Proposed Manuscript Chronology

[npcompl33t]

It would be interesting to test how both known, meaningful texts and samples of iteratively generated gibberish, à la Timm and Schinner (2020), behave when run through this pipeline. Do all the texts exhibit "Guttman horseshoes" that correlate to the reading order? Or does it appear in one form of text more often than another? Among the meaningful texts, which texts are most Voynich-like?

If their hypothesis could be executed over time in the stages I mentioned above, with gradual changes accumulating, it would produce this same shape. Basically this means the text was likely not created all at the same time. 

There were different spans, that must have had gradual shifts that collectively evolved over time. In the Flinders Petrie example, Flinders categorized pottery into 9 classes containing several hundred types. If you think about how one style, like midcentury modern, turns into the next style,  at any given point in time style is generally consistent. All the mid-century modern pots follow the same style, but gradually they shift, until eventually they are an entirely different style. They don't wake up one day and say: lets all just start this new midcentury modern style -- it gradually and continuously shifts to that.  If you think of these charts as showing differences in Egyptian pot styles, it originally showed A Guttman horseshoe, and by applying MDS, it was possible to recover the exact path that traced gradual evolving pot style over time, through Flinders measurements. This is the kind of thing that causes a Guttman Horeshoe.

This doesn't specify an intended reading order. If certain midcentury modern pieces are meant to all be displayed in a certain sequence, you would only be able to recover it if each piece was created sufficiently far enough apart in time that the style has changed between when they are made, and they were created in the same order as the intended sequence.

So this means it is probably not a cypher of any kind. It is something that must have gradually morphed and accumulated changes. It doesn't really say anything about the content, as long as structurally the mechanism has the ability to accumulate changes continuously. 

That seems like it could be consistent with self-citation, if each bifolio gradually changes, and they keep copying from the most recent few. I think looking at the portions where multiple scribes appear to have been working at the same time, as well as the gaps between sections, and trying to understand the exact nature of the changes that occur to either prove or disprove that. That is a good follow-up to this.

It seems like the Herbal A section shows gradual change over a much larger span, suggesting it took much longer to create. Bio on the other hand, appears to have been created in a much shorter time span. 

My read is LFD hand 1 spends quite a while writing Herbal, then suddenly inlists a few others and they crank out the last few sections in a smaller amount of time than to create all of herbal A. The cosmo section, particularly the You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. wheel, appears before the other people start working . This is more of just an offhand theory, but maybe this means it was some type of mechanism LFD hand 1 used to help teach the other scribes?