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Scribes and authorship of the text
- Scribes and authorship of the text
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RE: Scribes and authorship of the text
dashstofsk > 25-08-2025, 08:12 AM
(24-08-2025, 06:57 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The various parts of the VMs may have been done by different people and potentially at different times over a couple of decades.
You might be right. The manuscript might not have been written in one go. Each section could have been a separate piece of work with the sections later being bound into one volume. Bound together for the convenience of having all works in the unknown writing in one manuscript.
Writing the sections at different times might also explain some of the differences in the language. In the gaps of time between the sections the authors could have lost some fluency in the use of the 'method'. In particular the language in the Bio B2 pages ( most of quire 13 ) suggests they could have been written at a different time. The language there seems to show less variability than in the rest of the manuscript. There is a high frequency of just a few words. 8 words make up 20% of the total. With ol coming top and daiin aiin not in this list. But in the Herbal B2 pages 20% of the total is made up of 12 words, with ol now not in this list and daiin aiin now being top. Yet this is odd since both sets of pages are in hand 2, supposedly written by the same person, and marked as being language B. It suggests the two sets of pages could have been written at different times, with some loss of 'method' in between. -
RE: Scribes and authorship of the text
quimqu > 25-08-2025, 08:40 AM
(25-08-2025, 08:12 AM)dashstofsk Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.
(24-08-2025, 06:57 PM)R. Sale Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The various parts of the VMs may have been done by different people and potentially at different times over a couple of decades.
You might be right. The manuscript might not have been written in one go. Each section could have been a separate piece of work with the sections later being bound into one volume. Bound together for the convenience of having all works in the unknown writing in one manuscript.
Writing the sections at different times might also explain some of the differences in the language. In the gaps of time between the sections the authors could have lost some fluency in the use of the 'method'. In particular the language in the Bio B2 pages ( most of quire 13 ) suggests they could have been written at a different time. The language there seems to show less variability than in the rest of the manuscript. There is a high frequency of just a few words. 8 words make up 20% of the total. With ol coming top and daiin aiin not in this list. But in the Herbal B2 pages 20% of the total is made up of 12 words, with ol now not in this list and daiin aiin now being top. Yet this is odd since both sets of pages are in hand 2, supposedly written by the same person, and marked as being language B. It suggests the two sets of pages could have been written at different times, with some loss of 'method' in between.
You raise a very interesting point.
In fact, if we look at the results of my topic–hand and topic–language analyses (You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. and You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.), we ""could"" (with many quotation marks) even reach the conclusion that the scribes themselves were divided by topic. In other words, each scribe might have been more of a specialist in certain “topics” of the manuscript.
This would fit the idea that the manuscript was not produced in one go but rather compiled from different pieces of work, possibly created at different times. If so, it could explain why topic distributions correlate more strongly with scribal hands than with Currier languages in my results.
Of course, this doesn’t prove the scribes consciously worked by thematic specialization, but the statistical correlation does suggest that some structural separation exists beyond pure chance. Whether that reflects real “expertise” in topics, different time periods of writing, or even different stages of mastering the underlying method, remains open to interpretation. -
RE: Scribes and authorship of the text
dashstofsk > 25-08-2025, 12:06 PM
(25-08-2025, 08:40 AM)quimqu Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.it could explain why topic distributions correlate more strongly with scribal hands
Perhaps it would help to count the number of words ( paragraph words only, no labels, no radial or circular text ) by topic, hand and language.
In particular all biological page text is in hand 2, language B. 90% of the stars page text is in hand 3, language B. These two make up 50% of the whole.
I have always found it useful to restrict my analysis to just the following works:
Bio_B2 6549
Herbal_A1 8086
Herbal_B2 2369
Pharma_A1 2490
Stars_A3 781
Stars_B3 11319
Text_B2 1830
With relatively few words outside of these works it might be difficult to get proper correlations between topic and hand and language.