Back to basics - or musings of an old bore

[Adam McLean <alchemy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

It seems to me that many of the skilled cryptographers on
this group have puzzled and worked over the Voynich now 
for many years and yet seem no nearer to cracking the code.

It also seems unlikely to me that someone in the 16th 
century could devise a code that could defeat 21st
century methods.

But how else can we proceed ?

I know I must sound like an old bore, always coming
back to the same theme, but it seems to me that we
have not yet exhausted an approach based on seeing
the context of the manuscript - and relating it to other
similar material.  There may not be a Rosetta stone
for the Voynich, but there may be some manuscripts 
out there that might help us see the context of the Voynich. 
Recently Dana Scott seems to have spent many hours
surfing the net looking for images and parallels in 
manuscripts. A valient effort, however, I suspect only
0.01 % or less of medieval manuscript material has 
been scanned and placed on web sites. We really
need some primary research done in libraries and
special collections of such material, or to tap the 
knowledge of someone who has studied such material
in depth.

>From my experience looking at manuscripts I can 
see three things that we should follow up 
further, avenues that to me appear not yet to be 
exhausted.

1. The 'herbal section' appears very similar to early
manuscripts of Dioscorides.  A while ago I posted 
images of the version in Vienna which is 6th Century. It
would be good if someone could survey all the Dioscorides 
manuscripts.

2. A number of manuscripts have been identified
which parallel the imagery in the astronomical section.
Some of these appear to be from a quite early period.
Thus the greek manuscript  Vat.Gr. 1291 of Ptolemy's 
Tetrabiblos in the Vatican is from the 9th century. 
It has already been pointed out that the  women in 
the first ring seem similar to that on one of the  
Voynich 'astrological/astronomical'  folios. I
have posted an image from this manuscript onto
one of my web sites:

http://www.alchemy.dial.pipex.com/tetrabiblos.jpg

The women figures in the Vatican manuscript are 
coloured. Are they coloured on the similar
Voynich drawing ?

3. The Voynich script itself. No other example of 
this has yet been found, though some characters
seem very familiar. On Stolfi's site he shows some
examples of abbreviated Latin which have some 
elements in common. There are many many 
medieval manuscripts using abbreviated Latin and 
these are difficult to read, but anyone familiar with 
Latin can quite quickly read some words and then
the whole text rapidly becomes accessible. So it
is not merely written in abbreviated Latin. 


Now in view of the fact that in 1. and 2. we can 
identify parallels with early greek manuscripts, is
it not possible that the Voynich characters may
be related to some form of abbreviated late dark age
or early medieval greek. Have anyone looked 
at this possibility ?  Or gathered some examples 
of abbreviated greek? The Vatican manuscript 
I mentioned above has the text around the
images in an abbreviated greek.  Of course it would 
be unlikely that the Voynich Ms was written simply
in an abbreviated greek transposed into its own
characters, but if it's character set related in some 
way to a particular version of abbreviated greek, 
it might give us some handle on how the text was 
coded. I don't read greek so cannot help here, 
but has anyone with a  medieval greek background 
looked at the manuscript ?

Adam McLean

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