(19-11-2024, 03:27 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.And for those who like to speculate, it is often the linchpin of their theory. If you hope to convince people of your views, this (and by extension Q13) is probably the hardest place to do so.
I have not chosen this page as it being the simplest page to approach, but rather I first approached it as what I thought the best page to break open the manuscript that I could see. It is a special page, much larger than the rest. Most of the other foldout pages didn't really need to be foldout pages e.g. the Astrology pages they would have been fine with each zodiac circle being on a separate page. This had to be a large foldout as it is one contiguous drawing. It could not have been split over several separate pages nearly as easily without weakening the meaning of the document. One could argue for that reason that in the mind of the author it may have been the most important page and so the most unique and original. That is of course speculation.
Without this page I doubt I would have got interested in the Voynich. Obviously, the unreadable script interested me, but the other pages much less so.
My first impression of the page is that it looked like a map out of fantasy fiction like a map of Mordor or somewhere out of Lord of the Rings not a real place. The "castle" particularly interested me, especially after having heard about the distinctive Ghibelline merlons. I found the idea that it was a drawing of real castle rather than a fantasy castle much more persuasive. And if it was a drawing of real castle then that castle had a precise geographical location. And if we knew what that precise geographical location was then it would give us some bearing on the broad geographical region from which the manuscript came. I spent some time trying to work out where I thought it was a map of with no satisfactory conclusion until I looked at Nick Pelling's Milan theory.
There appeared to be bodies of water illustrated all over the page making me think they we were dealing with islands and some kind of archipelago as I interpreted those bodies of water as being sea. I speculated this could be a map of Genoese or Venetian islands/colonies in the Eastern Mediterranean. However I could not see anything that satisfactorily fit. It fact it seemed that there was so much sea on the page that nowhere would fit. I felt like I was about to give up.
I doubted Nick Pelling's theory as Milan is far inland and yet large bodies of water appear to be illustrated nearby. However when I tried to disprove Nick's Milan theory, I actually changed my mind and came to the conclusion that the theory fit rather well, although I came with some time to disagree with his Venice identification. I took the kernel of his theory and developed it a lot, rightly or wrongly. I found that it resolved the problem I was having with identifying bodies of water as it pointed to them being mostly alpine lakes and rivers and not sea. The more I explored this alpine lake theory the more it seemed to fit.
So I didn't pick the Rosettes folio with the thought that this would be an easy page to crack. Rather just as it seemed to be an interesting starting point, but more importantly one which might provide a clue to the manuscript as locating in geographical place in addition to the carbon dating locating it in time. I also hoped that locating it geographically might possibly help point towards who the author was, though I had much less confidence in that possibility at the start.
I didn't start by thinking about a theory of the Voynich manuscript and then decided I would start with the Rosettes. My theory comes out of the page.
The crucial thing which particularly leads me to have some confidence in this theory is that it led me to an identification of author and only significantly later thorough and meticulous research that I have done has shown a very close connection from that individual to the most advanced cryptography of the time. This kind of connection seems to be very unlikely on the face of it and not something that I had prior knowledge of. It may be a big coincidence, but it seems to fit neatly.