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I have only copied the emails found in this
mailing-list after my email dated 07/14/2003
They will able to be useful during your next
mini-conference
Francois Almaleh
DENNIS
When? 1450-1500
Where? Northern Italy Who? An unknown subculture What? An encyclopedic work on a system of herbal medicine, derived somewhat from western European folk and esoteric thought, but with many original, shamanistic elements. Written in some Romance dialect, in a verbose word game-like cipher. LARRY ROUX
When? Late 1500s
Where? England Who? ? What? Ask me last year and I would have guessed it is in Latin. Now I am leaning towards a copy of pages from existing sources. Perhaps with personal ideas interjected. A constructed language containing elements of Latin, French and Italian. Not meant to be a cipher, but more a thought experiment. Of course, if I were to answer this tomorrow I might give another answer. I try not to let my guesses lead me down a path, but let the manuscript take me there... MATTHEW PLATTS
> When? 1450-1500
Agreed
> Where? Northern Italy Agreed > Who? An unknown subculture > What? An encyclopedic work on a system of herbal medicine, derived somewhat from western European folk and esoteric thought, but with many original, shamanistic elements. Written in some Romance dialect, in a verbose word game-like cipher. My own belief is that is was written by a single natural philosopher, whose work in biology (ie dissections) was considered taboo at the time, and so had to be done in secret. Hence the figurative representations of bodily functions, with the naked nymphs and the pipes.. I believe that it has some deliberate redundancy (like the 'King Tut' game) and that the glyphs are either alphabetical or phonetical - there are too few for a pictographic language... I don't think there is any special significance to the gallows characters. More so, that requiring it to be folded wouldn't make sense, partly because the ink would crack when the vellum was folded, or there would be otherwise a sure indication of folding by the original authors... who would, I am sure, have decoded it at one point or another... ROBERT ANTONY HICKS
When - 1600(ish)
Where - Germany Who - Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz What - A collation of alchemical lore written in a nomenclature And - Translation will require a 'Rosetta Stone' PK#01 (name ?)
When: between 1500 and 1600
Where: Europe, probably in the area between Rome, Avignon, Munich and Prague Who: An unknown and unknowable author What: A personal fascination / craziness or A fake document meant to impress credulous clients (one of Nick's hypothesies) And: Most probably there is no translation since both text and pictures are gibberish, but it is quite possible to make a good "profile" of the author by: - studying the conscious / unconscious pointers that he has left for us (just like in criminal profiling) - searching for historical parallels for this kind of publication - doing more research into related historical areas like crypto, herbals etc. That's why I just keep on reading related books and don't try to attack the VMS directly. I don't have the feeling the solution will come from there. I've given up on decryption. But I believe in studying the pages in minute detail, looking for possible clues and pointers. Then there is the slight chance that another page in Voynichese will be found in some remote library and we may be able to pinpoint the author more precisely. The horrible thought is that such a page may have been discovered already but not recognized as such. JEFF HALEY
When? Uncertain.
Where? I believe England. Who? Unknown. What? A very straight forward looking cipher with (factorial (x squared)) * x number of word/phrase pattern combinations. Where x = number of characters in cipher alphabet. Which makes is slightly difficult to crack. PETER RIIS
When: between 1500 and 1600
Where: Europe, probably in the area between Rome,Avignon, Munich and Prague Who: An unknown and unknowable author What: A personal fascination / craziness or A fake document meant to impress credulous clients (one of Nick's hypotheses) My fairly uninformed opinion would be along the same lines. I would lean more towards the VMs being the production of a schizophrenic rather than it being part of a scheme to deceive--the intricacy of the VMs seems to go far beyond what would be necessary just to fool a buyer. That kind of mad intricacy, though, is sometimes seen in artifacts produced by schizophrenics. The bizarrerie of the balneological illustrations and even a certain menacing something in the botanical drawings leads me to think that all was not well mentally with the artist--but obviously that's a totally subjective impression. It does seem to me, though, that direct cryptological attack would be one of the less promising lines of inquiry. But then again, what do I know? Maybe tomorrow somebody will provide us with a complete, valid solution through pure crypto! RENE ZANDBERGEN
When? I trust the experts so believe 1450-1499. (If I didn't, I
could believe that it was older
rather than younger). Where? Italy, Spain or the southern part of greater Germany (includes Bohemia). Who? Someone who knows his (contemporary) science but has some different ideas. A fringe scientist. Language? No idea. I'm quite open. I could imagine an invented language where new words are made up and added to the vocabulary on the fly. I have a hunch that some number system could be behind it. Nothing as complicated as Newbold or Strong suggested. Contents? I'm assuming that the text fit the pictures, but accept that there is a small chance that this is not true. Decipherable / hoax? I expect that the text has a meaning. I could very well imagine that the technique used by the composer of the MS to convert this meaning to its written form may have made this meaning irrecoverable, by accident. To clarify this last point: there used to be this 'magic' trick, I forget how it went, where a test person had to imagine a number. He would then be asked to make various calculations based on this number, and at the end the interrogator would predict that the outcome of the calculations was 1089. The point was that due to the selected set of operations, this was the outcome regardless of what was the original number. It was lost in the operation. I don't imagine anything as intricate in the VMs. I could well imagine someone 'transcribing' Arabic (or Sanskrit, or whatever) without having the first clue about what the original script is supposed to mean. JOHN STOJKO
Started the same way as everybody else, however I took different approach.
I reviewed history of that region first. Each political upheaval brings
atrocities and innovations. The VMS was discovered at that time and was sent to
Vatican. Evidently in Vatican they fail to decipher and decided that this VMS
does not present danger to them. After that the war stopped.
This explains the strange drawings in VMS. I assumed that the VM is written in Slavic language and began to sort the alphabet. When I finished it become evident that the alphabet consists of consonants only. The final result was published and the step by step method of my decipherment is given in my Home Page http://home.att.net/~oko/home.htm . Yes I started with believe but now I know. However I found out that there are people on VMS list that completed at list 90% of decipherment. Why I know? About 6 years ago in my amateurish way I tried to show that the alphabet is very old. I posted coin from 5-6 century BC and pointed out that the same number appears in VMS. Before I could publish more letters the member posted that he knows the number. The number was named "peacock". Than other members began to post that they know that the VMS is written in Latin and what is written on each page. If one knows the language and what is written than it is easy to find alphabet and post on VMS-list. I am still waiting for their posting. No I am not waiting for intimidating tests just for defined VMS alphabet. BERNED NEUNER
When? 15th century, I'd say, though I'm obviously not an expert. So I just
go along with some of the list's opinion leaders ;-)
Where? I have no grounds to exclude any part of Europe, as the educated classes obviously had access to similar sources all over the continent. Who? A dabbler, or rather an eclectic person, well versed in those topics depicted by the MS's illustrations, and probably also in languages and ciphers . Although I do not believe Edward Kelley is the author, the person I'm thinking of would probably share many of the characteristics commonly attributed to him. Language? Probably based on Latin, since I assume the text might be the result of a one-way coding process. Accordingly, any existing text should do the trick, and there should have been large corpuses available in Latin. Contents? Completely arbitrary, whatever comes handy. Anything of sufficient size might serve as input for the one-way coding process. Decipherable / hoax? Hoax. I think the unknown author devised a way to produce pseudo-random text out of an existing document. Probably he spent some time on fine-tuning the procedure so that it would yield properties similar to a language he knew (prefix/suffix structure, word length etc.). Perhaps he first scrambled the source text by deleting/adding/transposing etc. and re-structured it by sorting and padding. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps . As for the exact procedure, it could be any combination of leaving out letters, padding, sorting, permutation, look-up tables, throwing the dice etc. There is a slight chance however, that we could discover the source text after having established the procedure with a certain reliability. An obvious approach would be the application of the suspected method to known texts, as the books of the bible - or known herbals :-), followed by comparison of the results GORDON RUGG
When? 1551-1586
Where? Possibly England Who? Probably Kell(e)y, possibly with the active help of Dee Language? Probably meaningless gibberish, though a code is also possible, in which case English or Latin Contents? If code, then either a contentful hoax (i.e. a meaningful plaintext, rather than gibberish, but a plaintext whose role was purely as a source of "padding", like the alphabetic strings in the Beale ciphers) or something which Kelley claimed that the angels had told him Decipherable/hoax? Probably recoverable, as opposed to decipherable - I think it would be possible to reconstruct the precise methods and materials used, though I'm far from certain about this. Procedure? Probably used a (now lost) north Italian and a (now lost) west mid German manuscript as templates for the illustrations, to ensure fashions, etc, would be consistent with a late c15th alchemical herbal; perhaps supplied by Puccius. Used characters from a variety of scripts and shorthands, which make it harder for decoders (since we can't be sure which characters are random variants of each other and which are different) and also has the advantage of concealing the originator's own handwriting. Botanical section originally prepared in parallel by originator and accomplice; when they realised the divergence between the two sets of output (A and B), then they changed procedure, with one drafting and the other doing the fair copy. MATRT WELNICKI
When: mid-1500's
Where: England Who: not entirely certain but one with some standard higher education and possibly religious backround or interests What: not a hoax for profit Method: at first thought it was a nomenclature like others of the time, now possibly something different but not totaly uncommon for the time. NICK PELLING
When & Where:
Content: 1450-1462, Northern Italy Code: either 1463 in Milano or (rather less likely) 1465 in Istanbul Who: Content: various authors (but that's several other stories entirely) Code: Cicco Simonetta, the (god)father of modern cryptology What: Content: a collection of various proto-scientific (non-religious) manuscripts ...but whether this all comprises a "guess" or not is another matter! :-9 FRANCOIS ALMALEH
When : 1490-1600
Where : England, Italy or Praga
Who : an lonely man, not Dee nor Kirscher. A
erudite man who has known the writngs of Roger Bacon
Content : an alchemical books to sell (to Rudolf II
?)
Language : a hoax
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