VMs: RE: flowers & stars: Zoroastrian stuff, Pahlavi

["Joseph H Peterson" <joe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Since Zoroastrianism was at one time the dominant world religion, it has
survived in pockets that are widely dispersed geographically, isolated
because of ruthless persecution. There are several other intriguing aspects
to Zoroastrianism which make it worth looking at re: Voynich connections.
The bulk of Zoroastrian writings are in Middle Persian.
· Middle Persian was written in a very compact and difficult script called
Pahlavi.
· In its classical style it was written with only 14 to 17 letters! The
script derived from the official Aramaic of the Achaemenian empire. In
addition to multiple values for the graphemes, some may represent
combinations of letters
· In addition to the basic 14-17 letters, Pahlavi uses ligatures.
· Knowledge of the Pahlavi method of writing middle Persian was preserved by
the Zoroastrian priesthood (magi).
· It is known to have been used as a kind of code (Cf. Persian Rivayats).
· Pahlavi freely mixes MP graphemes with ideographs, which derive from
Aramaic
· Several encyclopedic Zoroastrian texts, such as the Bundahesh and Denkard,
treat on topics depicted in VM illustrations (e.g. astronomy and medicine)
(e.g. http://www.avesta.org/pahlavi/grb.htm#contents)
· Pahlavi texts often contain extensive quotes from the Avesta, which may
account for multiple languages found in VM.
· The Pahlavi script was so difficult towards the end of its official use,
that the more phonetic Pazand/neo-Avestan script was invented. It also made
the adoption of the Arabic script easier. Other means of transcibing and
transliterating are easy to hypothesize.

There is a sample of the script at http://www.avesta.org/denkard/denkard.htm

It is not trivial to transcribe Pahlavi because of its use of ideographs,
but I tried a sample with 2758 words, and it has this word length
distribution:

  n    number of words with n chars:
  1    252
  2    256
  3    568
  4    365
  5    400
  6    307
  7    297
  8    132
  9    108
  10     43
  11     17
  12      7
  13      2
  14      3
  15      1

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:owner-vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx]On
Behalf Of mesinik@xxxxxx
Sent: Wednesday, February 23, 2005 8:44 AM
To: vms-list@xxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: VMs: flowers & stars: Zoroastrian stuff

Flowers & stars are Zoroastrian stuff and the VMS is full of these
So, where could  this Zoroastrian religion survive to the XVth century?
Once, it's stronholds were Iran, Central Asia. The last one surely kept even
some organised, "orthodox" Zoroastrian cult pretty long during the Islamic
era
(it was okeey, if you paid some extra taxes). Cannot tell, how long exactly
and
after all, the VMS doesn't look like a kind of "orthodox" stuff. But this
depends of course... for me it is easier to believe in some kind of
"folklore
influenced by Zoroastrian religion" inside the VMS.

BTW, somewhere I have heard, in the Zoroastrian era in Iran, they had quite
good
calculations about how the Earth and the rest of visible planets are rolling
around the Sun ... pretty long time before Kopernik ... could anybody
confirm?

Sometimes I have thought, the strange signs on the first VMS-page could be
Zoroastrian altars (with more or less "ethernal fire") ... but birds could
still
be a better match for these (one of them carrying something).


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