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Voynich Manuscript May Have Originated In the New World
bmearns writes "The Voynich Manuscript is most geeks' favorite 'indecipherable' illuminated manuscript. Its bizarre depictions of strange plants and animals, astrological diagrams, and hordes of tiny naked women bathing in a system of interconnected tubs (which bear an uneasy resemblance to the human digestive system), have inspired numerous essays and doctoral theses', plus one XKCD comic. Now a team of botanists (yes, botanists) may have uncovered an important clue as to its origin and content by identifying several of the plants and animals depicted, and linking them to the Spanish territories in Central America."
translated: d-r-i-n-k-y-o-u-r-x-o-c-o-l-a-t-l
I don't believe this. Botanists, really? And here I thought they were only good for fertilizing my plants. I'll have to stop composting them when I catch them prowling outside.
If we find out they can do other sapient stuff, like make fire and use Facebook, I may start feeling guilty about the whole composting thing.
According to TFA, plant names in Nahuatl (the language of the aztecs) have been identified.
If indeed people who wrote it were writing in Nahuatl, and perhaps in a dialect, they may have needed to make their own script (since there was none around).
So given time, perhaps it can be deciphered...
A series of tubes? With naked women in it?
How could that be anything but the net?
Well, from the linked resource, you can download the whole thing as a PDF. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.
Second image down:
http://www.midorisnyder.com/th...
Man, but medieval porn was tame.... :-)
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Is it available as an Ebook?
Yale has digital scans and you can download the whole thing as a PDF.
I thought it was fairly conclusive that it wasn't a cypher - the symbols simply lack the entropy to represent language. It's just what you'd expect from someone combining a few symbols in nonsense ways as a hoax, and not statistically what cyphertext looks like at all. A bit disappointing, really.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
That's not even remotely plausible. You can't develop a writing system overnight. The first and only thing surviving the invention of a writing system certainly wouldn't be a large codex. Such a work would also not be produced in a vacuum. Writing systems are developed with a future reading community in mind. They record things for posterity and allow for certain sort of communication that either need to be recorded or which are directed at people who are accustomed to writing. It's not plausible that everyone capable of reading the thing just died off without telling anyone, and the book floated itself into the hands of Westerners. Moreover, if you look at the examples of writing systems developed relatively late in history, they are derived from existing writing systems for other languages. You don't just invent such things from scratch, unless it's a personal system, in which case it's really a cipher. Moreover, if the system weren't derived from that of another language, it would have to be inspired to some degree by native iconography. If either case were true, the thing would have been easy to decipher. If people claim that they have identified Nahuatl, that identification is only possible if the system is derived from earlier Nahuatl iconography, which as noted, would have made the interpretation quite easy long since, or it's some sort of phonemic transcription, which is something they could only have learned from another language community with a writing system in so short a space. In the latter case, the system would certainly have been adapted from that system.
Codex Seraphinianus is an encyclopaedia of an imaginary world published in 1981 and written in a similar style to Voynich, but the illustrations are much more surreal.
I would've thought surely NSA could crack it by now....
So you're saying that it's the original Loren ipsum with illustrations?
The original "lorem ipsum" was De finibus by Roman philosopher M. T. Cicero. Lipsum.com has a translation of the famous passage into English.
I got mine (years ago) from Aegean Park Press, P.O. Box 2120, Walnut Creek, CA 94595
It has entropy that has been widely regarded as too high to be gibberish... roughly equivalent to the Latin Vulgate Bible - 1 Kings
On the subject of it being a hoax... The Voynich is a parchment manuscript with many fold-outs, (center cut pieces of parchment were 10 times more expensive than a single leaf), and many expensive inks/dyes. It would have cost a small fortune to create at the time (several years salary for even a skilled bookmaker). If it is a hoax, it was a very well funded one, with no known purpose.
I think that some of your points are valid, but not this bit: "It's not plausible that everyone capable of reading the thing just died off without telling anyone." Given the impact of the Spanish conquest, I would say thay is perfectly plausible, morover it could have happened in a single generation. People don't seem to understand the impact of disease and slavery on the native American populations. Even educated people aren't going to have much time for reading between shifts in the salt mines, and when you're dead from smallpox you don't read much of anything. This thing could have been written for a tiny surviving readership, for posterity.
I'm pretty sure that at least one plant was previously identified as American , and that would be the sunflower. These botanists have taken the idea a lot further though. Their paper is well researched, but I will leave it to the peer review process to ultimately determine its veracity. The identification of Nahuatl words in the script seems a bit of a stretch IMHO.
I've written software specifically to do analysis on this manuscript. There are patterns in the formation of the words that show beyond any doubt that it is not a random collection of letters. There are some very specific rules that would take significant effort to generate the words. For example, Gordon Rugg's theory / technique of generating random words using a grid is absolutely, positively not correct.
I'm certain that "words" in the manuscript do not represent words in the original language. They are merely chunks of ciphered text, which explains the unusually homogeneous word lengths, for one thing. I believe the length of the ciphered words is thus arbitrary and chosen by the person doing the ciphering. That also explains how word length and spacing can be perfectly justified and fit along the varied shape of images (consecutive lines must be different lengths to fit in the available space), yet the rules and patterns of the words still adhere even though the words appear to be of arbitrary length.
Better known as 318230.
That's not even remotely plausible. You can't develop a writing system overnight.
Well not over night, but it doesn't take that long.
A Phonetic equivalence seems quite plausible, and you can whip up a phonetic equivalence chart for your private
use, or the use of a small group in a few hours.
And that might be the natural course of action for someone trying to document knowledge from an oral tradition.
That this book didn't contain the key to the symbols is also not that unusual. Maybe this scribe needed to retain
it for subsequent work.
Western letters drawn with a quill certainly speaks to the possibility of early Spanish origins deliberately trying to
encode information to be sent home such that it couldn't be used by just anyone. There may never have been more
than a dozen who knew the key or the symbology. Maybe they and the key went down with a subsequent ship,
even thought this book or perhaps a few others weren't on that boat.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
It isn't a new theory that the Voynich Manuscript is Nahuatl. Here's a book from 2001 positing that very thing:
Keys for the Voynich Scholar: Necessary Clues for Tahe Decipherment and Reading of the World's Most Mysterious Manuscript which is a Medical Text in Nahuatl Attributable to Francisco Hernández and His Aztec Ticiti Collaborators
The botany side seems to further reinforce this existing theory, as opposed to originating it.
Better known as 318230.
That's not even remotely plausible. You can't develop a writing system overnight.
Sequoyah.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"In 1821 he completed his independent creation of a Cherokee syllabary, making reading and writing in Cherokee possible. This was the only time in recorded history that a member of a non-literate people independently created an effective writing system.[1][4] After seeing its worth, the people of the Cherokee Nation rapidly began to use his syllabary and officially adopted it in 1825. Their literacy rate quickly surpassed that of surrounding European-American settlers.[1]"
So, yes, it's remotely plausible, in the sense that it's absolutely happened (at least) once.
Wait, you're saying that because it has an entropy similar to a book of the bible it's not gibberish?
http://ambushprinting.com/voyn...
Wikipedia says "The book has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438)", yet it contains information about Mexico.
This is possibly way more interesting than the text itself. I can think of a few explanations:
1: Native Americans made books before Columbus arrived
2: Knowledge of America existed in Europe before Columbus's first journey
3: somebody predicted the invention of carbon dating and used an old blank book
None of them appears to be very likely. #2 is supported by the vinland map (roughly same age), but that one too is controversial. What we do know is that vikings settled Greenland and the lack of timber made them to go Newfoundland to cut down trees, apparently regularly until the vanished from Greenland in mid 14th century. It's unknown if they had contact with Europe and Greenland is somewhat too far north to provide knowledge of central American plants.
What if people travelled the world earlier than we normally expect. However for some reason the records are lost or never made. The age of exploration might not have been when the people learned of the existence of an outside world, but the time when they realized they were willing to invest in proper exploration. Later we learned stuff like Columbus was the one to figure out the earth is round, which is made up. The resistance to his journey was that he might not find land before reaching Africa (they didn't know the map), in which case the expedition would have starved to death before arriving. This was too great a risk compared to the price of the expedition.
One interesting part of traveling the world is that a roman grave was examined a few years back in Sicily. Despite being around 1800-1900 years old it contained a man born in China. There is no records of the romans having contact with China. However clearly they must have had some sort of contact as the man arrived in Italy somehow. Maybe our history books are too quick to assume based on preserved records alone. Lack of existence of evidence is not the same as evidence of lack of existence.
I thought it was fairly conclusive that it wasn't a cypher - the symbols simply lack the entropy to represent language. It's just what you'd expect from someone combining a few symbols in nonsense ways as a hoax, and not statistically what cyphertext looks like at all. A bit disappointing, really.
That is wrong. The word entropy is similar to English, and, while the second order entropy is low, it is similar to Polynesian languages.
This is a nice nice review of Voynich studies.
There is no records of the romans having contact with China.
There are such records. The Bible discusses silk, and the Romans loved it. The Silk Road was established about 1800-1900 years ago to supply the Roman empire with Chinese silk. Later the Romans attempted to breed their own silkworms.
As for extensive pre-Colombian contact, I would assume based on the exchange of plants, animals, metals, disease, and technology, that such contact would stick out in the historical record. In my opinion it's far more likely that the carbon dating was inaccurate or that the interpretation of the plants as American than that extensive pre-Colombian exchange existed.
E pluribus unum
there are many minor languages where adjectives and adverbs are prefixes or suffixes, leading to very long words.
Holy Fahrvergnügen, Batman!
Try comparing it our knowledge of remaining centam indigenous languages.
Or, as Eric Idle once put it, "Ham sandwich, bucket and water plastic duralex rubber McFisheries' underwear." (Or was that from the Voynich Manuscript?)
Judging by the technology and the timeline, it can only be the work of Dr. Who.
Googling up the American Botanical Council shows that
1) they're unimportant enough that Wikipedia does not have an article aboutf them or their magazine
2) They are not part of any professional botanical organizations
3) Their facebook page calls them "Your source for reliable herbal medicine information" and shares links for organizatioins whose descriptions include phrases such as "holistic" and "alternative medicine".
4) Their own homepage is clearly aimed at the herbal medicine crowd and even includes a disclaimer that "The information on this site is intended for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for the advice of a qualified healthcare professional". Their magazine is called HerbalGram, for pete's sake.
I dare you to read their own site's news page at http://abc.herbalgram.org/site... and conclude that they are anything but a bunch of alternative medicine crackpots whose belief about the Voynich Manuscript should be taken as seriously as their belief that it's worth giving a presentation at an aromatherapy conference.
It's the Perl of the dark ages.
Table-ized A.I.
Maybe its just me, but when I first saw the thing the first thought that popped into my head was "its an alchemy book" and the more I read about the thing? The more i lean towards that conclusion.
I mean lets take a look at what we DO know from that time period, 1.- Alchemy was practiced by many court magicians at the time, 2.- Alchemy was also dangerous as its link with science made it awful close to heresy in the eyes of many of the clergy, also 3.- Competition was fierce, with many believing that lead into gold was possible the one who found that "method" would become legend, so because of this 4.- Secrecy was SOP for the alchemist, with the man that supposedly made the first air conditioning, Cornelius Drebbel, refusing to write down his method for doing so. Finally 5.- The court alchemist would be one of the few who would have the funds to afford such a book while also having both the knowledge of the natural world AND a reason to keep such knowledge secret.
Given this and without any proof that would lead one to believe it was something else I still lean towards an "alchemist recipe book", written using a cipher now long forgotten. Given what we know about the times and about the level of detail (as well as the cost as you pointed out) I would say it would be the most likely source of the book.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
3: somebody predicted the invention of carbon dating and used an old blank book
You jest. But paper was expensive, scraping or cleaning and reusing paper, even whole books, wasn't uncommon.
[More recent analogy is the BBC recording over classic TV shows to save money on video tape; now madly trying to find copies, even fragments, forgotten in old archives and basements at TV stations around in the world.]
[[Or the current Canadian government's attitude to science libraries.]]
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
There was pre-Colombian contact, although perhaps not extensive. Central American and Alaskan jade show up in Chinese tombs of the 13th and early 14th centuries, and peppers from the Americas have been grown in Szechuan since ancient times.. IIRC, the Piri Reis map mentions Portuguese sailors visiting the territories shown on that map. A mummy in Paracas had TB, and another (in Tumbes?) had syphilis, both European diseases. Of course if you want to go further back the round stone heads of the Olmec show what are very clearly African faces, and black peoples were mentioned by Europeans when they arrived in Central America. Even further back the bottle gourd was cultivated in tropical South America apparently as soon as humans arrived in the area, and it has been an exclusively domesticated (as in, can't reproduce naturally) since at least 9,000 years ago.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Just to pick nits, the goal of alchemy was to produce the Philosopher's Stone, which granted eternal life to imbibers. Turning lead (or other base metals) to gold was simply the test of whether the Philosopher's Stone had been successfully produced or not.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Oh, and I forgot the nicotine and cocaine found in Egyptian mummies, produced by plant which ONLY existed in the Americas.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Roman_relations
4. Carbon dating is very inaccurate for something that recent.
Textbooks in Academia are very often subject to the now normalized purposeful practice of being embiggened with useless redundancy and other such non essential and pointless filler to give them a high "thud factor", id est, a physical quality exhibited by a bound set of printed manuscript as its conversion of potential to kinetic energy -- most commonly expressed as free-fall -- ends abruptly upon colliding with the approximately parallel planar surface of a coffee table, desk or other such platform, such that the humanoid observer will cromulently valuate the manuscript as having a higher value due to this property being associated with other well respected volumes of physical information conveyance.
Yes, this from your 'best and brightest'. Your race is doomed.
So, yes, it's remotely plausible, in the sense that it's absolutely happened (at least) once.
And it might even be the same sort of situation as Sequoyah. A native Aztec (or related dialect) speaker who can't read or write, but knows it is possible because the Spaniards could do it. So he or she creates a phonetic script and writes everything they can into the book.
The methodical nature of the book, with its natural division into somewhat identifiable subjects could indicate it is a knowledge dump perhaps for a posterity that might forget the past. Or maybe it's a crazy person with an opinion from some point in the last 500 years.
The radiocarbon date of 516 +/- 18 yrs bp only dates the time of life of the goats who's skin was used for the parchment. It does not date the construction of the book persé. It was not unusual at that time to use old parchment.
The manuscript contains several depictions that are clearly European: figures in European clothing, European equipment (e.g. a cross-bow) and some pages with Western (not indigenous American) constellations (e.g. Capricorn, the Balance).
So it is very clear, if it indeed shows American plants, that it must be post-Colombian and old parchment was used.
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem delendam esse
You also forgot to mention that those 'discoveries' are subject to serious criticism (e.g. contamination) and are not as yet accepted science.
The romans having silk does not mean they had contact with china. You know there is this mysterious ancient gild called 'traders'.
Traders tended to trade between main trading points, e.g. from china to persia from persia to north africa, from africa to rome, or what ever more plausible route you come up with.
And sometimes what they traded were slaves.
Syphilis is probably an American disease transported to Europe via Columbus. There is no written record of it in Europe before Columbus. Of course it could have been there already but not recognized, but the leading theory is it came from the new world.
1 Corinthians 1:18
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
No contamination source has been found so far. Cocaine is not a popular drug among tomb excavators to my knowledge, and smuggling drugs in cadavers is normally only done with fresh corpses. In order for nicotine to have contaminated the inner tissues the mummies would have to have been stored in a humidor for a couple of years, and one would think the stench would be noticeable. The "serious criticism" so far seems to have its roots in the whole "ancient peoples were primitive semi-savages" bigotry.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Interesting. It was not common in the Americas until the European arrival, when it became one of the great scourges (along with influenza, smallpox and tuberculosis), so I always assumed it was imported. Maybe it just became widespread by the Spanish soldiers' habit of raping everything with two feet.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
About moderating down a comment of mine about the portuguese discovering north america, brasil and australia long before the official dates: "Gasper Corte Real made trips to the north west in 1500 and 1501, visiting Greenland, Newfoundland and Nova Scotia. He disappeared on the last voyage, and his elder brother Miguel set out with an expedition to find him in the following year, but he also disappeared. King Manuel sent out a further expedition to find the two brothers, but without success, and at this point abandoned exploration of the north west. Newfoundland was long considered a Portuguese possession but the Corte Real brothers were forgotten by historians until an archaeologist discovered an inscription on a boulder on the shore of the Taunton River near Cape Cod. The letters seem to read Miguel Corte Real, and it has even been possible to imagine the date: 1511, which would indicate that Corte Real must have survived for at least ten years among the indians." "15th- and early-16th-century manuscripts indicate Portugal had already known about Brazil. Why would the Portuguese know about Brazil but keep it secret? The answer lies in the Portuguese and Spanish race to find India at the end of the 15th century. While the Portuguese concentrated on searching for India by sailing the Atlantic around South Africa, the Spaniards and Christopher Columbus chose to look in the Caribbean. To understand why Portugal reached Brazil and hid it, one must delve into a secret Portuguese plan to keep Spain from beating Portugal to India." " second Portuguese author also described sailing to Brazil before its official discovery. In 1514 the Portuguese mariner Estevam Fróis was sailing along the northern coast of South America when Spaniards captured him. They accused the Portuguese mariner of sailing in Spanish territory, or on the western side of the boundary established by the Treaty of Tordesillas. The Spaniards imprisoned Fróis in Hispaniola. Writing from his prison cell, Fróis claimed that he had been sailing along the Brazilian coast for twenty years. [24] His chronology placed Fróis in Brazil in 1494, the very year when King João II was negotiating the Treaty of Tordesillas with the Spanish monarchs, some six years before the Portuguese officially discovered Brazil" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...