copy of an older, barely legible manuscript?

[dashstofsk]

Thirty pages would have been more than enough... but writing so many pages on expensive parchment, and with a relatively consistent system, as a hoax makes no sense at all...

You are making the assumption that the hoaxers wrote the whole manuscript before trying to find a buyer for it. That would have been risky. The effort might have been for nothing.

A more plausible scenario is that the writers, initially unsure how far they could go with the deception, started by writing a small piece, worked hard on it to make it look genuine, presented it as a rare piece from a distant land where they used a strange alphabet and where they knew about the secret sciences, and hoped to find a buyer for it. Eventually they did find a buyer and that gave them the enthusiasm to write a second piece. Then success with that one also. And with the one after. Each piece being on a different topic. With each success their greed and motivation grew stronger. When eventually it was over someone bound all the sections together for the convenience of having all works in the unknown writing in one manuscript.

In effect the manuscript is not one manuscript but a collection of individual pieces of work.

As success and reward came with each piece the author believed they could relax their standard. Confident that further writing would be certain of success they started to get lazy and the quality of the pages started to decline. Perhaps the dazzling 3x2 sheet was the initial offering. Perhaps the herbals with the careless drawings were the last.

But after each piece the authors paused. They did not want to feed their patrons too soon. They had to guard against the suspicion that the manuscripts were being written on demand. But with each pause they lost some fluency in their ‘method’. The language of the new work was slightly different to what came before.

This scenario neatly gives a plausible hypothesis for the motivation for the manuscript, how it was written, why the authors went to the trouble, can suggest the chronological order of the sections, can explain the wide subject matter, can explain the different language clusters, can explain the differences in the quality of the sections.

Does it at least make some sense?