[split] Jorge's Retracer Thread: darker ink, retracing of text and drawings

[oshfdk]

Hey, you are not questioning my Superior Pareidolia, are you? 

First of all, thank you for providing a detailed answer. I'm not sure the presence or the absence of retracing affects my deciphering attempts, but I'd rather keep track of all new developments.

From my point of view it does look a bit as if you have theoreticized yourself into a corner, but who knows, maybe it's the right corner after all.

On that micrograph (as in the Beinecke 2014 scans) I see four very different ink types, Rt0-Rt3, with well-defined coverage areas and sharp transitions between them.  Rt0 are the original traces.  Rt1 is the first round of retracing, that was applied to almost the entire text of this page, as well as many pages in the whole book.  Presumably, the few parts that were not retraced by Rt1 were still legible enough at the time.  Rt2 and Rt3 are later rounds that retraced a few glyphs and words, or parts thereof.

Rounds Rt2 and/or Rt3 may have been cases of what I call "back-tracing", when a scribe goes back and retraces some stuff that he recently traced himself.  The back-traced glyphs then may come out darker only because the pen is more loaded with ink.  But retracing and back-tracing are distinct processes from variations of darkness along the same trace, due to variations of pressure, ink flow, speed, etc.  The distinctions between Rt1, Rt2, and Rt3 cannot be explained by such variations.

Between Rt0 and Rt1 enough time passed for the Rt0 traces become so faint that the owner decided to commission a full restoration of the manuscript.  The intervals between Rt1, Rt2, and Rt3 are less certain, but at least one of them was long enough for the leftover Rt0 traces, and possibly the Rt1 traces themselves, had faded substantially.

I wonder, if it's possible to compare in any meaningful way the old photographs/photocopies from Voynich times with the modern scans to see if any perceptible fading has occurred in the last 100 years. Would you expect some visible fading?

You mean at the point X3? As I see it, the original trace (A3) was wider, and the dark ink flowed only over the top 1/3 of that trace, for a little bit.  It is not strange that the new ink speads over older traces. Those would have traces of binder, which is probably more wettable than blank parchment.

This is the only explanation consistent with retracing that I can think of - that somehow new ink would just stick to the old ink and would be repelled by the parchment. Otherwise I find it very implausible that three different people would spend so much effort with extreme precision and yet achieve somewhat visually poor result of very uneven ink density.