VMs: Forged to look old in 1634

["Philip Neal" <philipneal_vms@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

There is a fascinating article in the current issue of the New York Review 
of Books about a corpus of forged Etruscan manuscripts produced around 1636.

I have the print edition in front of me but you have to pay to read it on 
the web.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/article-preview?article_id=17754

Joseph Connors is the reviewer of a book by Ingrid D Rowlands about a 
forgery by the seventeenth century Italian Curzio Inghirami. Connors and 
Rowlands are alive and probably make their living out of writing, so I urge 
you to pay a small fee to read the whole article. A few quotes:

* Of course it was all a forgery. Curzio dreamed up a fantasy world...

* a kind of Etruscan Lord of the Rings...

* another fold-out etching shows the Inghirami family tree...

* about thirty pages of pseudo-Etruscan text and about as many Latin 
translations...

* "The Wolf is the mother of the Lamb. The Lamb shall love the Dog. A pig 
shall come forth from the horde of Pigs and shall devour the work of the 
Dog.    He shall laugh while weeping and build while destroying, until water 
swallows all of Etruria. Then shall the Kingdom of Volterra [be] again. This 
prophecy will not always be obscure."

* the watermark of the local paper factory...

* One commentator thought that Curzio was too young to have made all this 
up...

* The finger was then pointed at... Tommaso "Fedra" Inghirami, who lived a 
century before Curzio...

* There is some astronomical lore in Curzio's text.. But there was no 
astronomical sense to be made...

A seventeenth century forgery, with samples of the alleged original text. An 
alleged translation which makes no sense. And the really interesting thing 
is that serious scholars in the 1630s suggested that it was a forgery but 
one created a century before their day.

Ring any bells?

I say, no wonder Kircher wanted to know who Barschius was.

I continue to study the Voynich manuscript and I continue to think that it 
probably enciphers meaning.

Philip Neal


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