Proposed Manuscript Chronology

[npcompl33t]

I have tested a lot of historical comparanda, and while the above method can recover their reading order fairly well, virtually none of them  have guttman horseshoes. 

Could scribal shifts cause a horse-shoe?

Here is what the Black Book of Basingwerk looks like. This has a well known orthographic shift in it, the scribe is replaced half-way through, and the new scribe writes in a much more modern style -- an extremely good parallel to test the scribes impact. lets look at the MDS. Very obviously not a horseshoe, so the voynich horseshoe does not seem to be simply due to an abrupt shift in scribes.

   


 

What could cause a legitimate horse-shoe in text?

I did find an actual Guttman Horseshoe, in Napiers casebooks. These are astronomical/medical logbook, that covered 37 years. Across the entire set of casebooks, there is no arch. But for the first few years he was recording, he did not have a consistent formula for how he recorded cases. For example:

• yeres old becomes a bare y or y. around 1600; 
  
• the Latin weekday marker die before 
  
• the planet sign is universal in 1597–1601 and gone by 1603; 
  
• the hourmarker is h or h. in 1597–1599, hor. takes over in 1600–1604, and h. wins out again from about 1605 and stays for thirty years.
  

After about 1603, his method stabilizes and no longer changes. It turns out, the data before 1603, has a horseshoe shape, and tracing the path recovers the chronology of the reports. After 1603, once his method stabilizes, the horseshoe collapses and nothing can recover the chronology.

So this is showing exactly the theory -- small random walk-esque drift along a time axis, exactly like the egyptian pottery style example. Once the style is locked, the random drift ceases and the horseshoe vanishes.  

   



How long of a time frame does the sequence represent?

I also calculated an expected time for the entire manuscript sequence, for both the alternate and proposed route. i did this by looking at the densest region, where pages were produced the fastest, and assuming the time between those points represents the minimum time production time. Then assuming a scribe can write 25 lines per hour, 2 hours for herbal, 4 hours for a zodiac, 3 for a bio page. These are rough estimates based on some studies i could find.

These produce estimates between 200 days and 240 days for the entire manuscript sequence across all scribes. This is just a rough estimate that could probably be better refined.