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Voynich Manuscript dated

Aliens don't use pens, they use computers and ticker tapes!
 
Beanbag said:
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.
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Rongorongo suffers from the fatal problem with unknown writing -- there are too few examples. For codebreakers, quantity is golden.

However, the Voynich is only one example of its style, and while longer than all known rongorongo, and apparently internally consistent, that's not much help if the intention was to be deliberately obscure, or if there was no serious purpose in the first place.

My personal opinion is that it is the scribblings of a medieval scholar at play. He invented a world and had fun describing it and filling it with creatures and fanciful plants not unlike what he knew. Did he intend to deceive or just titillate? Maybe it was just a notebook of scribbles with no other motive. How could he have seen what the future would do to his creation? Maybe the future is over-analyzing it. Cf. Motel of the Mysteries.

This is entirely consistent with the known data. Think...wouldn't a 15th Century version of The Onion look a lot like this?
 
Sherman Bay said:
My personal opinion is that it is the scribblings of a medieval scholar at play. He invented a world and had fun describing it and filling it with creatures and fanciful plants not unlike what he knew.
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Maybe it's a companion piece to other fictional works that are now lost or awaiting discovery. It might make perfect sense in context. Consider the Klingons. Their culture, biology, history, and technology are well documented, including a constructed language. If you encountered any of it in isolation, it would be mystifying.
 
Fascinating subject.

Finding and forging one piece of parchment is one thing, but creating an entire book out of whole cloth is quite another. I would think it highly unlikely to come across a piece like this and consider it a simple forgery. They should be able to tell if the separate pages come from different sources even if they're in the same ballpark of ages right?

And washing and repainting would leave telltale signs I'm sure would be noticed too.

A small note of confusion for me: some have said this is on parchment, some say vellum. These are two distinct things yes? Which is it?
 
There's always a game of one-upsmanship between forgers and authenticators. When they started using nuclear florescence to determine the age of ceramics, the forgers took their works to dental offices and irradiated them with the X-ray machines so they would have a suitable radiation exposure to get an "ancient" result. Or they would embed a genuine shard in a not-so-conspicuous place like the bottom of a foot, knowing that was where the authenticators were most likely to take a sample for analysis.

Short of some real "clanger" mistake (like a Made in India sticker on the bottom of a Grecian urn), a lot of times authentication comes down to a "expert A says this, but expert B says otherwise" situation. Authentication is a fuzzy science at best, short of some really obvious mistake.

And even then, the science doesn't always win out. A lady had a painting purported to be by Jackson Pollack, but all the art experts claimed otherwise. It just "didn't look right." Then, an outside authority found a fingerprint in the painting, and matched it to another fingerprint located in Pollack's studio. Result? The "experts" still hold their original opinions. Seems too many reputations were on the line.

Beanbag
 
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BenBurch said:
Beanbag,

Other than formulas there are ways to tell the age of any ink involving carbon.

-Ben
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Not all black inks use carbon. The oak gall based inks use iron. However, this leads to a different issue, as the iron is corrosive and will etch the substrate. I understand there are "cookbook" techniques for faking the necessary damage in a forgery.

Beanbag
 
nvidiot said:
And washing and repainting would leave telltale signs I'm sure would be noticed too.
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Old manuscripts were frequently recycled and re-used in period. A scribe would scrape the text off the old parchment and use the cleaned surface for their own work. In fact, that's the only way we know certain works, by raising the original text underneath a later work either by chemical means or through photographic means like IR or UV imaging.

Parchment was expensive, and good-quality parchment is difficult to make. I can speak with a certain amount of authority because I dated a girl who actually made her own parchment. It was a several-week-long process, what with soaking the uncured hide, liming, removing the hair, stretching, and scraping the surface. The odor alone would make most people nauseous (you had to be real careful which container you opened in her refrigerator). It is also highly craftsmanship dependent to get a good, smooth surface. It was a skill you had to learn. Compared to parchment, paper is relatively easy to manufacture once you have the necessary equipment on hand.

Beanbag
 
Beanbag said:
There's always a game of one-upsmanship between forgers and authenticators. When they started using nuclear florescence to determine the age of ceramics, the forgers took their works to dental offices and irradiated them with the X-ray machines so they would have a suitable radiation exposure to get an "ancient" result. Or they would embed a genuine shard in a not-so-conspicuous place like the bottom of a foot, knowing that was where the authenticators were most likely to take a sample for analysis.

Short of some real "clanger" mistake (like a Made in India sticker on the bottom of a Grecian urn), a lot of times authentication comes down to a "expert A says this, but expert B says otherwise" situation. Authentication is a fuzzy science at best, short of some really obvious mistake.

And even then, the science doesn't always win out. A lady had a painting purported to be by Jackson Pollack, but all the art experts claimed otherwise. It just "didn't look right." Then, an outside authority found a fingerprint in the painting, and matched it to another fingerprint located in Pollack's studio. Result? The "experts" still hold their original opinions. Seems too many reputations were on the line.

Beanbag
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But how does this apply to this case? A forgery from 1912, or late 19th century, or mid 16th century would only try to one-up the technology of the time?

I think one of the fascinating things about the Voynich Manuscript is that it really looked like it was probably a 19th century hoax, but as science advances and more examinations and tests are done, the evidence keeps pointing to a authentic early 15th century work.
 
Beanbag said:
Old manuscripts were frequently recycled and re-used in period. A scribe would scrape the text off the old parchment and use the cleaned surface for their own work.
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Previous examinations of the parchment have determined that the parchment was not previously written on and then scraped. Idon't knowthe details, but it I think it was something based on the stretching and binding of the parchment tha proved that it could not have been a book that was scraped and re-written.
 
Beanbag said:
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.
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The link in my OP describes the process. Samples were taken from four pages.

He cut four samples from four pages, each measuring about 1 by 6 millimeters (roughly 1/32 by 1/4 inch) and brought them back to the laboratory in Tucson
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Beanbag said:
Not all black inks use carbon. The oak gall based inks use iron. However, this leads to a different issue, as the iron is corrosive and will etch the substrate. I understand there are "cookbook" techniques for faking the necessary damage in a forgery.

Beanbag
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Radiiocarbon dating of the inks is also addressed in the link in the OP.
 
Sherman Bay said:
My personal opinion is that it is the scribblings of a medieval scholar at play. He invented a world and had fun describing it and filling it with creatures and fanciful plants not unlike what he knew. Did he intend to deceive or just titillate? Maybe it was just a notebook of scribbles with no other motive. How could he have seen what the future would do to his creation? Maybe the future is over-analyzing it. Cf. Motel of the Mysteries.

This is entirely consistent with the known data. Think...wouldn't a 15th Century version of The Onion look a lot like this?
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There is nothing from the illustrations, or anything else, that would indicate that the work is a satire or a work of fiction. The composition looks like what we would equate to a Genreal Science textbook.
 
My theories are:

1. It is a mid-to-late 16th century hoax to get a bunch of money. The history of the manuscript indicates it was purchased from someone in 1586 for a whole bunch of money. The motivation for a hoax was there. Some people had the knowledge to create an effective hoax at the time. What would make this somewhat difficult to believe is that the images appear to place the document at 100-150 years before then and this is confirmed by the radiocarbon dating. The size and complexity of the manuscript also suggest that someone was doing something more than a simple hoax to get some quick cash. If it is a hoax, it is a good one, but not impossible.

2. It is the work of a 15th century con man. He convinced someone he was a brilliant scholar with secret knowledge and would write it all down in exchange for patronage (good pay and benefits). So he just made stuff up and wrote gibberish to look like other scientific manuscripts he had seen.

3. It is the work of a 15th century scientist and he text is in a secret language or code that can be translated. The big problem here is that the illustrations of the plants don’t resemble known plants. The simple fact that the text has not yet been translated also pushes toward the decision that the text may be gibberish.

In my cursory reviews of the text, I have found that certain series of glyphs tend to appears above and below each other, which would be uncommon in natural language, but perhaps more common in a case where someone was just making it up as they went along. I haven’t done any real analysis, but that assessment gives me an feeling that the text is phony. Of course I thought the manuscript was probably a late 19th phony, and evidence keeps proving that wrong.
 
Considering I've only known of the existence for a very short time my opinion on the subject matters little. But a scientific treatise in code to avoid wide distribution amongst those who would compete with the writer seems good to me.

Don't forget that a lot of nonsense was included in "science" at the time. These descriptions of plants that don't exist could simply be another case of ye olde unicorn.
 
DevilsAdvocate said:
2. It is the work of a 15th century con man. He convinced someone he was a brilliant scholar with secret knowledge and would write it all down in exchange for patronage (good pay and benefits). So he just made stuff up and wrote gibberish to look like other scientific manuscripts he had seen.
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That's the way I am leaning. Maybe he wanted to pass as a pilgrim or a merchant, with secret knowledge of a distant land with vast riches in gold. He goes around trying to find "investors" for an "expedition". Some of his marks are too smart for him, and start asking for information about the distant land. He needs to whet their interest but not give himself away---and any sort of legible document would be risky. (If the scammer is making it up, it might contain some error of fact that catches the eye of someone who knows what they're talking about. He can't crib from an existing travelogue, since the conceit is that he's the only European who has been to this place.) So he makes up a script, comes up with a semi-random process for generating long strings of it, cobbles together some pictures of "exotic plants", etc. And he can confidently walk up to learned men and say "Here is a book I brought back from Outer Gongolia in my own hands."

ETA: The hardest part to believe is the 'generate long strings of random script', since the manuscript *does* have all of these vaguely-language-like properties, so it wasn't generated from straight encipherment of another text; nor by dice rolls; nor, presumably, by automatic writing. But, from the perspective of the forger, why not? Why would you generate it in some complex way when (given the low crypto/stats sophistication of the people you're trying to fool) an easy way would have been fine?
 
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