'm leaving out the text because that would make it way too complicated)