VMs: RE: VMS numbering systems hypotheses...

["GC" <glenclaston@xxxxxxxxx>]

Nick, thanks for the response.  Very good things to consider here.

> May I ask what you consider the weakness to be?

My primary consideration is the use of "17" in various images.
This particular artifact could go a long way in explaining the
astrological thinking of the author.  This number was very
prominent in astrological teachings on the continent during the
1500's, primarily among those schooled in Padua, Italy at the
time, though it seems to have migrated to Germany and beyond by
1560 (though not to England for some reason).  Its roots appear to
be cabalistic.  There are other numbers of great interest, but
being positive of these requires that I do my absolute best to
discern the "unit" of text, as these numbers would fluxuate and be
rendered meaningless with errors.  This is primarily why I've
stayed with the less error-prone herbal section, as the characters
are generally much more readable and less ambiguous than the later
sections.

> I think that the function of the VMS is to encode a
> library of older,
> rarer, external texts "as-is"... and those texts would
> probably have
> represented numbers as Roman numerals. To maintain that
> "as-is"-ness, a way
> would therefore need to be devised to *hide* those
> Roman numerals,
> especially given that I also believe that this was in
> pre-polyalphabetic times.

Pre-polyalphabetic times would put it somewhere before 1450 IMHO.
I was once trying to track the usage of a Knight's Tour cipher,
and up until my investigation all the literature seemed to be
silent on this type of steganography.  The only example I could
find was from 1760, but then I discovered one from 1623, and
further reading uncovered its usage in Arabic around the 11th
century!  Interestingly enough, the 11th century version used two
half tours, the 17th century version used a full closed tour, and
the 18th century version used two reversed closed tours and a
Vigenere tableau, demonstrating a clear effort to add
sophistication to this peculiar and very difficult steganographic
cipher.

The same might be said to be true of the polyalphabetic ciphers.
While the first cipher wheel was described around 1450, it was
very common only to give the minimum function of something as
secret as a cipher and let the "masters" teach worthy "initiates"
the more secret functions.  As was made clear by Trithemius, the
Cabalistic Right Table and Averse Table of Commutations are the
basis for modern polyalphabetics, and they existed for centuries
before the first "wheel" was made public.  Much of Vigenere's book
deals with mathematical matters of the Cabala, indicating that he
too was aware of these uses, and even developed a table based on
one of the variant tables of the Cabala.  The fact is that many of
the modern versions of this type of cipher already existed in the
various cabalistic tables long before they were "discovered" by
western enthusiasts.  To rule out a more sophisticated form of
cipher based solely on the date of its first publication is to
underestimate the sophistication of the medieval mind, and to
misunderstand how deeply educated men sought to hide their
discoveries from the prying eyes of the church and other
"unworthy" individuals.

And while the English are without a doubt the worst cooks in the
world, from around 1518 to about 1700 they were the leaders in
cipher sophistication and secrecy, primarily because of the
growing desire to exchange new information and keep it from the
Catholic Church, should the leadership change for the worse, which
it often did.  The one art form the English excelled in  far
beyond any other nation was of course Steganography.  Necessity as
they say, is the mother of invention.

It is my belief that as more enthusiasts begin to understand that
such dating is not an accurate indicator, more people will be
looking for these types of cipher in older manuscripts, and more
examples will begin to emerge.  I doubt the earlier ciphers will
be very sophisticated as the simpler forms were considered secure,
but who knows, maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised.

GC