VMs: Re: Garlic-smelling manuscripts

[CanBooks <canbooks@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Stolfi

The friends who told me the information were not working from the English
language. They are a family that has had access/custody of ancient religious
and other documents in the mountains of Iraq for many centuries. They
mentioned that the old manuscripts, (most 300+ years old) all smelled of
garlic. It could easily be that they assumed it was garlic when it was
actually arsenic. I don't believe that they knew very much of the mechanics
of how the manuscripts were made. Unfortunately, during the strife during
the last year, the eldest of the family, who was the most fluent in the
ancient scripts died. We are currently searching for others who may have had
training in the old scripts. They told me that Strangaili (that's what they
call it in their language) was an ancient script that was used for some
years and then abandoned for a more efficient one. I gave a copy of a page
from the VMS to the son of the old man (who is an old man himself). He
couldn't make much sense of it. The next morning he picked it up and looked
at it without his glasses. He was holding it upside down, and suddenly he
said he could make out some the name of a flower. He flipped the paper over,
and it was gone. Then he realized that the script was a mirror image
(written backwards). I received this news some time ago, and have done some
research into it. I have produced some pages of the VMS in mirror image and
last week showed them to the grandson, who is a professor in a university.
He immediately recognized many of the letters, and lamented that his
grandfather wasn't alive to read it. He also said that the script contained
some strange characters as well. After reviewing it with other members of
his family, he felt that the VMS was not written in ancient Strangaili, but
rather that it used a good number of Strangaili characters. Perhaps it is
written in another language and the writer ciphered it using letters from a
selection of languages, one of them being the obscure Strangaili script.  I
too have searched the Internet for Strangaili which is related to Old
Aramaic... and was used by the ancient Nestorian Church for a brief period
of time.

I guess this is another case of... Hey this looks familiar, but then again,
it isn't.

I'm moving over the next couple of weeks, so will be out of touch. I'll let
you know more if I learn more.

Dan Gibson
nabataea.net

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