Water, earth and air

[Linda]

VMS' f68 "earth"

Which page are you referring to? Perhaps f67v2, the small circle in the SW corner?

No, I really do mean f 68v left, this one here:



I think the most here agree meanwhile that the center TO circle is a representation of "earth" or "world".


But this here, f 67v:




May also be a TO vignette, maybe with a known preference for green water, the rest is blue air and red soil or so.

I really like to group the TO maps together, it forms a comprehensive coverage of the understanding that was had at the time about the Earth.

I see the colourful one with the faces as being a south up Isadore style TO map, I do not see soil sky and water though, what you say is green water, i see as Asia, but upgraded to divide Asia into north and south, by showing what appears to be representations of the people who live in each quadrant. The inclusion of what seems to be representative of south Asian people is the main upgrade to knowledge of the world over the Oresme version, which would have this area at the back of a 3d representation. It also seems to posit that humans originated out of Africa and finally settled the entire world (as it was known then, front and back of the one side, in the Oresme version).

I see the cosmos one as an Oresme TO, where the top right is the habitable known world, down to the equator, which was thought to be the extent of habitable area, with water covering the lower half. The right top half is unknown, hence the ambiguous pattern.  The upgrade here is the cosmos part of that diagram to accentuate the revolving nature of sky vs earth, albeit in a complicated manner.

I see the rosettes TO as an Inverted Isadore TO to indicate the sections discussed in correlation with certain Rosettes. You can see a path from the middle of Europe, and another from the north western part of Asia. What I find interesting about that is that if you consider these to be a Volga Baltic North Sea Atlantic to Mediterranean to Marmora to Black Sea to Volga, you get a path around the world that includes both Europe and Asia. If you include the Rhine, you can also get to the Alps, and with a little work, to the Po, Adriatic, and Mediterranean again, or to the Danube and Black Sea. I do think the Rhine is denoted by the river delta looking thing that connects up with the pathway from northwestern Asia. I think the delta on the other side which connects up to the Castle inside the connection to the next rosette on the other side denotes where the Black Sea is on the rosettes map. So this is showing triple connections to Asia. 



I see the plain one drawn in the middle of the one with the birds and rocks (which I consider to be a four corners of the earth geological treatise on sedimentary and metamorphic rock) as an Oresme version again, this time upgraded for magnetic north. Although fluctuations existed at the time, there was a time within the carbon dating where the magnetic north pole was similar to where it is now or in the recent past.

 
As you can see here the angle of the magnetic declination is similarly drawn. The globe drawing from this angle of the earth is what is represented, the habitable part is Europe Africa and Asia to the equator, you can only see to about western India, so the rest of Asia east of there is on the back side. This seems more than coincidental insofar as what I see in quire 13 which is the inclusion of Gujurat only, with an empire ring to show there is more.


If you move it over to the right, that is the habitable part, it ends at India.



I see all of it as the newest information insofar as the Earth is concerned, far before many of these concepts were outlined in history as we know it.