Notes on the Voynich Manuscript - Part 20 [1993 September 17] ----------------------------------------- Speculations on the Date and Provenance of the Voynich MS Consider this, if you will: Was this the face that launched a thousand ships And burned the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss! Now, suppose we came upon this text in a mysterious manuscript, and had no clue, from history or palaeography, from vellum or ink, as to the provenance of what we were reading. Nevertheless, we could conclude, with a high degree of probability, that it had originated from Europe or the Mediterranean littoral: from one or other of the states and cultures that are the heirs to the Hellenic civilisation. And why? because who else would refer so explicitly to the Iliad of Homer? Now consider, if you can find it, Botticelli's Primavera. This is a picture, not a text; nevertheless, we can establish, from the subject, style, and iconography, that it was painted during the European Renaissance, and very probably in Northern Italy. And so to the topic of this note: if we consider the Voynich MS not as a puzzle, a cypher, but as a work of art, what can we deduce about its possible provenance, from its subject, style and iconography? Oh, how I wish I held the real thing, and not a miserable monochrome photocopy of a few pages! And a miserable photocopy of a hand-written copy, and that copy by a Westerner! I am not an expert in these matters, and it might be a good idea to consult one. But I've seen a lot of art, from almost all over the world, and can fairly reliably tell the difference between Mayan, Chinese, Egyptian, Persian and Roman renderings of the same subject. And of the images in the MS, none looks to me obviously non-European, and all that look familiar look European. Here are some examples. (a) the features of the women in the zodiac and plumbing sections. They all look Caucasian. Moreover, many of them have hairdos, and those mostly look mediaeval European. (b) the pictures that seem to be allegories of the seasons. It's pretty easy to identify Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter, and the iconography - flowers, fruits, old man with stick &c - is again traditional mediaeval. (c) the astronomical folios almost all seem based on divisions of 12 and 24, either hours in the day or months in the year. That's the Western solar calendar - a Mayan (and, indeed an Arab) would use a very different iconography. If we had a lot of 18s and 20s, that would point almost irrefutably to a Mayan origin - I submit this evidence is also pretty strong. While looking at heads, look at their angle with respect to the viewer. If they were Mayan or Egyptian, almost all of them would be in full profile. If Byzantine or Indian, they would be either full profile or full face. But many of them are half or three quarter profile. That's typical again of European art, and of the late-Mediaeval and Renaissance period. Here is another consideration. As far as I can see, all the images are two-dimensional. There is no attempt at either "true" perspective or the various "false" perspectives found in Egyptian, Chinese, and late-Mediaeval art. If the artist wanted to give anything depth - the plumbing pictures with mass hot tubs for instance - well, he was less skilled that the illustrator of Les Tres Riches Heurs or the painter of the fowling scene in the tomb of Tutankhamun. So either he was untrained, or he lived before Giotto's innovations had spread to his part of the world. -------- Let's turn to the Zodiac. It's the so-called "Western" zodiac, the one documented by Berosus and almost certainly cast into that form in the Hellenistic age. That again says the MS comes from somewhere that was once part of the Roman Empire. And the icons let us get more specific. The MS has Libra, the scales, not Zygon, the yoke, so it's Latin, not Greek. And Leo, the lion, isn't a bestiary lion: he's an heraldic leopard, as found in Mediaeval French heraldry - and hence, thanks to Duke William, in the arms of England. Scorpio, as already remarked, isn't a scorpion, he's a lizard or (I think) a salamander. That again says Western Europe, where scorpions are hard to find. And Cancer is a lobster, which hints strongly at France. Look at all of them, and imagine meeting them in the street. Taurus isn't a giant, wife-ravishing monster - he's the image of the "little white bull", the bulls of Catalonia. And Aries with his lyre-shaped horns - I've seen him hopping about the hills above Barcelona. Gemini are a man and a woman, and that's a late change. To me, they look like the Lovers of an Italian Tarot deck. Those fish, Pisces, they were drawn from life, and they are carp, at a venture. From a fishpond, not from the sea, just as a monk would have drawn them. And Sagittarius, the archer, he holds a crossbow. The crossbow has been invented twice in all history - in Ancient Greece and in Mediaeval Europe. That's not a Greek crossbow - we have a description by Heron of Alexandria, and it's nothing like that drawing. But it is very like the crossbows you see in museums. Now, if he'd been holding an atl-atl... -------- The maps. Well, maybe - there are two folios that seem to contain an approximate map of the world. And it is the classic mediaeval disc-and-tau: a round, flat world divided by a T of inner seas into three continents: Asia (eastern half), Africa (southern quarter); Europe (northern quarter). The Mappa Mundi in Hereford Cathedral looks just like that, and it dates from the thirteenth century. By the time of Behain, in 1460 or so, it had vanished. So, Western Europe again, and surely before 1400. -------- My conclusion: The Voynich Manuscript was created in Europe, by Europeans, and probably in one of the lands that border the Gulf of Lyons. It is late Mediaeval, not Renaissance, and hence dates from approximately 1350. -------- And now for the evidence that does not fit the above! Again, back to the Zodiac. The number of nymphs evidently matters - if you turn from folio to folio, you can see the scribe trying different patterns to fit them in (10+19, 8+16+6, 10+20...), and often having to scrunch them up, or spread them out, near the end of a ring. (By the way, that suggests these folios were not a fair copy, but at least in layout were originals.) But, what calendar has one month of 29 days (Pisces) and then nine months of thirty days? None at all. Maybe Pisces is a mistake, and all the months have 30 days. But that's the Pharaonic Egyptian calendar, and why would anyone revive it? And why have it beginning with Pisces - the Egyptian year began in our July, with the heliacal rising of Sirius. So, maybe this is astrological rather than calendric. But, again, why begin the calendar with Pisces and not Aries? That I find very, very odd - because, you see, it's right: the Vernal Equinox does fall in Pisces - about 2 days in at present, and in 1350 about 11 days in. Why, alone of all works of Western astrology, is the Voynich Zodiac true to the stars? Who in that age even remembered the precession of the equinoxes, discovered by Hipparkhos of Nicaea but, as far as I know, forgotten until Tycho de Brahe? (No, wait a minute, there's a Middle English rime about the Great Year - Graves quotes it in The White Goddess - so maybe this knowledge just went underground.) And why are Aries and Taurus divided into light and dark halves, each with 15 nymphs, stars, or days? -------- The plumbing. Yes, the nymphs look like plump European wenches, but the pipes, valves and stuff? Not even the Romans could have built a fluid transport system that well. I've read Vitruvius on plumbing, and the joining, branching, tapering, curving of the Voynich designs simply could not have been realised with the technology of the time. For example, when the Romans wanted a pipe to turn a right-angle corner, they encased the joint in a block of solid marble, because they didn't know how else to cope with the stresses. Nor could they create a true Y-junction - they drilled a hole in a straight pipe and stuck a smaller pipe into it at an angle. [Note: as so often, I was hopelessly wrong. The late Mediaeval age could indeed create the shapes you see, though only on a much smaller scale. And I was doubly wrong, because I'd seen it done with my own eyes, in the Most Serene Republic of Venice, at the Murano glass works, founded - by another typical Voynich coincidence - in 1291. And if the plumbing is made of glass, my strong suspicion is that the text is alchemical and the nymphs indeed allegorical.] What it looks like to me, is an attempt to redraw a system of veins and arteries as if it were a plumbing system. But where did that idea come from, in a time when dissection was prohibited by law, and centuries before Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood? As others have remarked, these pictures don't look Mediaeval or Renaissance - they look eerily modern. Another example - there are nymphs sitting in small bath tubs. Nonsense! There were few enough bath tubs in all Europe in those times, and they were made of stone or metal. Nobody could cast a pipe the size of a tub, no kiln big enough to fire it could have been kept hot. All right, it's an allegory - but allegory uses familiar images to convey an unfamiliar meaning, that's its point - it doesn't use impossible images as if they were commonplace. (But then, what about Hieronymous Bosch? Look at the weird machines in his picture of Hell (right panel of the Garden of Worldly Delights). And wasn't he supposed to be a member of a secret Gnostic cult called the Brethren of the Free Spirit, distantly related to the Cathari? No! no! ... that way madness lies.) -------- The plants. Not the leaves and stems and alchemical beasts, but the folios that seem to show cell structure. How is that possible before van Leeuwenhoek? Roger Bacon invented the microscope, you reply, following Newbold. But who showed him how to prepare slide samples? Who invented the microscope slide, the microtome, the art of staining? You can't just look at a plant and see cell structure. -------- No: there is something else in the Voynich MS; something alien. Images that not only didn't exist and couldn't exist, but that nobody in that time should even have been able to imagine. (Orbis tertius, says the daimon; I ignore him.) Last conclusion: I need to see the real thing. Robert [Note: near enough, every path by which I tried to explore the origin of the MS led me, eventually, to the same place: the littoral of the Gulf of Lyons. And every attempt to date it, again based on its appearance, its look as an art object, eventually said 1350 to 1450. If my guess as to place is correct, then I'd go for the earlier half of that time span.]