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Voynich Manuscript dated

DevilsAdvocate

Philosopher
DevilsAdvocate
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Nov 18, 2004
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The University of Arizona issued a press release regarding their radiocarbon dating of the Voynich Manuscript (although I'm not sure why they are issuing a press release now when the results were available in 2009).

"University of Arizona researchers have cracked one of the puzzles surrounding what has been called "the world's most mysterious manuscript".

"Using radiocarbon dating, a team...has found the manuscript's parchment pages date back to the early 15th century..."

http://uanews.org/node/37825

Another clue to what I find to be one of the world's most fascinating created objects. That dating (1404-1438) pretty much eliminates the theories about Roger Bacon or John Dee or several others as the author. It also pokes some holes in hoax theories, although it is still possible it is all gibberish.

I wonder whether it would be possible to analyze the pigments to determine where the manuscript was likely created?
 
The cryptographical issues surrounding it are certainly fascinating. If it's a natural language, it's been through one hell of a scrambler algorithm! And all manually. Must have been a monk or similarly stuck-at-lectern-for life person :)
 
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The parchment dates from the 15th century. I have a piece of linen paper that would date to about the late 17th century. It's a flyleaf from a book I rebound for a friend. The "best" way to forge a document from an earlier period is to start with a blank sheet of paper or parchment from that period. Blank sheets filched from period books are a prime source for forgers to use. It's really NOT that hard to get a substrate that would date from that period.


I've considered giving my family a land grant from the 17th century. Wouldn't be hard. I know people who brew up their own inks using period recipes and materials (like harvesting their own oak galls, etc) and making their own pens. Just a matter of finding the correct wording and a couple practice sessions to get the hand down.

Pity I'm basically honest. It's held me back in life.

Beanbag
 
I have seen one mentally ill person write page after page after page of gibberish in normal script (with pretty space craft picture) on the same subject. Nobody could read any of the page..

I wonder if it could be the same here.
 
Beanbag said:
The parchment dates from the 15th century. I have a piece of linen paper that would date to about the late 17th century. It's a flyleaf from a book I rebound for a friend. The "best" way to forge a document from an earlier period is to start with a blank sheet of paper or parchment from that period. Blank sheets filched from period books are a prime source for forgers to use. It's really NOT that hard to get a substrate that would date from that period.


I've considered giving my family a land grant from the 17th century. Wouldn't be hard. I know people who brew up their own inks using period recipes and materials (like harvesting their own oak galls, etc) and making their own pens. Just a matter of finding the correct wording and a couple practice sessions to get the hand down.

Pity I'm basically honest. It's held me back in life.

Beanbag
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If you can find ACTUAL ink from the period, you would have something hard to disprove.
 
If you're dedicated, I think it's possible to fake parchment/papyrus/ink/whatever from any era you like.

Build a reasonably-airtight greenhouse. Flush it, not with regular air, but with CO2 from an coal-furnace exhaust. That's pure 12C, no 14C, and will appear too-old-to-measure in a spectrometer. Grow a supply of plants in this greenhouse; now you've got 14C-depleted plant material (paper, papyrus?). Raise a goat for a few years on a strict diet of 14-C-depleted plants and you've got raw materials for fake "old" parchment.

Oak galls might be a challenge.
 
If it's a clever forgery, someone went to a lot of effort before 1912; anticipating radioactive carbon dating et al.

I do think Aepervius has provide the most reasonable explanation I have ever heard.

It can't be decoded because it's just insane scribbling. :solved2
 
BenBurch said:
If you can find ACTUAL ink from the period, you would have something hard to disprove.
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The ink formulas are known. They're not that hard to reproduce, using natural materials. The tough part in a forgery is avoiding modern equivalents with the same name, or synthesized versions of naturally-occurring materials. Modern chalk, used for white pigments, is totally synthetic in manufacture. Use it in your forgery, and the relative purity and microstructure will give you away. You need to go dig natural chalk and manually prepare it to maintain the fraud. And the names of two or three people I know who have successfully made period inks come immediately to mind, plus I know where to find more.

I just pulled my copy of Theophilus' On Diverse Arts off the shelf. Fifteen seconds perusal gives one formulation for ink using hawthorn, plus page after page of how to manufacture pigments, straight from the horse's mouth from the twelfth century. Nothing bought from the local art supply -- you go out and harvest your materials.

Not to say the Voynich manuscript is faked. I'm just saying that if the ink also dates from the same period as the paper, I'll move closer to convinced it's genuine. Provenance is a puzzle of many pieces to consider.

Beanbag
 
So what is the confidence level of the ink findings?

In 2009, University of Arizona researchers performed C14 dating on the manuscript's vellum, which they assert (with 95% confidence) was made between 1404 and 1438.[3][4] In addition, the McCrone Research Institute in Chicago found that much of the ink was added not long afterwards, confirming that the manuscript is indeed an authentic medieval document.[3]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript
 
Beanbag said:
The parchment dates from the 15th century. I have a piece of linen paper that would date to about the late 17th century. It's a flyleaf from a book I rebound for a friend. The "best" way to forge a document from an earlier period is to start with a blank sheet of paper or parchment from that period. Blank sheets filched from period books are a prime source for forgers to use. It's really NOT that hard to get a substrate that would date from that period.
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I certainly don't know how available that much parchment from the 15th century would be in, say, 1915 when the manuscript was first displayed. However, it seems unlikely that even at that late date that a hoaxer would have gone to the trouble to use period parchment rather than something that simply looked period.

There is additional evidence that the document is much older. An analysis of the inks indicated no modern materials and that the materials were consistent with those used in the 15th and 16th centuries. The drawings are consistent with the 15-16th centuries, including text on similar subject mater from the times, and show no anachronisms.

The known history of the manuscript, along with some documentation, date back to 1639. That history would put the last known history of the document to somewhere before 1580. So if this is a forgery, it is most likely a forgery from the mid 1500s using 100-150 year old parchment.

It is possible that the manuscript was created in the mid 1500s using old parchment, either as a forgery or just a new manuscript using old parchment. While the possibility of a mid 16th century creation cannot be eliminated, it is more likely that the manuscript was created around the same time as the parchment.
 
Beanbag said:
I just pulled my copy of Theophilus' On Diverse Arts off the shelf. Fifteen seconds perusal gives one formulation for ink using hawthorn, plus page after page of how to manufacture pigments, straight from the horse's mouth from the twelfth century. Nothing bought from the local art supply -- you go out and harvest your materials.
Click to expand...

That sounds like a book worth having.
 
Floyt said:
The cryptographical issues surrounding it are certainly fascinating. If it's a natural language, it's been through one hell of a scrambler algorithm! And all manually. Must have been a monk or similarly stuck-at-lectern-for life person :)
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Not necessarily. The Schinner analysis only concluded that it was not a simple replacement cipher of a Euorpean languge. Although the manuscruipt has resisted many attempts to break the cipher, it does not necessarily take an extremely complex algorithim if sufficient elements used in the algorithim are unknown. A large set of secrect codes used with a fairly simple algorithim can be more effective that a very complex algorithim. It would take some time to create the large set of secret codes, but for a manuscript of this size, that would seem reasonable.
 
Aepervius said:
I have seen one mentally ill person write page after page after page of gibberish in normal script (with pretty space craft picture) on the same subject. Nobody could read any of the page..

I wonder if it could be the same here.
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This hypothesis faces several challenges.

1. The incoherent ramblings of madmen don’t often find their way into prestigious libraries where they are preserved for centuries. There are, of course, exceptions to this rule.

2. The materials used to create the manuscript were not cheap. They were not the finest materials available (parchment instead of vellum), but it would have cost quite a bit to produce the manuscript. If the author was mad, he was also wealthy or supported by someone with a good deal of wealth.

3. The illustrations, especially the astronomical/astrological illustrations, are consistent with scholarly works of the time. These are not “pretty space craft” pictures from pure imagination. The author was certainly familiar with similar scholarly texts.

If it is the work of a madman, it is a madman with some significant scholarly knowledge and some wealth and prestige and time. To the extent that it is indistinguishable from the work that would be created by a con man or a real scholar.

The author had the time and money to create the manuscript and was clearly either creating a scholarly manuscript or attempting to look like he was doing so. So whether he was mad or not becomes somewhat irrelevant. ;)
 
Floyt said:
That sounds like a book worth having.
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Dover edition, translated by John G. Hawthorne and Cyril Stanley Smith.
ISBN 0-486-23784-2

The price marked on my copy is $12.95 USD, though this is a few (read that "a lot") years old.

Beanbag
 
Beanbag said:
The parchment dates from the 15th century. I have a piece of linen paper that would date to about the late 17th century. It's a flyleaf from a book I rebound for a friend. The "best" way to forge a document from an earlier period is to start with a blank sheet of paper or parchment from that period. Blank sheets filched from period books are a prime source for forgers to use. It's really NOT that hard to get a substrate that would date from that period.


I've considered giving my family a land grant from the 17th century. Wouldn't be hard. I know people who brew up their own inks using period recipes and materials (like harvesting their own oak galls, etc) and making their own pens. Just a matter of finding the correct wording and a couple practice sessions to get the hand down.

Pity I'm basically honest. It's held me back in life.

Beanbag
Click to expand...
.
The "Baron of Arizona" did that... found an old parchment, scraped off the text, making it a palimpsest and wrote out a deed for the area to an ancestor... if memory serves... saw the movie tons of decades ago.
.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Reavis
.
Vincent Price played Reavis in the movie. (1950)
 
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I will concede that the sheer size of the Voynich manuscript (240 pages) makes it VERY unlikely that it was pieced together from individual leaves taken from various books. Let's say the page that was tested dates from the 15th century. I have no detailed information about where the radiocarbon dating sample was taken, either a single sample from one page, or several samples taken from various pages distributed through the manuscript.

On the surface, the information provided in the wikipedia article would make me believe the date ascribed to the manuscript is reasonably accurate to within the limitations posed by the dating method(s). Exactly WHAT the book's intended use is, well, that's another matter. "Secret" societies and forbidden knowledge have always existed, and remember that in the period when this book was written, the Catholic church could have you burned if you even dared question whether Jesus owned his own clothes. Certainly incentive to keep any possibly heretical beliefs well-hidden and indescipherable.

There's no shortage of ancient texts that can't be read. Rongorongo comes to mind immediately. Out of the countless texts produced by man over the generations, it shouldn't come as a surprise that some of them can't be read.

Beanbag
 
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This can be related to the thread on DVDs.
Their limited life time, as with most magnetic media means that our precious memories will be unreadable in the near future.
Only real ink on real paper seems to last.
Many of my notes from the past done on line printers have faded beyond readability.
 
Old parchment and canvas is a standard technique in the art forgery world. There are whole channels of supply for scraped old canvases.

Same with paint and ink. Forgers have gotten pretty clever but so have sleuths looking for the decay byproducts of old inks and paints, i.e. simply using an old recipe is not good enough.
 
I Ratant said:
Many of my notes from the past done on line printers have faded beyond readability.
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Funny. Having pretty much been derived from old typewriter technology, I would have thought stuff done on a saturated-cloth ribbon impact technology would have survived better. After all, the ink doesn't have any great chemical demands placed on it like inkjet printers do. All it has to do is be transferred from the ribbon to the paper when smacked.

Now, some of my old manuscripts from my dot-matrix printer tractor-feed paper days are looking a little peculiar, but I suspect that's from the acid paper they are printed on. Still readable, though.

Beanbag
 
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