13-03-2026, 03:54 PM
(13-03-2026, 02:40 PM)proto57 wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I have long suggested Maurice Pope's, "The Story of Decipherment: From Egyptian Hieroglyphs to Maya Script.": You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
From that book I compiled a list of all the scripts which I could reasonably ascertain would have been "unknown" to the Men of the Letters, and it quickly added up to over 100.
Quote:Of course, I think there is a very real possibility Book A was destroyed, if it were some poor, low value thing... which most herbals were in Voynich's time...
That is quite a possibility, since (AFAIK) in the catalogs of the books made by the Jesuits prior to the 1911 sale there is none that could be MS408 or the Barschius Manuscript (BookA, "BMS"?).
When Kircher received it, the BMS was anonymous and had no legible title. Apparently Kircher did not add any provenance note or serial number. Now imagine someone trying to organize his books and documents after his death. Would he put all the books in his library in the same set of boxes and ship them to the Collegio Romano? Imagine the librarian at the Collegio unpacking those boxes and finds the BMS. What would he do with it? How would he enter it into his catalog?
I think that there must have been hundreds of opportunities for the BMS to get lost or destroyed between the time it left Kircher's library and the time some of Kircher's books still at the Collegio were shipped to the secret hideout in Castelgandolfo or Villa Torlonia. (Or to the Netherlands?) Even if the BMS got there, it may have became separated from "Kircher's stuff" because of its anonymity.
Quote:And I think I have several candidates, written in several scripts unknown to them, with plants which would have mystified them, and with what might be considered stars and chemical symbolism. I've even looked through some of Voynich's catalogs, wondering if he found and listed the book they saw. For one thing, one clue, it may have been in Kircher's collections, since they may have sent it to him (as reported), so that may be a good cross reference. I think there is a chance we have all seen Book A, but can't yet say I know what it is/was.
That sounds quite possible...
Quote:Also, and this relates to this issue directly I think, and applies to the BST: For those unfamiliar, years ago I looked at every page of the Carteggio, and found several loose sheets, seemingly unconnected to nearby letters. I long wondered if any of these contain the script said copied from Book A, and belong with one of their known letters. I compiled just a few of the scripts on a composite:
I saw some of those "mysterious scripts" when I browsed the first online scan of the Carteggio. (Although the ones I saw may have been in the body of letters; I don't recall any loose sheets.) But besides those copied samples, he must have received also whole "mysterious books" -- originals, not copies. Not everyone who found a cryptic book would be "hooked" like Baresch and would have wanted to keep it. So it seems quite possible that MS 408 was one of these, and was substituted for the BMS by accident. Or somehow reached Wilfrid, who chose it as the replacement for the BMS...
By the way, I don't care much if the Book Switch theory is true or not. The Rudolf/Marci story is not why I became interested in the riddle.
That theory matters only for those who care about the history of the book before Wilfrid. Even for them, whatever they learn about that history would still be just as interesting -- only that it would be about some currently lost book (the BMS), not about MS408.
All the best, --stolfi
PS. I can tell that #3, #6, and #7 on your image are just some form of Arabic script. What about the others? Do they look like cryptography? Could some of them be just attempts to prank Kircher?