19-12-2025, 01:49 AM
Goulashmancy = the art of predicting the past by inspection and interpretation of sauce stains on ancient mysterious manuscripts.
Not long ago I wrote a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about the stain on f102v1 + f103r.
Here are some annotations on the image of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. stain, specifically.
This clip spans the right end of lines 1-9 of page 103r, including the big red stain near its NE corner. The spilled material apparently was some reddish sauce, like goulash or tomato sauce, that presumably contained both greasy and watery components. The spill was probably on this page or perhaps on the facing page f102v1, but the book was closed before completely cleaning the spill, so that both pages got matching stains. Some component of the liquid seeped through the vellum and stained additional pages on other folios.
The spilled liquid must have softened the text ink, so that, when the spill was finally cleaned, a large portion of lines 1-7 was largely erased. The part of the damaged text within the blue outline (A) was retraced, but a large part (B) was not.
The retracing inside the stain used broad strokes and dark ink similar to that of the retouching pass Rt2 on other pages. However, the person who tried to fix this damage (RtX) may have been a separate Retracer distinct from the retracings of other pages.
Unlike the general restorer Rt1, RtX retraced the glyphs that had been less affected by the spill. Note that he refrained from fixing some glyphs that are still quite legible, like © and (D), and incorrectly restored others, like (E) and (F). This indicates that RtX did not know the Voynichese alphabet.
All the best, --stolfi
Not long ago I wrote a You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. about the stain on f102v1 + f103r.
Here are some annotations on the image of the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. stain, specifically.
This clip spans the right end of lines 1-9 of page 103r, including the big red stain near its NE corner. The spilled material apparently was some reddish sauce, like goulash or tomato sauce, that presumably contained both greasy and watery components. The spill was probably on this page or perhaps on the facing page f102v1, but the book was closed before completely cleaning the spill, so that both pages got matching stains. Some component of the liquid seeped through the vellum and stained additional pages on other folios.
The spilled liquid must have softened the text ink, so that, when the spill was finally cleaned, a large portion of lines 1-7 was largely erased. The part of the damaged text within the blue outline (A) was retraced, but a large part (B) was not.
The retracing inside the stain used broad strokes and dark ink similar to that of the retouching pass Rt2 on other pages. However, the person who tried to fix this damage (RtX) may have been a separate Retracer distinct from the retracings of other pages.
Unlike the general restorer Rt1, RtX retraced the glyphs that had been less affected by the spill. Note that he refrained from fixing some glyphs that are still quite legible, like © and (D), and incorrectly restored others, like (E) and (F). This indicates that RtX did not know the Voynichese alphabet.
All the best, --stolfi