Category: charts

O’Donovan notes 12.1: The Merlons thing.

c.2500 words

The author’s rights are asserted.

First, let’s put that detail into physical perspective.

From the Yale facsimile edition, we find that the entire Voynich map measures, overall near enough to 420 mm square. That’s 16.5 inches each side.

Within that map, the roundel containing the detail of interest measures close to 100mm (3.9 inches)

Within that, the structure given crenellations measures just 30mm by 45mm (1.2 x 1.8 inches).

.. for reasons I’ve never seen explained, it’s a habit among Voynich writers to omit or truncate the flanking arcs, thus reducing the detail to the size of an ordinary postage-stamp – about 25mm (1 inch) square.

That’s about the length of your thumb’s top joint. Try taking your finest pen and reproducing it there some day when you’re bored at work. 🙂

What does this tell us about this detail-in-a-detail-in-a drawing?

First, that given the physical constraints on the draughtsman, this detail isn’t likely to be a detailed and literal portrait of any single structure or location, simply because the scale precludes inclusion of enough details to clearly distinguish one structure from all others of similar form within a purely literal genre.

The same constraints tell us that for a given place or location to be clearly identifiable, some of what is included should be there for its resonance in terms of medieval iconographic forms: that is for its existing symbolic or metaphorical hooks.

To put this another way, the constraints imposed by the available space mean that the structure must serve as token for that place and while some elements may indeed be literal, others will not or may not be so.

Consider the difference between what you would produce if asked to present a literal portrait of your local place of worship, as distinct from marking it on a map. In the first place you would need to add far more detail to show the ways in which it differs from all other churches built in the same architectural style, but in the second case, you might just draw one of these:

or you might use a more literal-looking token, detailed only enough that a visitor will connect your drawing to a local building when she or she comes across it – even though the drawing is in no sense a literal ‘portrait’. Like this:

The idea of a ‘token’ image embraces the purely symbolic and the merely generic.

A token can include some literal details (such as the rose window, if your local building has one), but omits all non-essentials and can even include non-literal details – your local building may not have a cross on its door, for example. As you see, this drawing doesn’t show whether the building is made of stone, of brick, of stucco or of wood, which a literal portrait would have to do.

Given the very limited space assigned this detail in the Voynich map, our default assumption (pending other evidence) must be that for the first maker of this detail, each item he did include here had no less weight and importance than any other, regardless of whether one item is drawn in a way generic, symbolic or literal.

It is irrelevant that one or another of the inclusions springs more readily to a modern eye; it is quite as much a mistake to ignore the form of the central tower or the subsidiary towers or the square merlons as the fishtails.

So then, to the degree that the drawing must necessarily be reduced to whatever the maker considered essential elements, what we have is a token, but one hopes a significant token, for the intended place.

For the moment we set aside the various theories which have the Voynich map a description of some poetic, theological or other set of ways. We’ll start from an initial position that the map is not of some otherworld and see how we go.

Given a combination of an intention to communicate information of some kind, and the constrained space available, we now consider each of those features the first maker considered distinctive – even definitive – and suppose further (for the time being) that the place indicated did exist to so late as c.1440.

The structure is placed between two great curving ‘walls’ though it isn’t immediately clear whether those are meant for topographic or for man-made forms. Certainly no defensive walls would be found extending across the lowest point of a very narrow and very steep river valley – a moment’s thought will show you why.

At the front we see a great entry-way opening directly onto what is shown (by a fairly-well known convention in late medieval cartography) as a waterway, shallow and having only one opening. Today we don’t conceive of the Mediterranean as a large shallow ‘bay’, but evidently that’s how the maker viewed it and in fact that’s exactly what the Mediterranean is. By comparison with the open ocean, the Mediterranean is shallow and it does have only one natural opening to the deep sea, through the straits of Gibraltar.

So, without presuming which elements in the Voynich detail convey information by literal depiction and which by symbolic value, consider the remaining items included.

The enclosed area is drawn about twice as wide as it is deep. It is enclosed on three sides by walls.

Inside those walls is drawn nothing but one great tower, apparently round since two others which are square are found outside the back wall and are clearly shown so.

That central tower is evidently distinctive in having three storeys (assuming one window-token equals one storey). The roof is tall and conical, but seems to sit within the tower’s upper edge, which suggests that between the tower proper and the roof is an upper parapet or walkway.

Behind the rear wall, there is placed to our left one of those square towers and this has its top coloured blue, the same pigment used to colour an adjacent area. Where that ends, to the right, is a second square extramural tower, this having its top coloured yellow.

We may suggest, then, that perhaps here the blue is used to denote water, so the front entryway is a water-gate and the tower to the left, outside the walls is a water-tower. If that is what the maker intended, then perhaps the lines of blue which we see following along the top of those curving flanks could indicate aqueducts of the sort so often seen in Roman-era settlements, especially in the near east. But, on the other hand, those lines may only indicate some natural descent of fresh water down steep hillsides. No need to decide yet which the maker intended. The analysis is still in its early stages.

As we look for sites fulfilling our criteria so far, the nature of the less easily discerned will serve as a test for each possible identification.

And now at last we come to the merlons.

There are at least two, and possibly three forms of merlon shown on these walls – the ordinary square merlons and what might be described as two forms of fishtail merlons or, perhaps, an attempt to draw twice the same form of fishtail merlons, but whatever the case, the form given those across the front appear different from those seen on the right side of the rear wall.

As you’ll see (further below) there wasn’t just one form of fishtail merlon, but of course the difference may again be due to the scale at which the draughtsman was obliged to work.

Since we don’t yet know when the drawing was first enunciated, so even if we date our present copy 1405-1438, some effort will be needed to determine by research which elements are employed for their symbolic information and which are more nearly literal within this token. Nor can be even guess, as yet, whether the intended place and structures remained standing beyond 1440 AD, even if they existed to that time.

A common and very typical error in Voynich studies is to begin by assuming that one can identify the place by adopting Mary d’Imperio’s suggestion that its resembled a castle, and then start collecting photographs of such examples of castles having fishtail merlons as exist today, without doing any deeper investigation of the date to which such merlons are dated – in fact many examples seen in Europe today are the result of romantic nineteenth-century ‘renovations’.

Merlons – geographic range.

Merlons of various kinds, including the fishtail type are attested during the medieval centuries from as far north as the Black Sea to as far south as Egypt, and from Asia Minor to western Europe. Some are attested by contemporary writings, some by relics in near-ruins, others by what little still remains in structures often destroyed and re-built since those times.

These facts are well-known to historians and to students of military architecture, and have been reprised and documented often enough in contributions to Voynich studies, that there is really very little excuse one can offer, in 2023, for such misleading assertions as – and I quote:

The swallowtail merlons on the Rosettes** castle and city walls tie the manuscript to southern-German or northern-Italian contexts.

The term ‘context’ avoids saying ‘locations’ while implying it; the substitution provides a loophole, so that in future the theorist can claim the assertion applies to any time when any southern German or northern Italian may have been in any place – including the Black Sea, or Egypt, or somewhere in between such as Constantinople.

But asserting that the type is tied to southern Germany and northern Italy is easily disproven and here again, the work has already been done and more than once since 2010. If readers find no reference to the earlier contributions or to these Sicilian precedents shown below (again) it may be because those researchers have relied too heavily on specifically Voynich-related sites rather than turning to external and more impartial [non-wiki] sources.

The following three images all show buildings in Sicily, and all having their merlons in original style(s), according to our best current information. The first example dates to the tenth century and it is said the merlons which had crumbled over time were accurately repaired; the second example is dated to the twelfth century; the third to the thirteenth century, from which time we see such forms first used by the Franco-Savoyard Challant family* in the Valle d’Aosta, west of Milan.

*They built the famous Fénis castle, among others, and it remained in the possession of the Fénis branch of the lords of Challant until 1716.

Notice the varied forms given these older fishtail merlons in Sicily.

TENTH CENTURY: This part of the tower dates to the period of Arab rule in Sicily (i.e. from 902AD). Before that time, the island had been part of the Byzantine empire. It was gradually re-taken by Christian forces and freebooters in numerous battles between 999 and 1139AD. The Latins who finally took it decided to keep it rather than returning it to the Byzantine emperor, although Byzantine and Arab influence remained strong in the island to the end of the 13thC.
c. TWELFTH Century.
THIRTEENTH CENTURY – Palazzo Corvaja, Taormina.

Nick Pelling’s historical research led him to made a fair case for the present manuscript’s having been made in, or near Milan.

He did begin by expecting all the content would be the original composition of single Latin Christian author who had lived contemporary with the present manuscript’s manufacture. This was in keeping with most theoretical Voynich narratives to that time (2006)

Unlike the creators of many other Voynich narratives, Pelling adopted standard scholarly ethics and used accepted methods, while taking pains to consider the codicological evidence and, as best he could, to date and describe the manuscript’s palaeography. All this in addition to attempting to explain the whole work in the light of his studies of late medieval cryptology.

Pelling was (so far as I know) the first among the Reeds’ list generation of Voynich writers to pay attention to the implications of the script’s “4o” form, while being chiefly interested in its presence in some early fifteenth-century Milanese ciphers.

Pelling read the Voynich map as a city-plan or city-scape rather than a map in any narrower sense.

Unlike many other creators of variants on the traditionalist narrative, Pelling laid out for his readers the course of his own research. He gathered and then presented and cited honestly the full range of precedents and sources he found; he explained his reasoning and the data used to inform that reasoning. He was prepared – within limits – to debate his own findings as few later traditionalists would do, and as some have never done. Even more in keeping with the better type of scholarship, Pelling himself published comments and responses made to his work – the positive and the negative, both. This sort of open-intelligence attitude attracted so many researchers that to just one of the posts listed below he received more than 600 comments.

Pelling represents the last flicker of that energetic, co-operative and actively debating atmosphere which initially gave the first mailing list under Reeds such energy and which led rapidly to numerous new insights still being re-discovered by those living in the present ‘groundhog day’ fog. Thereafter the rise of a ‘believe my theory or else’ and degradation of ethics and standards in the online arenas saw debate and any honest engagement with informed dissent constantly discouraged or disdained by the more ambitious theorists until today one finds little activity of that kind in any Voynich arena.

Whether any of the Voynich research published since 2006 has moved Pelling’s own opinions on any point, I cannot say. It is something which readers must discover for themselves.

Below are linked two of Pelling’s earlier posts. one about the larger drawing and the other about the detail presently of interest, I add a link to a post made by Koen Gheuens in 2017 and, because it tracks the history of this particular ‘groundhog day’, a post made for this blog about 18 months ago. Perhaps after that discussion of Pelling’s contributions to the study I should add that he and I differ on a great many points, especially those invoking one or other of the manuscript’s drawings. 🙂

more on the backstory in an earlier post at this blog:

  • D.N.O’Donovan, ‘Swallowtails‘ voynichrevisionist (October 8th., 2021)

In the next post, we’ll move from surviving examples in Sicily to those which begin to appear from about the 13thC in the Franco-Savoyard Valle d’Aosta.

The Valle d’Aosta is not on the Venetian side of Italy, but in an area which will have become familiar to any readers who laboured through our analyses of the calendar’s ‘July’ and ‘November’ emblems. That is, a region between Milan-Genoa and adjacent to regions in which forms of Occitan were spoken during the middle ages – including Genoa. In the map detail shown below, the marker for Valle d’Aosta is seen slightly left of centre at the top of the image.

Valle d’Aosta in the mountains west of Milan, above the Lombardy plain.

O’Donovan notes 8.7 Confusion or chronology? laying out the pieces.

c.1200 words

The author’s rights are asserted.

So far, in considering these two diagrams (on folio 85r and folio 67v-1), what we’ve been doing is like picking out two small pieces from a pile of jig-saw puzzle pieces for which there is no convenient picture printed on the box.

What we must now do is to pause to think about what these two pieces tell us and because the manuscript is evidently no uniform composition but a compilation, what they tell us may not only differ between one and the other of these pieces, but may agree or disagree with the traditional expectation that all the matter in Beinecke MS 408 would be of western Christian (i.e. ‘Latin’ European) origin and an expression of no other cultural traditions.

.First piece – diagram on folio 85r (part).

Analysis (see posts in Series #6) showed some elements do use conventions closely consistent with those of medieval Latin art, particularly the fact that in it four winds are given characters closely reflecting the content in a widely-used western text – Isidore’s Etymologiae.

Yet elements in the same diagram expresses ideas and habits alien to the Latins’ visual vocabulary, most importantly use of an asymmetrical four-fold division for the circuit.

Other characteristics presenting opposition to the traditionalists’ assumption that the whole manuscript is an expression of Latin culture, is the accurate depiction of Mongol dress and a ‘lily’ which is no fleur-de-lys.

But the single most telling detail is the asymmetrical divisions’ being marked by a form that ‘L.L.’ suggested might be the fly-whisk (as symbol of religious or of civil authority, known from western North Africa, through Ethiopia into India and south-east Asia) but which I think closer in its sense here to that ‘whisk-like’ form as banner – a motif employed not only in Asia by the Mongols, but also in art produced in a Persian environment during the period of Mongol rule (13th-14th C). An example is shown at right.

In those cases the ‘whisk’ takes on the character of a banner, and the sense it bears is most like the flag as emblem in Europe; that is, it signifies not only religious or secular authority, but planting the flag constitutes a claim to rule over a that territory.

Between the second half of the thirteenth century and much of the fourteenth century, Mongols ruled the largest empire the world has ever seen. They were the great power throughout the Mediterranean world during that era, with only Mamluk Egypt as significant second. The Seljuk Turks waited in the wings.

As the Yuan dynasty, Mongol rule within China would survive until 1368 AD.

During that time, foreign traders were welcomed in China’s foreigners’ ports, protected across the overland ‘silk roads’ and foreign ambassadors and their religions invited. Among those who accepted invitations to come to China itself there were a few western Christians and of those (very few) of which records remain, none but persons from Italian city-states remained long. For example, we hear of one doctor from Bologna, a Franciscan friar from Sicily, another Sicilian resident as trader, and of Katerina Villioni who died there in 1342.

While, therefore, it is statistically most likely that matter now in Beinecke MS 408 came into European horizons with someone who was not a Latin (i.e. western European Christian), and otherwise most likely that it was brought by an Italian or a Jew whose home was in the south-western region of the Mediterranean, it is not beyond all possibility that a Latin from some other part of Europe might have fetched much of the material from ‘oriental parts’ in that brief period called the ‘Pax Mongolica’.

Example 2 (folio 67v-1 – starting with post #8.3)

In this case, the diagram’s main, central, part displays habits that can fairly be described as ancient, and Egyptian, but continuity within the art of Egypt and regions it influenced during Egypt’s four-thousand years as an independent kingdom means these same motifs and ideas continued to be seen even when Egypt lay under foreign rule, as it did for almost all of the six centuries which preceded the Christian era. In the sixth century, Egypt had been taken first by Persia, then in the fourth century it was taken from Persia by the Macedonian Greeks, who were in their turn supplanted by Rome.

On the other hand, this diagram’s peripheral emblems, whose subject is entirely astronomical, suggest by their forms and selected subjects, no ancient origin. One emblem’s being overlaid with heavy pigment implies a late effort to ‘Latinise’ that detail, while retaining in it the image of an unmistakeably Asiatic face – again suggesting the Mongol century and a discrepancy between the customs informing the original drawing and what are evidently later additions, the latest of which is a less-than-congenial influence from one or more ‘heavy painters’ or the work’s overseer.

Reflecting more than one cultural tradition and historical era is no reason to suppose the drawings faked. Quite the opposite; they speak to issues of origin and subsequent transmission which – so long as we do not create pre-emptive narratives (‘theories’) – are more helpful than troubling.

Matter deemed ‘ancient’ was typically revered and carefully transmitted everywhere, though in Latin Europe that reverence was usually accorded only the information in written text and it is unusual to see images not immediately ‘translated’ to suit the customs of Latins’ visual language.

The diagram on folio 85r provides a nice example of how certain elements might be left untranslated – either because they had no Latin equivalent, or were considered insignificant or as I think is found again in other sections of the manuscript, because the fifteenth-century copyists had been ordered to alter nothing.

We are only concerned with the manuscript’s drawings. When and where the written part of the text gained its present form is for others to determine.

For these two diagrams, then, it appears that the most likely period for their first arrival in Europe is during the ‘Mongol century’ – late thirteenth to late fourteenth centuries.

Once more, for any newcomers, I repeat that this ‘Notes’ series is not here to ‘showcase’ my own research, but to demonstrate the value of adopting an analytical rather than a theory-driven approach.

Partly for that reason and partly there is a persistent problem of plagiarism among a few Voynicheros (all linked at first- or second remove to the same university), I won’t be including in these notes the complete analysis of any one drawing or series, though in the usual way it is an absolute requirement of formal analyses that an account must be given of the entire drawing, or the entire series of drawings being discussed. A theorist may cherry-pick, and most do. Iconological analyses may not.

I’ve said that the fourth of the peripheral emblems in folio 67v-1 represents certain stars in Orion, but being reminded of that problem with persistent plagiarism I’ve decided to omit further details here.

In treating its ‘North’ emblem, however, it became apparent that a person who exercised a form of overseeing- or censoring role is linked with the addition of heavy pigments, and the nature of that ‘censorship’ suggests a Latin scholar and/or -cleric responsible.

The next series will investigate whether the same is true for images in a different section where astronomical emblems are found.

Within what we’ve called the ‘Voynich calendar’, some sections show the ‘heavy’ painter’s influence especially pronounced, though for the exercise just two central emblems will be considered, both of which have been regarded by even the staunchest of Voynich traditionalists as ‘unusual’ and unhelpful to a theory of the manuscript as entirely an expression of western Christian culture.

These are the emblems which now fill the centre of the diagrams for July, and for November.

The series is described as a calendar because its diagrams’ central emblems are over-written with month-names in a dialect or language variously identified, but always as a language or dialect used in the south-western Mediterranean or in regions linked to them by the sea-lanes: Occitan, Judeo-Catalan, and Norman French most often suggested.

O’Donovan notes #8.6 – peripheral ‘North’ in fol.67v-1.,

c.4000 words

Note – [27th July] wordpress had kindly let me see images that I’d lazily just copied-and-pasted from my earlier work. Apparently they were not allowing anyone else to see them, which is reminder to me not to take the lazy way in future. If any are still invisible to you, leave a comment or email me.

The author’s rights are asserted.

The ‘T-0’ issue

Those determined to maintain the old Eurocentric narrative have encountered a major difficulty in the fact that there is no evidence of Catholic forms and themes despite its having been the core about which western literacy developed.

It is therefore understandable that a traditionalist whose aim is to find or create support for that Eurocentric Wilfrid- Friedman narrative or some variation of it, will feel inclined to leap on any evidence of input from the Latin west. Despite there being quite literally hundreds of drawings and details in this manuscript that have no counterpart in medieval Latin Europe’s visual vocabulary, the existence of just one Latin practice may well be flourished as proof-positive that everything in the manuscript is an expression of western Christian (‘Latin’) culture and an assertion of Latin gate-keeping over anything which is too obviously ‘foreign’.

One nicely problematic instance is provided by the peripheral north emblem on folio 67v-1.

Biblical Noah, his three sons and Isidore’s little sketch.

Latin Europeans had included together with specifically Christian writings (Gospels, Acts, Epistles), many books of Jewish law and teachings to become their Bible, although few Latins read the Jewish works other than in Latin translation and very, very rarely consulted the Jewish commentaries of which most Latins seem to have remained ignorant.

The Jewish law and writings were also read by Muslims and quite apart from the written tradition, popular tradition itself throughout the near east maintained that after a great flood, none had survived on earth save Noah, his three sons, their wives and such creatures as were taken into the Ark.

Among Latins, however, the habit was to ignore Noah thereafter, and suppose that the world had been divided between- and re-populated by the three sons: Ham occupying Africa; Shem Asia and Japheth, Europe.

That notion was believed, quite literally, by European Christians to as late as the seventeenth century. It was also the origin of the ‘T-O’ diagram of which various Voynicheros have made much, and the earliest example of which comes from a copy of Isidore’s Etymologies.

T-O diagrams were always oriented with largest area of the three always Asia, and always separated Asia from the rest of the world by a line drawn directly along a North-South line.

So there’s a first problem.

This isn’t how the apparent ‘T-O’ diagram is drawn and aligned on folio 67v-1. Instead, the line is drawn at forty-five degrees from that North-South line. Again, I’ve turned the page north-up for readers’ convenience, and shown the European ‘T-O’ diagrams as they were drawn – East up (upper register) and then turned North-up (lower register).

FIG.1

As you see, this emblem in the Voynich manuscript can be described as a ‘T-O’ not because the underlying drawing shows the circuit divided in that way, but because of how the pigments have been added. And here I want to emphasise the detail and precision with which one face of the four has been drawn.

FIG. 2

It would be very helpful to know whether the lines marking this circle into three were laid down by the draughtsman-copyist or were a decision made by the overseer-painter(s) whose presence is evidenced in many of the manuscript’s drawings.

So now what do we have here? Was the emblem designed as a ‘T-0’ or has the painter thrust ‘T-O’-ness upon it? Short of spectral analysis I could not offer any opinion save ‘unproven’. (I have checked the reverse using the Beinecke scans and in my copy of the facsimile edition but while what one sees is certainly interesting, and the circle itself is clear, the lines of division are again defined by the pigment, not the underlying drawing.

FIG. 3

And neither the drawing itself, nor the pigments explain why the division between Asia and the rest of the world has been differently defined: that is, not by the simple North-South division we find in the Latin T-O diagrams. It’s another instance of why these peripheral emblems do not seem ‘native’ neither according to the Arab, nor to the Latin context.

Of course, there are numerous examples of a four-fold division of the heavens and of the earth, including diagonal divisions which were most natural (for example) in the ornament given a dome. Here’s one from Byzantine-influenced Sicily during the 12thC.

FIG. 4 Cathedral_of_Cefalù Sicily ca. 1150 A.D

Another drawing from the 12thC correlates another type of fourfold division with the tripartite division of the circle.

FIG. 5. “This manuscript contains a collection of fragments from England and France in the 11th and 12th centuries. It consists of the sorts of materials that were studied in monastic and cathedral schools in this period, including works on philosophy, theology, logic, cosmology and computus (the calculation of times and dates). Appropriately, a picture of a lesson also appears .. (f. 126r). It shows a teacher instructing a group of students about the world, signified by the disk he holds. One student counts on his fingers, another takes notes on a writing tablet, and a third studies a booklet.” The manuscript is one which had been in the library of St.Victor, one of a number seized during the Revolution and which are now in the BNF, sequentially numbered.

and then, from late in the fifteenth century, we find a divergence appear – a traditional ‘T-O’ in a manuscript written in humanist script, versus one written in a “neat, mercantile script”.

FIG. 6

The first example comes from a copy of Gregorio Dati’s ‘Sfera’, described by the holding library as:

A navigational treatise in the form of a poem, with numerous illustrations and maps, written in Pesaro on 7 August 1484.”

Boston Public Libary. The manuscript has not been digitised at the time of writing.

The second comes from another copy of the same work, described by the holding library as

Manuscript on paper .. of Gregorio (or Leonardo?) Dati, ‘La Sfera’. This rhyming treatise (ottava rima) is divided into two parts: 1) a treatise on astronomy; 2) rules for navigation and the determination of the position of the sea.

Yale University, Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library. This manuscript has been digitised. A detailed description and bibliographic record was created by BPL staff based on description by Dr. Lisa Fagin Davis.

It will be recalled (by those who read the posts about dissemination of a ‘4’ shape for the numeral) that introduction and dissemination for that ‘4’ shape occurs in just this same environment (mercantile, computing and navigational) and, further, that the numeral in that form is recorded as early as 1375 – again in a map using the ‘rose-gridded’ style of the new maritime charts.

This great map by Cresques, a Jewish cartographer in Majorca, at a time when none but Genoese and those Majorcan-Jewish cartographers were producing such charts for the Latin world.

More, in that same work we find confirmation that there was a belief then prevalent among the Jews that world after the flood had been divided into four parts, not three, with Noah’s portion being western north Africa where he re-planted the vine – that is, the grape-vine.

That view of the world’s division after the flood was widespread among the Jews, many believing that North Africa had been the original promised land.

Readers may also recall that it was from the south-western Mediterranean and chiefly from North Africa that the new Hindu-Arabic numerals and related forms of calculation were first encountered by Latins, brought to Europe by merchants who encountered them being taught in specifically commercial schools (called ‘abaco’ or ‘abacus’ schools by Latins) of which to that time Latin Europe had none. The numerals and the development of merchants’ “calculation schools” spread in tandem and the students – both adult merchants and their sons – were more interested in practical skills that served their own practical needs than in the theoretical and academic style of the universities.

The convention of separating ‘commercial’ from ‘academic’ streams in education would in fact continue in the western education (or more exactly systems of education in the European sphere) well into the twentieth century.

I am not suggesting that any part of the Voynich text copies Dati’s Sfera – apart from other considerations, that easily-memorised school-text was not produced until August of 1484 – but what it contains was certainly known earlier and it is in the same environment of practical, commercial and navigational knowledge that the peripheral emblems on folio 67v-1 fit best.

What I would suggest is that the diagram might have been meant to have four divisions, not three and that the ‘overseer’-painter has attempted to exercise a form of censorship-as-correction to bring this diagram into line with the ‘official’ forms of traditional Latin scholastics gained from Aristotle and/or Sacrobosco.

As to the stars we find here, they are ones vital to navigation within the northern hemisphere.

What follows was first explained by me in 2012, met by silence – as again when I re-presented the information for the new audience in 2017. Since I find no reason to change my identification and explanation for the four stars and their role in signalling ‘North’, I see no reason not to offer the information to a still more recent and more engaged audience. This is taken from the version published in ‘Ring-o’-Roses Pt 2-ii of 2′ (last updated in 2017), and details as I expressed them in ‘Crux and Ursa Minor in the Voynich manuscript’, voynichimagery.

FIG. 7 – Square inc ‘Brothers’ – Ursa minor

Preliminary comment:

As I said, when first explaining this North emblem … it seems so very long ago now, but perhaps that impression is magnified by the ensuing silence … the reference here is to  Ursa minor, whose β and γ stars  were widely known by terms such  as the ‘Guards’, or ‘faithful ones’, for their continually patrolling the perimeter of the north, circling about the  Pole and serving as a reliable means to mark the watches of the night, guide the traveller, and allow  determination of the Pole star’s position when it is obscured.[1]

[1] all the above has been explained in more detail in earlier posts.  e.g. D.N. O’Donovan, ‘fol 67v-i ~ chronological strata’,  (first published April 6th 2012; re-printed with minor edits through voynichimagery.wordpress.com October 18th., 2012).The last five years’ work [2012-2017] has refined my reading of various drawings in this manuscript, but I find no reason to alter the explanation provided for this detail from folio 67v-1, and though I no longer think (as I did in 2012) that we must invoke the Armenians as middle-men, it remains a possibility.

South of (below, beneath, under) the Pole star… Polaris and β Ursa Minoris.

FIG. 8 Ursa minor – constellation

Ursa Minor as ‘Phoenicians’ marker of the Pole.

It is important, here, to recall that classical Greek and Roman navigators had not used Polaris, or Ursa Minor to determine the point of the northern celestial Pole.

Thus Manilius

The top of the Axis is occupied by constellations well known to hapless mariners, guiding them over the measureless deep in their search for gain. Helice, the greater [-Bear], describes the greater arc; it is marked by seven stars which vie with each other in radiance; under its guidance the ships of Greece set sail to cross the seas. Cynosura [the lesser Bear] is small and wheels about in a narrow circle, less in brightness as it is in size, but in the judgement of the Tyrians it excels the larger Bear. Carthaginians count it the surer guide when at sea they make for unseen shores.

  • Manilius, Astronomica 1.294-302. (1st C. AD)

while Edwin Brown points out that the distinction became a proverbial one:

It became a literary topos that the Greeks guided themselves by the Greater Bear, the Phoenicians by the Lesser … And Gundel is surely right in giving this Phoenician practice as the primary reason why “the majority’ ‘ according to the Eratosthenic Epitome call the Little Bear Phoenice.

Edwin Brown, ‘The Origin of the Constellation Name “Cynosura” ‘, Orientalia, Nova Series, Vol. 50, No. 4 (1981), pp. 384-402

and so ‘Poinike/Phoenike/Phenice’ etc. also became labels for Polaris, while Cynosura became a common term for its constellation, Ursa minor.    But that name for Polaris also deserves a reminder for readers that the label by the North star in folio 68r-1 is, in my opinion, meant to read with the same sense.

FIG. 9 (detail) fol 68r-1.  The North Star.
FIG 10

It is not certain that the Phoenician mirror (detail illustrated right) meant to represent the Dioscuri, but this large ‘compass’-star means they may represent the ‘Guards’ of Polaris who then, as now, could assist those at sea in finding the position of the Pole if that star itself was obscured and for counting the hours of the night watches.

The clearest explanation for the latter use, when it came to be employed by Latin navigators, is offered by E.G.R. Taylor.

FIG 11 from E.G.R. Taylor, The Haven-Finding Art (1971 edition).

For the more on medieval practice in the west, see

  • E.G.R. Taylor, The Haven Finding Art (1971 edition)

for vocabulary used in the Mediterranean:

Alan Hartley, ‘Astronomical Names in the Romance Languages of Western Europe from Late Antiquity to Early Modern Times”, Romance Philology, Vol. 73 No 2, (2019), pp. 507-30 and his website ‘Logotheros‘.

added (2022) for recent research into the Phoenicians of the west

  • José Suárez Padilla et.al., ‘The Phoenician diaspora in the westernmost Mediterranean: recent discoveries’, Antiquity Vol. 95 (384) pp. 1-16.
  • Carolina López-Ruiz, Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean (2022)

However, the easier course is often taken today, using stars in Ursa Major.  The following diagram is not literal.

FIG. 12

The Mediterranean’s ‘Phoenician star‘ and later western navigators.

Taylor mentions that, for the Latin west, the system which recognised ‘the Guards’ was known “at least by the time of Ramon Llull” – once again turning our attention to the south-western Mediterranean, Majorca and North-west Africa during that period of most interest to us in attempting to discover when the matter in Beinecke MS 408 entered Latin horizons. Ramon Llull was born in Majorca and lived from 1232 to 1315/16, contemporary with the first maker of those ‘rose-gridded’ charts in the Latin world. Pietro Vesconte was a Genoese whose work flourished 1310-1330.

By good fortune, a couple of classical works survive whose authors explain why the Pole star gained its name as ‘ Phoenice’.  No such record exists of how its constellation, Ursa Minor, came to be called  Cynosura  and the question had puzzled historians of astronomy and etymologists, both.  Edwin Brown addressed the question once more in 1981, and satisfactorily resolved it, though his paper is not well known, and is all too rarely cited.

  • Edwin Brown, ‘The Origin of the Constellation Name “Cynosura” ‘, Orientalia, Nova Series, Vol. 50, No. 4 (1981), pp. 384-402.

However, since this section of my post is more relevant to an image on another folio in Beinecke MS 408, I omit for the present post (2022) much of what followed.

* * * * * * *

FIG. 13 (detail) folio 67v-1

Identity of stars used for ‘North’ in folio 67v.

While I assume that the single ‘North’ star seen inside the diagram proper should represent Polaris, It might then be considered problematic as to whether the four stars used in the peripheral emblem are intended to refer to Ursa minor or to Ursa major, but just as we saw a trace of eastern influence retained in the diagram on folio 85r (part), so again I believe the Asiatic face signifies eastern influence in content and not just in form.

As I did in the original post, I note again that Hinkley Allen speaks of  β Ursa minoris‘ being known to the Chinese as ‘the emperor’ and the larger of the constellation’s doubled stars (γ1) as ‘the crown prince’. On both counts, however, the paper by Y. Maeyama must be preferred though it requires no alteration of my identifications for these four stars: i.e. that the ‘four stars’ are stars of Ursa minor; do not include the Pole star itself, and thus that the Asiatic face is a personification for β Ursa minoris.

We must differ from Maeyama only on one point: β  Ursa minoris is not ‘adjacent’ to the Pole but directly ‘below’ it, (see FIG. 8, above) so of all the seemingly discordant sources which Maeyama cites, the nearest to what we see here, informing the drawing in f.67v-1, is the dictum from one of the oldest, most respected, and thus constantly repeated authorities, namely Shih Shen (5thC BC).  I reproduce this passage from Maeyama’s paper directly:

What Maeyama concluded from that study of Chinese sources and the Dunhuang star-maps is that the term Thien-i (Celestial unique) was always applied to the Pole star for any given epoch, but Thai-i  refers to  “the unified celestial symbol of the Pole star and the terrestrial emperor, designated to a star adjacent to the Pole star”. [emphasis, present author]. For the last passage I think it more accurate to say “…assigned to a star below the Pole star” – i.e. β Ursa minoris.

We cannot then say that Polaris was unknown to any but the Phoenicians during the Greek and Roman classical eras. In terms of modern astronomy, of course, Polaris (α Ursa minoris) did not occupy the point of North until the 5thC AD, but the testimony of classical writers is unequivocal:  it was certainly no later than the 1stC AD that Phoenician mariners were habitually taking Polaris as Pole star; which practice the Romans saw as some peculiar and semi-religious quirk of Phoenician mariners alone, and saw no reason to adopt themselves.

The overseer-painter who addressed the detail on folio 67v-1, being apparently without authority – at first – to prevent the drawings being rendered with near-facsimile exactness, even if they expressed forms and ideas opposed to the Latins’ world view, academic traditions, religious beliefs, and conventions in art, has had to be content with overpainting – an act of semi- ‘translation’ that alters the sense of the original but which has also distorted the normal orientation and subject of a Latin ‘T-O’ diagram. The ‘T-O’ was exclusively a description of the physical world. Its imposition here on detail whose content is entirely astronomical attempts to assert that although an Asian king might, in fact, dominate the physical world, the same could never be true of that higher ‘world’ of the northern heavens. As we have seen, however, the Chinese at least, saw a closer link between the two.

That the resulting form (as a ‘T-O’) is oriented neither to the usual East, nor to a other cardinal point, but half-way between two of them is another indication that this layer it was not original to the drawing but apparently imposed on it, and awkwardly imposed at that. I think we may fairly attribute the addition of the pigments – and the peculiar result – to some Latin scholastic.

By the time of interest to us, the ‘T-O’ diagram was far more than what it had been – just schematic diagram of ‘three continents’: it had become for the Latins intrinsic to a highly developed and closely-woven mesh of theological, geographic and quasi-historical ideas. It wasn’t something that scholars and theologians could discarded simply because better geographic knowledge had come along, and I find no evidence to suggest that any idea of the physical world as composed of four continents was known to, or accepted by,  the Latins’ official learning before 1440. I might mention, though, a diagram from an Occitan manuscript dating to c.1350 or so, and which I’ll have reason to refer to again in the next series of posts.

Fig. 14

Merchants and merchant-venturers were more pragmatic than the more sedentary and academic Latin scholars, and what I think we can take from the emblem on folio 67v-1 is that here again we have a drawing of non-Latin origin, brought into that environment by person(s) with open attitudes, wider links and mental horizons, and so conflicting with the ‘official’ learning of scholars and theologians who, like physicians, studied Aristotle and Ptolemy, not works produced for sailors and ‘mere shop-keepers’. As we’ve seen, ‘T-O’ diagrams continued to be produced in formal Latin works for more than a century after the first rose-gridded cartes marine were produced in Genoa and Majorca, and which showed plainly enough that the physical world was not so neatly disposed.

By the time that Dati (or his brother) composed his poem, the era of easy western travel to as far as China had long ended.

Its heyday began after 1291, when Mamluk control over Syria had expelled the last of the foreign occupation forces and the eastern trade which had come through that region was being re-routed through the Black Sea, and Genoa and Venice struggling for dominance in that region. Venice had a certain advantage in the longer term, being included with Byzantine intermediaries as the two great powers – the Mamluks of Egypt and the Mongols – negotiated a working alliance. Latins’ access to the eastern trade via Alexandria fluctuated, being the subject of efforts at embargo and of prohibition by the Mamluks and by European authorities. As so often, the maritime city states put calculation and profit over more theoretical imperatives.

Postscript (July 26th., 2022):

FiG. 15

This post is so long that I’ve decided to omit the summary of research into the history of the type of head-dress worn by the Asiatic figure. It is not a Papal tiara, though it is not impossible that Bonifiace VIII added a second ring to assert primacy over the eastern Byzantine regions and that Benedict XII found his contact with eastern Christians a reason to add a third ring to the papal crown.

I found nothing similar associated with a Mongol ruler, but I believe the type of headdress is one descended ultimately from an older type (attested in ancient Harran and associated with Nabonidus), but more nearly related to forms attested in pre-Islamic southern Arabia and in southern India. The example shown at right (FIG 15) shows a Pandyan ruler. Since those regions were Christianised either directly from Egypt during the 1stC AD (as was the oldest Community of Thomas in southern India) or were Christianised from Syria during the 3rdC AD, it is natural to suspect that the figure in folio 67v-1 may be meant for some eastern Christian (‘Nestorian’) patriarch or for a Christian mongol ruler. I note that the first western Pope who increased the number of crowns on the Latin pope’s ‘tiara’ from one to two was – Benedict VIII, who seems to have done this only after representatives of the Church of the East and of the Mongols had come to Italy, France and England. As to the Mongols’ religions:

During the time of the Mongol empire (13th–14th centuries), [the Mongols] were primarily shamanist, and had a substantial minority of Christians, many of whom were in positions of considerable power. Overall, Mongols were highly tolerant of most religions, and typically sponsored several at the same time. Many Mongols had been proselytized by the Church of the East (sometimes called “Nestorian”) since about the seventh century, and some tribes’ primary religion was Christian. In the time of Genghis Khan, his sons took Christian wives of the Keraites, and under the rule of Genghis Khan’s grandson, Möngke Khan, the primary religious influence was Christian.

wikipedia, ‘Christianity among the Mongols’

The Latin pope’s ‘tiara’.

the following is edited from the entry in the Catholic Encyclopaedia.

It is clear from the “Constitutum Constantini” and from the ninth Ordo of Mabillon (ninth century), that for this first period the papal ornament for the head was a helmet-like cap of white material. There may have been a trimming around the lower rim but it had nothing of the character of a royal circlet. The first proven appearance of the word tiara [from the Persian] as designation for the papal head-covering is in the life of Paschal II (1099-1118). The monumental remains give no clue as to the period at which the papal head-covering became ornamented with a royal circlet, but it is mentioned in a statement of Suger of St. Denis (c.1130). During the next period ( up until the pontificate of Boniface VIII 1294-1303 AD, the diadem remained a simple although richly-ornamented [single] ring.

The election of 1294 would bring a change. As Boniface VIII, Benedetto Caetani would add a second crown. It is evident from the inventory of the papal treasures which had been undertaken in 1295 that the tiara at that era had still only one royal circlet.

Three statues of Boniface VIII that were made during his lifetime and under his eyes, and of which two were ordered by Boniface himself, leave no doubt that he introduced the second circlet. Two of these statues are in the crypt of St. Peter’s, and the third, generally called erroneously a statue of Nicholas IV, is in the Church of the Lateran. In all three the tiara has two crowns.

What led Boniface VIII to make this change, whether merely love of pomp, or whether he desired to express by the tiara with two crowns his opinions concerning the double papal authority, cannot be determined.

The first notice of three crowns is contained in an inventory of the papal treasure of the year 1315 or 1316. As to the tombs of the popes, the monument of Benedict XI (d. 1304) at Perugia shows a tiara of the early kind; the grave and statue of Clement V as Uzeste in the Gironde were mutilated by the Calvinists, so that nothing can be learned from them regarding the form of the tiara. The statue upon the tomb of John XXII is adorned with a tiara having two crowns.

Benedict XII (c.1342) – while the papal court was in Avignon.

The earliest representation of a tiara with three crowns, therefore, is offered by the effigy of Benedict XII (d. 1342), the remains of which are preserved in the museum at Avignon. The tiara with three crowns is, thereafter, the rule upon the monuments from the second half of the fourteenth century.

Further references:

For more information about the detail I’ve shown above as Fig. 5, see

It is sometimes difficult to get results by searching shelf number at the Bib.Nat. Paris website, so here is the link to BNF Lat. 15170.

‘Pharma’? – getting the goods.

WE’RE CONSIDERING whether Baresch was being realistic in supposing matter now in Beinecke MS 408 had been collected – or could have been gathered no less than two hundred years earlier – from ‘eastern parts’.

So far, we’ve seen that it was certainly possible for a person to travel between the western Mediterranean and China before 1440.

As for plant-products, some eastern plants appear regularly in Europe’s antidotaries by the ninth century.

Riddle’s survey of early medieval Latin antidotaries remains a valuable study. He comments:

From a list made of the substances, the following are those appearing in eight or more recipes (The number of times per recipe is in parenthesis): aloes (15), ammonicum (11), amomum (9), apium semen (10), cassia (12), ciminum (8), colofonia (14), fenuogrecum (10), libanus (12), Unum (11), mastice (16), murra (17), piper white-, long-, and black- (33), petroselinum (17), picea (10), scamonia (14), storace (13), terebentina (17), and zinzibar (8).

An examination of the identities of these drugs reveals a startling fact: most can only be found in the orient. Though it is impossible always to identify each according to the exact plant species, one can be fairly certain of the family or, at least genus.

  • Amomum is an aromatic shrub said by Pliny to come from India, Persia, and the Aral Sea region and presently attributed to Persia and the Aral Sea region.
  • Ammonicum, a salt, is ammonium chloride and apparently associated in antiquity with the oracle Hammon in the desert regions of Africa where ammonicum is found. Both Pliny and Galen note its use in early medicine, but it is known to have been manufactured in the late middle ages from the distillation of the horns and hoofs of oxen.
  • Aloes, employed extensively in ancient medicine, is found in south Africa but mostly in India where there exists a variety of species. Medicinal aloes is a resin described in the Materia Medica of Dioscorides.
  • Cassia, probably a product of cinnamomum pauciflorum nees*, is said by Pliny to be the “skin” of a shrub, and it is known to be found only in the far east.
  • Crocus is simply the Latin and Greek form for saffron, an oriental product.
  • Libanus, or frankincense, is a product of the orient, though one variety of the tree bearing this gum is indigenous to the Somalia region.
  • Murra, or myrrh, remembered along with frankincense as two of the Magi’s gifts, is the gum resin product of commiphera myrrha, found only in Arabia and Abyssinia.
  • mastice or mastic, a resinous exudation obtained from the lentisk plant, is presently grown in the entire Mediterranean area though evidence shows that in antiquity and the middle ages it was imported from the eastern Mediterranean.
  • Pepper, of course, is a product of the far east, a fact widely recognized in antiquity.
  • Scammony [derived from the plant convolvulus scammonia].is found only in the eastern Mediterranean area especially Asia Minor.
  • Storace or storax, widely employed in ancient medicine, comes from Asia Minor, Syria, and the far east.
  • zinziber or ginger [described by many ancient writers], is a native to the warm parts of Asia.
  • The remaining substances, apium semen (parsley seeds), colofonia (a resin product), ciminum*, fenogrecum (or fenum Grecum, a plant), Unum (flax), petroselinum (rock-parsley), picea (various forms of pitch), and terebentina (terebinth) are all found in western Europe. Thus, the evidence from this typical antidotary of 9 th century Europe discloses a large use of eastern products which had to have been imported. That is to say, the drugs were imported if the manuscripts of recipe literature were in actual use.

In the same paper, Riddle comments on his various sources saying (e.g.):

A manual for traders, composed possibly in the 11th century or even earlier, lists ambergris along with camphor, musk, aloes, pepper, cinnamon, and ginger. (Kitāb al-ishārati ilà mahāsini ‘t-tjāra (Cairo A. . 1318), as cited by T. W. Arnold, “Arab travellers and merchants, A. D. 1000-1500”, Chapt. 5 of: Arthur Percival Newton, Travel and travellers of the middle ages (New York 1926), 93-4..

We know that the monks of Corbie in the 9th century planned to buy the followingmap Corbie France herbs and spices at the market: piper, ciminum, gingember [ginger?], gario file, cinamomum, galingan, reopontico, costus, spicum, mira, sanguinem draconis, indium, percrum, pomicar, zedoarium, styrax, calaminta, apparment, thyme, gotyumber, clove, sage, and mastick.”

To bring to the local market of Corbie such substances as pepper, ginger, cinnamon, galingale and cloves, and what may have been the true ‘dragonsblood’ of Soqotra, (resin of Dracaena cinnabari),* it was not necessary for the monks to travel east in person, but neither were Muslim traders so welcome in medieval France and England.

*After submitting, in 2009, an article identifying the chief subject of folio 25v as Dracaena cinnabari –  formerly described as Dracaena draco – I learned that Edith Sherwood had earlier offered an identification as the western Dracaena(s) from Morocco and the Canary islands. One of these is now called ‘Dracaena draco’.  As so often, botanical nomenclature has a long, confusing and irresolute history. The line is very easily blurred, in Voynich writing, between modern use of Linnaeus’ categories – which is the basis for modern botanical descriptions – and the ways of seeing which applied in ancient, medieval and non-European communities three centuries and more before Linnaeus was born. 

The cosmopolitan traders who passed easily through areas of diverse religious jurisdiction during the earlier medieval centuries included Nestorians, Radhanites and Jews,  groups whose networks extended far into the east, and who were content to ally in business with local merchants and middle men regardless of race or creed –  as documents of the Cairo geniza attest clearly for the India-to-Mediterranean region.*

*today, the Radhanites are said to be Jews, and were so classed by the Muslim rulers for purposes of taxation, but the earlier historical evidence suggests this might not have been the case and some medieval Jewish comments insist that they were only ‘messengers of the Jews’. This blogpost isn’t the place to explore the question.

apothecary Circenster 4thC gifWithin the Islamic empire, however, the itinerant Indian merchant-physician was also a well-known character, appearing in the Arabian nights as a stock character before the 12thC, and still so common a sight in the nineteenth century that it was in that guise Richard Burton lived in Egypt and travelled towards Mecca. We are yet to see a comprehensive study, in English, of the debt which Mediterranean countries owe to southern India and Ashoka.

Half-way Houses: Fonduk and Apotheca.

Baresch’s letter of 1639 1637 includes the following passage:

Regiones orientis adijsse, ibique thesauros Artis medicae Aegyptiacos, partim ex monumentis librorum, tum etiam ex conversatione cum peritis artis adeptos, indeque reportatos, talibus notis in libro eo defodisse.

Neal translates this, “He would have acquired the treasures of Egyptian medicine partly from the written literature and also from associating with experts in the art, brought them back with him and buried them in this book in the same script”.

I won’t presume to correct Neal’s translation, but note that in medieval Latin, ‘thesauros’ meant not only a ‘treasure-house’ – as it did in classical Latin – but also now a commercial warehouse in which goods were kept and so organised that any item could be brought forward with ease. To the Greeks, the warehouse was an ‘apotheka’. To the practical traders working from Cairo, Alexandria or Tunis, storehouses meant the warehouse-complexes termed fonduks in Arabic. Each fonduk included many store-rooms in which goods being imported, or purchased for export, could be held securely. A favoured city, such as Venice or Genoa, might be granted use of one or more entire fonduks.

But there was a metaphorical sense, too, in which medieval Latins used the word ‘thesauros’ – to describe the memory’s ‘stored treasures’. Altogether, these diverses senses in which the Latin term had been used might have later affected Baresch’s understanding of just how matter now in the manuscript had been (or could have been) gained.

Writing almost two centuries later, Baresch envisages ‘thesauros Artis medicae Aegyptiacos‘ as ‘treasures’ of Egypt’s medical learning, where it might been ‘the learning of the storehouses’. One bought or sold goods for their practical applications, and (as Flood says),* medical uses were among those for which ‘oriental’ plants were traded. It’s just a thought.

*passage quoted in the previous post.

The equivalent Greek term for a warehouse – ‘apotheka’ – had also shifted in meaning. Here again, Riddle

The best illustration of trade in drugs is exemplified in the derivation of the word apotheca or apothecary. The Byzantines had local depots, called àποθηκαι, in the main harbors and road termini of the Mediterranean area. Just how or when the word changed from a general depot to a dispensory of drugs is unknown, but some clues can be found. An edict of Frederick II, regulating medical activity, referred to apotheca apparently in the sense of a store house for drugs. During the 13th century, at least, the word apotheca comes to have the specialized meaning of the modern word. The very fact that the word for an import-export house came to be associated entirely with the meaning “drug-store” demonstrates vividly the relation between trade and drugs.

  • John M. Riddle, The Introduction and Use of Eastern Drugs in the Early Middle Ages’, Sudhoffs Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften, Bd. 49, H. 2 (JUNI 1965), pp. 185-198.

What I’d like to point out in this context is that

  1. The ‘leaf and root’ section’s unusual format finds few parallels in the west, but we’ve noted (in the previous post) two commercial documents, the one an illustrated invoice from fourteenth-century France by an Italian businessman, and the other the style of Chinese ‘Bencao’ herbal texts which were also employed as ‘forme’ for bills of lading and for the purpose of inventory and taxation.
  2. Artefacts represented in the ‘leaf and root’ pages display details characteristically ‘oriental’ (as I’ll show in the next post) and may represent the forms in which particular goods were presented, purchased, carried and/or stored.

The ‘Spice Islands’ –

As late as October 8, 2019, a blog devoted to the history of the ‘Spice Islands’ titled a blogpost “The first appearance of the Spice Islands on a world map – the Atlas Miller (1519-1522).”

The author’s definition of ‘world map’ allows him to claim the sixteenth century map a ‘first’ but in point of fact those islands had appeared on three notable worldmaps centuries earlier, viz. al-Idrisi’s twelfth-century world-map; Abraham Cresques’ great worldmap of 1375, and in specifically Latin European cartography, the Genoese ‘eye-map’* of 1457.

* Biblioteca Estense e Universitaria in Modena – shelf-mark C.G.A.5.b.)

Cresques’ worldmap refers to ‘Jeylan’ (Ceylon) as an important source for eastern spices, though in reality it was another trading hub trading not only in Indian, but in Arabian, Himalayan and far-eastern ‘spices’. Soqotra was another eastern mart of that that kind.

The earliest of the three is Al-Idrisi’s world-map. Al-Idrisi is also credited with a compendium of plants in which each was provided with a detailed description and its name in Syriac, Greek, Latin, Berber and Arabic, predating by a century the Clavis sanationis – popularly known as the ‘Synonyma’ – composed by Simon of Genoa and which was then presented to Pope Nicholas V (1288), commended by Roger Bacon and soon required by the faculty of the University of Paris to be held by every registered apothecary.

Two other books credited to al-Idrisi were about pharmacology, and medicine, but so far I’ve not found mention of any extant manuscripts.

For a first reference to the Jewish works of this type, see below.

  • Barbara. Zipser, Simon of Genoa’s Medical Lexicon (2013). https://doi.org/10.2478/9788376560236 – open access.

  • ‘Simon Online‘ – the translation project. *highly recommended*

  • Savelsberg. Bos, Hussein, Mensching (authors), Medical Synonym Lists from Medieval Provence: Shem Tov ben Isaak of Tortosa: Sefer ha – Shimmush. (Book 29, Études Sur Le Judaïsme Médiéval), Multilingual Edition (English, … Aramaic, Arabic, Latin and Romance).

  • “Only ten manuscript copies of the Book of Roger currently survive, five of which have complete text and eight of which have maps. Two are in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, including the oldest, dated to about 1325. Another copy, made in Cairo in 1553, is in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, acquired in 1692. The most complete manuscript, which includes the world map and all seventy sectional maps, is kept in Istanbul”. (source – wiki article)

Genoese ‘Eye’-Map. and another traveller – Niccolo de’Conti

For this map, the original essay at the Henry Davis’ site cites a study by G.H.T. Kimble for recognising three distinct influences in it, apart from the western cartes marine namely, the Classical, the western Christian and the Arab. Of these Kimble said that only the Arab influence is strong, and that it is improbable that the Classical influence was direct.

However, in what appears to be an increasing tendency within certain central European faculties towards regression to the old Eurocentric default,* a recent essay published online (to which I won’t refer readers) claims that the ‘eye-map’ relies for much of its content on information delivered to Poggio Bracciolini by by Niccolò de’ Conti (c. 1395-1469).

*In the same way, in another paper from the same central European university – one fast gaining a reputation for ‘white washing’ European history – it is asserted that Abraham Cresques’ worldmap was influenced by no more than a couple of western Christian sources chiefly Marco Polo and Oderic of Pordenone.  The author of that paper offers no evidence, and makes no attempt to provide specific textual comparisons, his assertions defying both reason and the informed, detailed commentaries by earlier specialists whose better-informed and better-documented opinions have traced the literary sources referenced by Cresques’, finding that they refer, among other sources, to the ‘Alf Layla wa Laya’, to Ibn Jubayr’s travels and to others accounts of foreign parts such as that by Bejamin of Tudela who moved between centres of the Jewish diaspora.

Niccolo de’ Conti was a Venetian who lived and traded in the east for a quarter of a century, finally returning to Italy in 1439. During his lifetime in the east, de’Conti had married an Indian wife and by the time of his return had a large family by her. She may have been a southern Indian Christian, of the ‘Community of St. Thomas’ – traditionally said to have been founded from Egypt in the 1stC AD. The literature, religious images and history of this church was eradicated by the western church through the agency of the Portuguese, a new legend then created and still maintained by which which all Christian churches of southern India were asserted founded from Syria in the 3rdC AD. Little material evidence remains now to support the older tradition.

At some stage, de’ Conti had adopted Islam and as penance for that ‘heresy’ de’Conti was obliged to “deliver the narrative of his journey” to Poggio Bracciolini.

Whether this was done orally or whether it included surrendering other documents, is not known, but from that material Bracciolini then created a bowderlised and gentrified narrative in which de’ Conti is made a socially elevated ‘traveller’ – more or less a passing tourist – and his 25 years’ residence and life in eastern trade reduced to cursory and uninformative survey of ‘foreign marvels’.

It is evident from other sources of the time, that de’ Conti could not have spent a quarter century in the east as ‘a traveller’ of the sort Bracciolini makes him, but was an resident trader.

I’m not particularly inclined think that Beinecke MS 408 is Bracciolini’s copy of matter delivered to him by de’ Conti, but the possibility has to be noted, and it would at least offer an explanation for a text whose hand is said to be ‘humanist’ appearing in a manuscript whose layout and images are anything but characteristic of Latin Europe, let alone of the Italian renaissance.

I also doubt that de’ Conti could be the chief source of information for the ‘eye-map’ of 1457, because while certainly drawn in the style of the western cartes marine, it includes an image for Canopus+Crux which has it half bull and half fish. A ‘bull of the sea’ was one way to describe a master mariner and Canopus is the chief star of the once enormous ‘ship’ constellation, but in terms of the image qua image, the combination of bull and ‘fish’ is ancient in India. The example shown below was carved in Bharhut, in an early house established by Buddhists for the shelter and care of foreigners..

The idea of mariners as ‘sea-bulls’ was apparently not wholly unknown to the Mediterranean. The following is said (by Charles Singer) to copy an image in a fifteenth-century English manuscript but he offers no references. As I read its details, this image represents the ‘ship of the world’ as allegory of the universe.

  • A list of nine notable foreign traders, emissaries and visitors to India before 1450 is given here.

So now, having established that there is nothing in the historical record to oppose Baresh’s view that a ‘traveller’ might gather material from ‘eastern/oriental’ parts before 1440, we can turn to analyse the drawings in the leaf-and-root section, while keeping in mind that Baresch’s intention in using terms like ‘oriental’, ‘Egyptian’ or of thesauros remains uncertain.

What magic? Where magic? 5c: Green stars (67v). Initial observations.

Two prior posts

These three green stars in folio 67v surely can’t be meant literally; there are no stars which appear deep green to the naked eye. So  we must look at other ways of thinking about stars and about colours to understand what ideas inform this diagram.

Before doing that, there are some preliminary points to be addressed.

(The scans now on the Beinecke site are more bleached-out than were the earlier ones, incidentally fading signs of the vellum’s inferior finish, and making  these stars look blue-grey).

67v green stars full gif

Johannes Klein once said:

“there are actually one to [a] few “stars” on the night sky that appear green and are so described in ancient literature .. One star, however, stands out as it was already described as green by ancient authors that is Zubeneschamali, or Beta Librae in modern terms. Being the brightest star in the constellation Libra, maybe it is drawn at several folios.”

– -Johannes Klein, comment to Stephen Bax’ site,  July 23, 2014 – 2:15 PM.

Klein did not specify which ancient author/s he meant, nor provide any secondary source and I’ve not found the reference yet. If you know, I’d be glad to hear from you.

Hinkley Allen has β Librae ‘pale emerald’ and (p.277) quotes William Thomas Webb,

“in the heavens deep green, like deep blue, is unknown to the naked eye”

  • Richard Hinkley Allen, Star Names: their lore and meaning.(various editions).

Hinkley Allen is still the most accessible source in English, though must be cross-checked against more recent and scholarly studies as e.g. those by Paul Kunitzsch, David A. King, David  Pingree, Tsvi Langermann or Otto Neugebauer, though Neugebauer is not without his biases.

Modern astronomers describe β Librae as a blue dwarf, while admitting (with a faintly grudging air) that  to the naked eye it does look green-ish but is the only star which does.  

That might explain one green star but the diagram has three.

Klein then suggested, reasonably, that they might be the same star repeated.  On seeing his comments, a few months after he’d written them, I decided to repost some research-notes earlier posted in my old blogger blog, ‘Findings’. (reposted to voynichimagery 22nd November, 2014). I’ll include a little of that material later.

So – why green stars on folio 67v?

‘Just for fun’ ?

It is true that Latin scribes were sometimes self-indulgent, so it is possible – just possible – that the scribe was tired of drawing the same forms and made some stars green just for a change.  It’s possible, but it cannot be proven, and the revisionist’s default must be that there’s a reason for what is there in front of you, on the page.

Purely decorative? Again, this is possible, but we cannot begin with such an assumption, and if it were to prove a purely decorative design, then historical analysis must take a different path.  It remains a second-last resort,  the ‘arbitrary’ being last of all.

Classing the diagram – divisions.

Exploring the technical, astronomical reference, the first step  is to define what type of diagram this is.

It includes an image of sun and stars, so we may begin with the hope that it speaks to such things – in which case, the number of its divisions should announce the type of diagram it is. This is a practical way to determine type for any technical diagram that conveys astronomical or astrological information. 

Not unexpectedly, the Voynich diagram is not unambiguous. The diagram’s outer border, though broken into sections, is incomplete to our right and our left so that while we might extrapolate to obtain a theoretical number of divisions for that border, it will be better to use something that is on the page – like the lines of written text. This gives 17 divisions for the circuit. Not an easy, predictable, ’12’ or ’16’. And just to make things more interesting still, the Voynich diagram has these radial divisions, as you see, unequally spaced.

One division (to our right) is actually double the size of those opposite it – where two of the three green stars are.

f 67v unequal divisions detail marked

As ever, one may not meddle or try to ‘fix’ information provided by the primary evidence.

If those unequal divisions irritate, it is something to investigate – not to ignore, arbitrarily to ‘correct’ ‘adjust’, or rationalise.

#Rule No.1 – Don’t mess with the evidence!

A mathematical average (360°/17) will tell us nothing useful, because the divisions are unequal on the page and our initial position – as ever – is that what is there is what was meant to be there. Movement away from that position must be required by a preponderance of clearly contrary evidence.

If the diagram pre-dates manufacture of our present manuscript, the number of divisions may be informative on its astronomical reference, but won’t necessarily explain why they are now painted green, so those questions must be separated.

I’ll leave aside, for the moment, the fifteenth-century scribe’s painting three stars green and concentrate on the number of 17, and unequal divisions of the circuit.

The diagram could be a schematic diagram, or it might refer to a planisphere projection, but that number of 17, in combination with unequal distribution, and combining the stars with a sun(?!) evokes for me description- but not a formal representation – of some form of sidereal compass. To speak generally, a sidereal compass describes a circuit or compasso of the navigator’s stars and though widely known by mariners of the eastern sea – called there ‘the Great Sea’- one fifteenth-century navigator, Ibn Majid, says was otherwise known only to his ‘brethren’ the original ‘barbary’ men of Africa’s north-eastern shores, near Sicily. It may be from them that Michael Scot, in Sicily, had his ‘berber’ star-names. No-one has yet identified the dialect.

However – mariners used the circuit of stars in navigation, but some eastern mariners, including the Arabs, also took the names of seventeen of those stars/asterisms to name their compass-card’s 32 points. On the card, those points are equidistant, but in practical astronomy it wasn’t so.

To illustrate, I’ll show a different example, the Caroline islander’s sidereal compass. This again names the 32 points using just 17 stars. One for each Pole, and then the east (risings) for each of 15, and the settings for those same fifteen on the west. Thus 2+ (15×2) =32.

stars mariners Carolinian unequal divisions

More of this ‘sidereal compass’ possibility later.

It doesn’t do to allow a possibility to take hold and become a theory before other reasonable possibilities are tested. Most important, now is the question of the diagram’s orientation.

#Rule No.2  Never assume the answer’s already something you know. 

manicle elegant lone right NoteThis might be a good moment to remind readers that what is in this post is from my own research,  is limited by that research, and any conclusions are  those I draw from that information. Other and better insights may yet be offered, so if any reader decides to repeat something from this post, the passage should be quoted directly, the introduction of this data and opinion to Voynich studies attributed to me and their own readers allowed the freedom to check out that data and opinion for themselves, so to judge my conclusions.   That’s what citing precedents and sources is all about – respecting a reader’s right to be more than a ‘believer’.  As someone else said,

“In Gd we trust – all others must bring data” – Dr.Mike (‘medlife crisis’ vlog), quoting one of his teachers.

Orientation.

As an initial guess, I’d posit here that, as with the Voynich map’s flame-haired sun-emblems, this face is to be understood as moving and looking towards the west.

Even so, there are two likely options:

First, that the gaps in the border to left and right were intended to signify those ‘gates’ though which the sun, moon and/or stars were variously imagined to pass into, and to leave, the visible sky.

green stars f.67v

Alternatively, we might take it that the sun’s ‘line of vision’ as its line of movement, in which case an approximate path for its passage would run:

green stars f.67v marked E-W tentative

NOTE re ‘vision’ – Unfocussed eyes: I note in passing that while northern peoples presume the sun benevolent, it is otherwise for peoples who know the sun’s savage heat.  Depiction of a leonine or feline sun whose eyes are unfocused is an old tradition in harsher regions, a tradition that survives even today among the ivory-carvers of Benin.  The ‘unfocused eyes’ for the sun, in folio 67v, is one of numerous indications that the image had its first enunciation in an earlier and other context than fifteenth century Europe. Examples below: {left) feline sun with artificial beard – Phoenician ivory, found at Nimrud. dated c.8thC BC.; (upper right) messenger as winged representative of the king-god’, probably Phoenician. Again from Nimrud. (right, below) modern ivory of traditional form, from Benin in Africa’s north west. I first presented these images as illustrations to a series of posts published through ‘Findings’, the first published on July 30th., 2010).

ivory unfocused eyes predator sun

A couple of years later, in treating the origin and evolution of the month-folio’s August emblem, I mentioned the custom again (voynichrevisionist, October 29th., 2012), noting that a faint remnant of that ancient graphic tradition of a feline sun survives in one thirteenth-century coin, described as from ‘Thamarra’. By the thirteenth century, in an Islamic context, this was no more than a traditional motif.

coin of Thamarra gif

‘Thamarra’ – In Wolf’s commentary on Eusebius’ Onomasticon (1971) Notes. pp. 76-252 Wolf mentions that on the Madaba Map there is a Thamara located as suggested by Eusebius, and that the Tabula Peutinger has a Thamaro 52 or 53 miles from Jerusalem while Ptolemy’s list (V, 15, 5f) has a Thamaro about 55 miles distant. The Notitia Dignitatum (74:40) has a Tarba and (74:46) a Thamarra both of which have a [Roman] garrison.

Orientation (resumed).

In the diagram on folio 67v, the artificial beard might be more consciously deployed to refer to the mid-heavens – the time of the sun’s strongest heat – by analogy with man’s greatest strength. between the infirmities of the newly born infancy and late old age.

While we’ve not yet tested either of those first tentative observations about an ‘east west’ line, if the second option survives testing, we might then posit further that the ‘pointer’ flame/lock is meant to indicate a North point, though that meant astronomical or magnetic north for the fifteenth-century scribes or intended user, it is much too soon even to guess.

f.67v pointer-lock of sun hair

But if it were to be proven to point ‘North’ we might then say with some confidence that all three of those green stars should be found south of the sun’s path. For someone in the northern hemisphere, that would mean ‘far below’ Polaris.

Comment: – I’ve often felt sympathy with d’Imperio when she describes the manuscript as an ‘elegant Enigma’. The drawings are elegant in conception, yet their analysis must so often be approached like this, from several individual guesses, each of which must be tested individually against the objective historical data, and then against all the rest, and then by comparison to what has already been learned from other studies of the primary document, until each of the working guesses is  either discarded or found to ‘click’ into place and open out the original maker’s intention. 

Because as I’ve said, this post is  original and I can cite my sources but (alas) take refuge in no precedent, I’m including information about my method and samples of the data, too. I cannot avoid the post’s being long but I will précis as much as possible.

Cultural cues/Peculiarities – false hair and sun-of-night.

False hair and ‘serpentine’? locks.

You might have noticed – though in 2010, I couldn’t learn of anyone who had done before – that the sun’s face looks as if a female, or for a young male, has been given an artificial hair and beard.   These flaming locks (of hair?), are bound into a twisted cord, passing around the chin and over the crown of the head.

f67v-1 Green stars 16 or 17

 Only the two serpentine locks seem to be original/natural, one of the two looking far more like a serpent than the other does. (Caput draconis of Leo?) (Agathos daimon?)

The motif is well known from Egyptian evidence, and then (as shown above) from Syria and/or Phoenician north Africa, but had no place in Greek art before the Hellenistic era, nor later in Roman art..

The only two locks which seem to escape from under that band of artificial ‘flaming’ hair may refer to the Hellenistic appropriation of the ‘horns of Amon’. The example below from a coin made for the first Hellenistic ruler of Egypt, Ptolemy Soter I  who was believed by Latins of medieval Europe to have composed  Claudius Ptolemy‘s works.

coin Ptolemy ! vestigal horn-serpentine late 4thC -early 3rdC BC

The reference becomes relevant to study of Beinecke MS 408 not least because we have an early, direct testimony from a person who had the manuscript in the earlier part of the seventeenth century, who studied it for years and who went to some lengths (including contacting Athanasius Kircher and sending him carefully copied excerpts) as to his belief that the matter in the manuscript had been gained from someone who travelled to ‘eastern parts’ and collected the matter from ‘ancient Egyptian’ documents, monuments and teachers.  Baresch’s comments have sometimes been read not as emphatic “It is certainly conceivable…” but as hypothetical “it is certainly conceivable..”.  I take the former reading, but for reasons we can’t spare space to explain here.  Time and again, however, the manuscript’s content offers Baresch support. This is one instance.

Another possibility deserves mention, though, as interpretation of those ‘sidelocks’, because it offers a direct connection to the simpler forms of container depicted in the  Voynich manuscript’s ‘leaf and root’ fold-outs. Fold-outs like this do not occur in Latin manuscripts before ours, and not for many decades afterwards.

I’ve called the two ‘side locks’ serpentine thinking of the pair which are seen in Egypt, but which were described in the Greek world as the ‘agathos daimon’ and the kakkodaimon. As older deities did, these later became identified as ‘demons’ and mentioned in magic.  The ‘daimon’ was not a ‘demon’ to the Greeks or to the Egyptians.

The type appears on some cities’ coins during the Hellenistic and then the Roman era, and chiefly on  those for Tralleis in Asia minor where they are seen in association with a type of container variously described in modern studies as a cista, cista mystica, capsa or simply as an offering/tax collection ‘bucket’, depending on specific use. 

photo (below) coin of Tralles, 2ndC AD.   left: serpent and cista (‘cista’ like ‘capsa’ also described a tax-collection bucket). (right)  agatha daimon and kakkodaimon – a pair gained from older Egypt. photo Courtesy wildwinds.

coin cysta mystica Tralleis 2ndC ce reduced

Containers of the same sort were are seen (as ‘capsa’) holding papyrus scrolls – reminding us that in earlier times the serpent’s significance was not of evil but of ‘wisdom’ and ‘know-how’.   A later coin from Tralleis, while under Roman rule.

coin Lydia Tralleis 2ndC wheatlid obverse Byzantine style

and below, similar images made during the Roman period but before Christianity became an official religion of the empire.

capsa Pompeii(left) Herculaneum (right) 1stC AD

above. (left) cista (as capsa) in painting from Pompeii; (centre) reconstructed, from Herculaneum. (right) in the form of a 3rdC ‘tax-bucket’.

Quite apart from the implication of those ‘serpent-of-wisdom’ sidelocks, the false beard informs us that the image now on folio 67v was not first enunciated by Latin of medieval Europe.

However, since we know that the diagram was of interest to at least one fifteenth-century person, very possibly European, then that constant purpose is the most important question. What did that fifteenth-century user believe the diagram described? What did he or she (and it was probably a ‘he’) make of the bearded sun, and its being set in a diagram apparently about the night sky? Why green stars?

Might the ‘seventeen’ lines of text describe seventeen brightest stars in the zodiac?

(I saw no reason for such a ‘zodiac’ or ‘luni-solar’ diagram within the context provided by the diagrams adjacent to that on folio 67v, but if you’d like to test the possibility, here’s a link which might help).

“Sun of night”

The diagram on folio 67v seems technical, but its stars are linked with a leonine ‘sun’ and not with the moon so we appear to have what could be described as a night sun.

Cornelius Agrippa’s ‘sun of night’ is off the board as reason for this diagram. He wouldn’t be born for another half-century after the Voynich manuscript was made.

On the other hand, Agrippa’s ‘occult’ studies were pursued in Toledo where, as Luigi Pulci attested in the early fifteenth century, traditional north-African and Islamic customs deemed ‘magic’ by Latins, were being openly taught and demonstrated. What Agrippa would later study in Spain, many others already knew when the manuscript was copied.

This made it worth considering another possibility. Though it proved a dead-end, this may save another researcher’s wasting time.

I considered whether the stars on folio 67v mightn’t relate to the series of lunar mansion stars in some way, and possibly via the ‘dot patterns of geomancy, but though some medieval Latin manuscripts refer to asterisms by drawing a few dots within a border, there’s no ‘seventeen-fold’ system which applies either to the 28 manzil or to the geomantic ’16’- so far as I could discover.

However, since I mentioned interlocking wheels of the ‘Enigma-machine’ earlier, here’s a thirteenth-century divinatory device in which the lunar mansions (here 28 in number) are correlated with the dot-patterns of geomancy – geomancy being one of the subjects about which Agrippa would later write. d’Imperio also mentions it.

astron and geomacy combined device 13th Mosul Savage SmithFound in North Africa the device is  believed brought from the eastern Mediterranean. Its dials correlate the 16 geomantic figures with sixteen of the twenty-eight lunar mansions. (British Museum, Department of Oriental Antiquities, Inv. No. 188.5-26.1. Detailed analytical studies have been published by Emilie Savage Smith and Marion More.  Illustration above taken from,
  • E. Savage Smith and M.B. Smith, ‘Islamic Geomancy and a Thirteenth-century Divinatory Device – another look’, Chapter 8 in Emilie Savage-Smith (ed.), Magic and Divination in Early Islam. (2004)

In case any reader would like to consider the idea for themselves, here’s a slightly- altered diagram derived from one in that study noted above by  Smith and Smith. In common with the sidereal compass, the system does refer to each asterism twice – at a point of rising and of setting.

stars geomantic notae and lunar manssions correlated dial Savage Smith

Another option. An astrolabe?

On a medieval astrolabe, you might find as few as 12 stars, but the usual number was between 15 and 21, with some few magnificent instruments having many more.  One example studied by Savage-Smith includes 50, but in such a case the only way to identify stars in that diagram on folio 67v would be to locate the specific instrument referred to, or take a guess at the 17 most commonly shown on surviving astrolabes.  It might be worth a cryptographer’s time to try that, but I didn’t think it worth mine. I’ve yet to see an astrolabe with such a  ‘sun-face’ at its centre. 

  • For an overview of medieval instruments – Byzantine, Islamic, Latin – see:
    David A. King, “Astronomical instruments between East and West” (1994), and on Islamic instruments other than globes, David A. King, In Synchrony with the Heavens, I. “Astronomical instrumentation in the medieval Islamic world” and XIIIa “On the favourite astronomical instrument of the Middle Ages”: 1-110 and 337-402.

On the subject modern attitudes to the study of medieval astronomical works, King has this to say in another paper:

Considerable progress has been made over the past century toward the further documentation of the history of Islamic science by scholars of divers nationalities, with fortunately not all of them interested only in transmission to the new Islamic world (mainly from the Hellenistic world but also from Iran and India), or transmission from the Islamic world to Europe (mainly via Spain), but rather in what Muslim scholars did within their own culture between al-Andalus and India, and between Central Asia and the Yemen. The problem that specialists in the history of Islamic astronomy confront is that the modern Western world is under the impression that Islamic astronomy is somehow represented by the 5% of it that became known in medieval Europe, and the modern Islamic world is unfortunately barely aware even of that. More recently it has been discovered that some aspects of Islamic astronomy came to Renaissance Italy from Istanbul, with Jews as the principal intermediaries. What is true of ideas is also true of instruments.

  • David A. King, ‘Spherical astrolabes in circulation From Baghdad to Toledo and to Tunis & Istanbul’ (paper published online Nov.24th. 2018 see davidaking.academia.edu. 

A couple of instruments have already been noted in connection with the Voynich calendar’s month-names:

  • Nicholas Pelling, Curse of the Voynich (2006) pp. 22-3. For the month-names’ being in a form of Occitan, Pelling credits Stolfi and Landini. He brought to notice:
  • David A. King, The Ciphers of the Monks – A forgotten number notation of the Middle Ages. Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001. See also
  • Robert T. Gunther, The astrolabes of the world, based upon the series of instruments in the Lewis Evans collection in the old Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, with notes on astrolabes in the collections of the British Museum, Science Museum, Sir J. Findlay, Mr. S.V. Hoffman, the Mensing Collection, and in other public and private collections. 2 vols. (1932).
  • and various works by Emilie Savage-Smith.

Other Possibilities.

Calendar?

As a division of the sun’s year or of the lunar year, seventeen divisions makes no sense practically nor, so far as I have discovered, historically.

Canonical Hours?

Nor does that number of divisions accord with the number of the canonical hours, whether in the earlier or the later Christian centuries, in the Latin or the Byzantine church.  For this point there are many easily-accessible summaries – this wiki article will do.

SIDEREAL COMPASS

Since 2010, when I first introduced this matter to current members of the Voynich online community, referring blog-readers to Tibbett’s translation of Ibn Majid’s Fawaidd, a great deal of material has been posted online about the subject and I see no reason to spare so much time explaining it now. There’s is a really superb old-wiki article, available as a pdf, on the subject of the compass-card and its winds.

This following table and commentary comes from a more recent wiki article.

I’ve corrected some of its errors, but it’s good enough as a first stage in research.

‘Kavenga’ was not the term used by the Arabs, but by some mariner-peoples of the Pacific. Interestingly Majid describes himself a a mu’allim kanaka, which does make sense in Arabic, but ‘kanaka’ means both ‘man’ and ‘navigator’ in certain Polynesian languages even today. On links between the two, I again recommend:

  • Michael Halpern, ‘Sidereal Compasses: a case for Carolinian-Arab Links’, Journal of the Polynesian Society, Vol.95, No.4 (1986).

[wiki article, quote, start]

The “side­real” com­pass rose de­mar­cates names the com­pass points by the po­si­tion of stars in the night sky, rather than winds. Arab nav­i­ga­tors in the Red Sea and the In­dian Ocean, who de­pended on ce­les­tial nav­i­ga­tion, were using a 32-point side­real com­pass rose be­fore the end of the 10th century.[4][5][6][7][8] In the north­ern hemi­sphere, the steady Pole Star (Po­laris) was used for the N-S axis north point; a notional ‘Pole of Canopus’ for the South. the less-steady South­ern Cross had to do for the south­ern hemi­sphere, as the south­ern pole star, Sigma Oc­tan­tis, is too dim to be eas­ily seen from Earth with the naked eye. The other thirty points on the side­real rose were de­ter­mined by the ris­ing and set­ting po­si­tions of fif­teen bright stars. Read­ing from North to South, in their ris­ing and set­ting po­si­tions, these are:[9]

PointStar
NPolaris
NbE“the Guards” (Ursa Minor)
NNEAlpha Ursa Major
NEbNAlpha Cassiopeiae
NECapella
NEbEVega
ENEArcturus
EbNthe Pleiades
EAltair
EbSOrion’s belt
ESESirius
SEbEBeta Scorpionis
SEAntares
SEbSAlpha Centauri
SSECanopus
SbEAchernar
SSouthern Cross Kutb Suhail.

The west­ern half of the rose would be the same stars in their set­ting po­si­tion. The true po­si­tion of these stars is only ap­prox­i­mate to their the­o­ret­i­cal equidis­tant rhumbs on the side­real com­pass. Stars with the same dec­li­na­tion formed a “lin­ear con­stel­la­tion” or kavenga [‘sky road‘] to pro­vide di­rec­tion as the night progressed.[10]

A sim­i­lar side­real com­pass was used by Poly­ne­sian and Mi­crone­sian nav­i­ga­tors in the Pa­cific Ocean, al­though dif­fer­ent stars were used in a num­ber of cases, clus­ter­ing around the East-West axis.[11][12]

[wiki quote ends]

Note – In practice, things were a little less simple. Some of the points here named as single stars were employed as a group – an asterism – of which the major star was one. Also important was the system by which a star was ‘fettered’ or conceptually tied to others as if one were forming a geodesic ‘path’ across the sky towards the wanted destination, but the Arabs didn’t speak of that sky-road as the ‘kavenga’.

Inclinations (not conclusions) – So far, I’m most inclined to regard the ‘pointer’ as north-pointing, and the three green stars as three bright navigation-stars of the southern quarter, though there are ones further south than Canopus.

Here’s how the southern circumpolar stars look to someone in the southern hemisphere. (To find Polaris, follow the Milky way past alpha Centauri and then keep going in below the horizon for a fair way. You can’t miss it..

Chambers of the south Crux Sulbar

photo below – page from a copy of one of Ibn Majid’s works. No further information was provided – sorry. Note the manuscript’s size – only 15 lines to the page. Unlike the Voynich manuscript, this shows no evidence of any aversion to ruling out, to ruled lines or to use of the draughtsman’s compass, signs of which are all surprisingly uncommon in Beinecke MS 408.

manuscript Majids

  • G.R. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean Before the Coming of the Portuguese: being a translation of Kitab al-Farawa’id fi usul al-bahr wa’l-qawa’id of Ahmad b. Majid al-Nadji.

Postscript: Majid was from the Azd tribe, it is thought, and for the period we’re considering, a south Arabian dialect such as Mahri would not be impossible, though it is now almost extinct.  A script not unlike the Voynich script is also known from early southern Arabia.  It has been found inscribed on palm-leaves and is referred to as zabur –  ‘psalm’- script. However, this script includes an ‘x’ shaped letter as the Voynich script does not.   Since the following is only for illustration, and I gave full details when first posting it to ‘Findings’, I won’t add this to the bibliography. 

script+zabur+palmleaves+p149+script+only.bmp

Next post : ‘Sun of Night’ in medieval Ireland and Spain. Green stars in medieval France and since I won’t be referring to the Arctic, here are some nice images of the Arctic’s ‘sun at night’ from the ‘Bad Astronomy’ blog.

Though I brought formal training and thirty years experience in a relevant field to the study of this manuscript’s drawings and have gained another thirteen years’ desultory research experience since then I still can’t claim to know enough yet to have formed an all-encompassing ‘Voynich theory’. All I have is an opinion from conclusions drawn from the data so far.

To be continued…

Next post – Ways of seeing: Stars in the Latins’ tradition.

Skies above – not astrological

I’m going to be very brief.

Having tried since 2010 to explain to the ‘voynich community’ that  the month-folios show no evidence of astrological purpose – regardless of what source may have provided the central emblems –   I’m not going to repeat my evidence and reasoning, but will quote two specialists each of whom, just a few days ago, was kind enough to respond when asked if the month-folios resemble any sort of horoscopic chart known to him.

Both men are competent, dispassionate and (above all) independent witnesses.  Neither did they know my view before giving their own.

re –  ‘astrological’ character for the month-folios:

Regarding Beinecke MS 408 – aka the Voynich manuscript, I can say with confidence that the page in question is in no way associated with astrology. There are no symbols that could be interpreted as astrological glyphs, either of planets or signs. Moreover, the numerical values are not in accord with known astrological symbolism; there are no recognizable asterisms depicted, and the female figures have no plausible astrological correspondence. I believe the attempt to interpret the MS from an astrological perspective is flawed and likely to be the cause of more confusion than clarity.

-P.James Clark, specialist in the history of astrology (eastern and western). Maintains the ‘Classical Astrologer‘ blog.

and on the notion that each month-diagram is a  ‘horoscopic chart’.

[the image provided] is not a horoscope in any conventional sense, as a horoscope would clearly show the divisions between both the twelve zodiac signs and what we now know as the twelve houses, as well as planets and their exact positions in the zodiac Also, it would be accompanied by some data of the time, date and place.

Dr Nicholas Campion, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, author of the two volume History of Western Astrology (Bloomsbury)

 

(Being a revisionist has its moments!)