O’Donovan notes. Calendar emblems 6.3: of ‘Ausonian verses’ and Scythian bows.

2400 words

The author’s rights are asserted.

To the best of my knowledge, all precedents are correctly acknowledged in what follows. If none is cited then, to the best of my knowledge, that item had not been considered in connection with Beinecke MS 408 before it was brought to notice in essays and research summaries published by the present writer from 2009 onwards. If you know better (and you may do) by all means email or leave a comment with the details.

From now on, there’ll be no more quotation marks around the phase Voynich calendar in these posts.

The mail has now brought a copy of Faith Wallis’ English translation of de Temporum ratione and in a note Wallis confirms that verses Bede attributes to “one of the ancients” are those of Ausonius – the same verses used as tags in a twelfth-century mosaic calendar in San Savino in Piacenza.

Here are those verses again, in a nicer font.

More than twenty years ago, in the first Voynich mailing list, Jim Reeds’ referred to San Savino’s charter document as an example of those elongated letters (mis-called “gallows letters”) which have been noted in the Voynich script. Strange to say, no one looked at the monastery’s art to see if it had anything useful to add – so I did, a while ago but the link to computus – and thus to Ausonius – now returns us to Piacenza by a different route.

San Savino’s 12thC charter. cited by Jim Reeds before 2002.

During the earlier exploration and thanks to Jonathan Jarrett ‘s kindly responding to emailed queries, I showed several more such charters with similarly elongated ascenders, concluding that the custom had become rare in the Latin west by the end of the twelfth century, and that in any case it is typically found there only in documents of the charter type written on the authority of the pope or ancillary authorities, but that isn’t our focus now.

San Savino’s twelfth-century mosaic did not survive the centuries entire. Its July roundel survived, but those for November and December did not fare so well.

We’ve seen that the July emblem offers a nice specimen of a locusta– Cancer and one with a three-point head, like those in the Voynich emblem for July.

Here (below) the image on the left shows what remained of the November emblem in 1836 when a careful drawing in ink and watercolour was made of what remained.

(left) detail from the 1836 drawing and watercolour record; (right) the November roundel after recent restoration-reconstruction.

Following the making of the 1836 record, a century and a half evidently saw more lost by attrition. A recent effort at reconstruction and restoration, observing best practice, has kept very clear the distinction between what remained of the original by 2010 and what the restorers added, since they have used sympathetic materials, colours and forms but kept it very clear what is newly added and what was there when they began. I’ve put orange rings over the left-hand detail (above) to show all that remained for the restorers to work with.

It is clear that the roundel had shown a creature whose tail ended with a hook-spike, and though one does not know what other historical information was available to the restorers and their clients, some uncertainty must remain about the original form for that figure.

Attrition must have removed even more of the December emblem, because certain noteworthy discrepancies are evident between the recent reconstruction and details still visible, and carefully recorded, in 1836.

It is worth taking the time to consider those differences with care. As we’ll see, it is not impossible that the figure had not been, originally, of the Centaur type but, like the Voynich archer, a standing human figure of the kind I term – following Cicero and Ausonius – “Arcitenens”.

Of the December figure nothing remained even in 1836 but part of the bow, the hands on that bow, a forearm and a hat. Between each of those details as shown by the drawing, and their appearance in the recent restoration, a number of important differences are evident.

Compare – the form taken by the top of the bow, by the line of its curves; the bow’s position relative to the last letter of “Sagittarius” – and especially the position of the human hands on the bow and on the bowstring.

It is true that the roundel was always labelled as Sagittarius and not with Ausonius’ term, adopted from Cicero*, but we have other instances of Sagittarius’ being represented with just two legs, including in some copies of Aratus that are in Latin, but are found in what were at the time the outer fringes of the Carolingian sphere.

*Ausonius’ use of the term Arcitenens (archaised as “Arquitenens”) is very rare, and the word appears to have been employed first by Cicero in his translation of Aratus’ poem. The Greek term he rendered so is usually found only as an epithet for Artemis or for Apollo and thus implies a human and not half-animal body for the figure.

A Scythian Bow – history and inferences.

The original form for the Piacenzan archer’s bow had it a recurved bow of the sort called Scythian. Above (left) is an example of that type in an early copy of the Latin Aratus, and (right) another whose bow and stance suggests the Parthian, but who is again given goat-like legs, which in the language of most northern Latin medieval art signifies the devil.

Yet that same form for Sagittarius’ bow is attested in what was then Scythian territory, on a coin produced about fifty years after Eudoxus’ death, for a town called Παντικάπαιον (Pantikapaion). The town had been founded by speakers of Ionian Greek; its name would later be rendered in Roman form as Panticapaeum.

One side of that coin shows a Pan-like figure and the other a Scythian bow. To the best of my knowledge, the second motif had not been been recognised as an allusion to the constellation Sagittarius before an essay published, by the present author, on the subject of the Voynich archer. Since then I have seen the second part of the following illustration re-used online by a number of writers, chiefly those interested in astrology.

reprinted from **D.N.O’Donovan, ‘Not a Centaur. Sagittarius fol 73v’ voynichimagery, June 24th., 2015, from an earlier article which the author had published elsewhere in October 2013**. coin by permission, Wildwinds.

Scythopolis/Beth Shean in Galilee

Fifty years later still, in what is now Israel, and upon the ruined foundations of an earlier town occupied by Egyptians and Canaanites, the Macedonian-Greek ruler of Egypt, Ptolemy II Philadelphus (r.282-246 BC), established a new town, naming it Scythopolis.

Scholars suppose the choice of name may be due to the new town’s being first occupied by former mercenaries in the Hellenistic armies, following a practice often observed in ancient as in more rent times, by which unwanted mercenaries are given homes and land and so turned into useful settlers rather than becoming lordless marauding bands.

Scythopolis grew to be a substantial walled city before being taken by Pompey, and though the Romans re-named it, the older name persisted. As late as the sixth century AD, a Byzantine-Greek Christian, a scholar and bishop for that area, is referred to as John Scythopolita (ca. 536–550 AD) or “the Scholasticus.”

The same town is now called Beth Shean or Bet She’an. There, a mosaic dated to the sixth century provides our earliest-known example of a Roman zodiac in which Sagittarius is made a fully human, standing or striding archer. This rota is inscribed with Hebrew letters and, quite apart from the town’s association with Scythians, this form avoids any suggestion of human-and-animal combined, which concept was always abhorrent to the Jews, and at that time equally distasteful to eastern Christians of that region.

Another mosaic floor from Beth Shean, again from the 6thC AD, formed a floor open to the sky and was part of a Christian monastery. This eschews altogether any use of the Roman zodiac, maintaining the much older custom of dividing the year by seasonal activities and (optionally), religious observances. Interestingly, there was apparently no objection to showing personifications of sun and moon, these each representing half of the night-and-day of 24 hours as well as the division between warmer and cooler months and possibly the circuit of stars on the solar, and the lunar paths, respectively.

Monastery of the Lady Mary Beth Shean (6thC).

the

Those two figures may remind some readers of how sun and moon are represented on ivory tabulae recovered from Grand in the High Vosges, and dated variously between the 1st-3rdC AD. Others, more familiar with Roman artefacts may be reminded instead of a peg-calendar (or parapegma) scratched into the walls of a public baths that had been built in imperial Rome, though this example is again dated to the 6thC AD. (sorry about the poor quality image).

A nice blogpost (in Spanish) about peg-calendars.

*Hilario Mendiaga, ‘Parapegma‘, debreves (Blogger blog), (April 24th., 2012)

Beth Shean would be deserted and destroyed in the following (7th) century, so we can be sure both these mosaics date to no later than the sixth century.

upper and lower images from old posts *20010-2013) in Dennis Aubrey’s *Via Lucis*

The earliest remaining western example of a fully human standing archer for Sagittarius appears in glass. First, an example from Aisne (Braisne) abbey, later taken to Soissons according to the late Dennis Aubrey, who took the photo shown (right, upper register).

That window used red glass of a kind which, by the 9thC, only a few families still knew how to produce, and all lived on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, with glass tesserae being found in great heaps near Lake Tiberius and exported widely during the Medieval centuries. It is possible, therefore, that the appearance of the “Beth Shean” type, which appears unheralded in the Latin west was because not only materials, but workers, were imported, and as early as the 9th and 10th centuries, for a new style developing in French architecture and which in its fullest form became known as the “Opus Francigenum”. It was later despised by some Italian humanists, Giorgio Vasari calling it “gothic” – meaning barbaric – but as so often, the label stuck and all derogatory overtones were eventually forgotten, from which arose another mistaken idea that there had been something uniquely Germanic about it.

A thirteenth-century example in the cathedral of Lausanne shows that along with adopting the architectural elements of Opus Francigenum, efforts were made to introduce similar forms for the coloured glass windows. (above, lower register).

The earlier, French, example evinces a stronger suggestion of Pan-like legs, though now covered with a hairy fabric rather than a hairy pelt. The bow was soon made more like that familiar to a medieval Latin audience – a change which makes even more interesting the original form for the archer’s bow in the Piacenzan mosaic.

Between what we find in publicly accessible images such as these, and images used in medieval manuscripts – private possessions by definition – the interactions are certainly fascinating and tempting to explore, but that is more than our present topic permits. It is, however, interesting to note that the Lausanne window as it is now is uses “Arcitenens” and not “Sagittarius” as the label.

One would dearly like to know whether there was once circulating an illustrated copy of Ausionius’ Eclogues as school-room verses, and if so whether those had been replaced as a basic text by the Poeticon astronomicon – and when – and whether (if such a change occurred) this was only because the latter was ascribed, probably erroneously, to the more eminent figure of Hyginus? Fascinating as it would be to investigate such questions, they too must be left aside here.

What we can say is that it would appear the Piacenzan mosaic originally showed a Scythian (recurved) bow and – for all that was left of it by 1836 – might have shown a standing human figure. It is significant, I think, that the original shows the figure not as about to shoot, but simply nocking the arrow – preparing to make the weapon ready, as is also true of the Voynich bowman, though his bow has been formed as a crossbow, and his appearance now presents a curious combination of the Spanish, the Dalmatian-Greek and possibly the Genoese. We can also say that a Scythian bow for Sagittarius suggests Hellenistic or eastern Greek precedents.

In my opinion, one is meant to read in the present form for the Voynich figure a punning allusion to the kingdom of the Archipelago: ‘Arci-tenens’. However… that is not an idea appropriate before the thirteenth-to-fifteenth centuries, when I suggest the Voynich archer figure was ‘modernised’.

Here again is what had remained of the roundel in Piacenza by 1836.

Bede’s source for the “Ausonian verses”

Bede knew the zodiac signs should begin in the middle of one month and finish in the middle of the next – but Ausonius says nothing of that. He assigns the fishes to March, the Crab (= langouste) to July and the Archer for December, as the Voynich calendar does. No crocodile is mentioned, but in his verse for November “bids.. go headlong” which might suggest something of the kind.

Wallis identifies Bede’s source for the verses:

“Bede derived the Eclogue and its introduction from a text entitled ‘De causis quibus nomina acceperunt duodecim signa‘ edited by Jones in BOD 665-667. This edition omits the poem proper. but it is included in Jones’ earlier transcription in Bedae psudepigrapha 103. This same text was the primary source for [Bede’s] ‘On the Nature of Things‘ [pt] 17. Its presence in the “Bobbio computus” (Milan, Ambrosiana H. 150 inf ) suggests an Irish origin
Faith Wallis, Bede: The Reckoning… pp.54-55

Faith Wallis, Bede (trans.), Bede: The Reckoning of Time. Translated with introduction, notes and commentary by Faith Wallis, Liverpool University Press, 1988 (Translated texts for Historians series Vol. 29)

re ‘De causis quibus nomina acceperunt duodecim signa’ – It seems there was an edition (or thesis) with that title issued in 2010; copy listed by the Favey Library of Villanova University. The book(?) has been digitised but is accessible only to ‘alum’ (alumnus?) accounts.

I’ll leave you with a few things to think over. A map of the old Irish foundations in Europe, and two more details from the Piacenza mosaic.

In the next post, I’ll begin with Cicero’s advice to a friend about his son’s education.

Bobbio the Irish and Piacenza.

Nicklies speaks, a little vaguely, of possible or probable links between the Piacenza mosaic and one made a century earlier for Bobbio.

Bobbio was certainly an Irish foundation and Piacenza’s mosaic has some plainly Irish motifs, including one often mistaken for the later and romantic Latin figure of ‘Melusine’, or a type termed a ‘mermaid’ though it carries neither mirror nor comb.

It had arisen as an Irish, and occasionally an Anglo-Saxon image for the ship or coracle, represented in a style deriving from that of late Roman-North Africa, where they are called by art-historians “triton-” figures.

Most of the Latin versions extant are, however, made as grotesques and date from the the 12thC though occasionally, as with the two shown above, a more faithful version survived. That shown on the right (above) is from San Savino. The other is from an English church built in the 12thC, but on an Anglo-Saxon foundation. Whether the older block were re-used, or clerics in this church felt more sympathy for pre-Norman tradition, one cannot say.

Another variation on the triton type appears, evidently by way of iconography of Basilidean gnosticism, in this highly eclectic Late Roman relief found in Trier and dated to the 3rdC AD.

A water-monster in the Piacenza mosaic is oddly reminiscent of our crocodile-Ammit type. It has an unnervingly wide grin as it bears away an unfortunate soul.

It was a custom of the pre-Christian Irish and Celtic peoples to carry off the head of enemy, but faces are given many watery creatures in medieval constellation-drawings, as we’ve seen.

In the next post, I’ll be considering the calendars of the Labours type and how an association with the Roman zodiac appears relatively late in the history of such rosters. It looks as if what we may have in the Voynich series is an intersection of the two – something which is found during the late Roman-early Christian period and chiefly between the c.3rdC -6th C AD.

The post will have its line assisted thanks, indirectly, to Mr. JK. Petersen’s having once mentioned a certain fourteenth-century French manuscript.

O’Donovan notes – Calendar ‘November and July’ Pt 5. November concluded.

c4000 words

The author’s rights are asserted..

I want to finish treating the ‘November’ emblem, so this is long-ish.

THE BEAST that we see as the November emblem is another of those which formed the figure for Ammit, the ‘croucher by the scales’ – the crocodile. The head is especially well-realised and although it is possible the beast was drawn from life, a propaganda-war between Rome and Egypt, between the 2ndC BC and 2ndC AD means that around the south-western Mediterranean, as in the eastern, realistic images of crocodiles were available in enduring media – coins, reliefs, mosaics and in earlier times no doubt murals.

Or. of course, you could see them in Egypt. If you had no ship of your own, pilgrimage ships crossed the Mediterranean in Spring* (wars permitting), dropping their pilgrim-passengers in Alexandria or in a friendly port further up the eastern shore. Christian and Muslim pilgrims and Jews made the journey across for reasons of religion and of community. We owe many valuable records of medieval life and practice to them.

R.J. Mitchell, The Spring Voyage: The Jerusalem Pilgrimage in 1458, (1964) has survived the decades to remain still a valuable introduction to this subject.

Re-collect.

To keep research focused, it’s a good idea to re-visit the list of research questions every now and then, It keeps research on track, and as the investigation answers one and then another, the list grows shorter, which reduces the ‘mazed’ effect. Some questions may be unresolvable.

Overall, our questions about this image were:

Is it a Scorpion?
Was it intended to be a scorpion?
If so, what caused the error? If not, why is it here?
Why ‘November’?
Explain form – spots, head-shape, four legs, upright, looping/lashing tail.
Other details? – skull and ‘hunter’s hat.
Significance issues:-
Is the drawing primarily here for its significance or as ornament?
Is it an astronomical figure, as has always been supposed?
Iconographic lineage:
Place and time of first origin (= first enunciation) in this form?
Transmission-lines?
First instance in the Latin west?
Associated texts – any identifiable?
Is the lifted forefoot significant?

To be clear: this beast is no degraded form for a scorpion, nor a mistaken attempt to draw a scorpion. It is, and was meant to be, a crocodile and is drawn rather better than most crocodiles were in the medieval Latin west before 1440. The head, in particular is very well drawn.

If, as has usually been imagined, this is a figure for Scorpius, why the substitution?

There are a few – very few – examples of a ‘crocodile constellation’ for Scorpius that have been noticed in Latin works made earlier than 1440. One is certainly, and the other apparently from France, and dated to the first half of the fourteenth century. The first is from BNF ms lat. 3718, which is a collection of excerpts whose common theme appears to be medical astrology, though this image comes from a section which is simply presenting the form of a constellation. The constellation drawings’ section [De duodecim zodiaci signis eorumque effectibus…).

After finding this image in the Warburg Database, an online search showed it among the many references provided in Marco Ponzi’s meticulously documented essay of 2017, where he says it had been mentioned earlier by Darren Worley, though (if I interpret him correctly) Ellie Venlinka is to be credited with first introduction to Voynich studies.

*Marco Ponzi, ‘The VM Zodiac as a pictorial cycle: a comparative analysis (by Marco Ponzi)‘, stephenbax.net Feb. 17th., 2016.

BNF ms lat.7351 is attributed to Northern France. The holding library provides (1) the Manuscript’s full description; (2) digitised version. (3) List of persons named ‘Pierre of Dacia‘ – named as the manuscript’s author. By the fifteenth century, according to the holding library, it had come into the possession of Louis de Bruges.

The rest of its constellation figures are generally of Late Roman style and no other is like any of the Voynich emblems.

The next example is more problematic. I can only say that JKPetersen indicated that the image, as single sheet or as manuscript originated somewhere in the general vicinity of Paris or that the holding library is in the general vicinity of Paris. Mr.. Petersen gives a mid-fourteenth century date for it. I find the drawing style – not the subject-matter – reminiscent of that we find in a penitential Book of Hours which, according to the Catholic Encyclopaedia, was made in 1317 for Queen Jeanne the Lame by a monk of St. Denys.

The crocodile (crocodillus), named from its saffron (croceus) color, is born in the Nile. It is a quadruped animal, powerful on land and also in the water. It is commonly twenty cubits in length, armed with huge teeth and claws, with skin so tough that it repels blows from stones, however strong, against its back. It rests in the water at night, and on the land during the day. It incubates its eggs on land, the male and the female taking turns to guard them.

Etym. XII. 20

The first example tells us that a recognisable ‘crocodile’ might serve as a figure for Scorpius. If the second example were also made in northern France about the same time, the context in which it appears could be informative, but all one can say is that the type apparently derives from a work representing constellations in a Late Roman style, that precedent having entered, emerged in or re-emerged in northern France during the first half of the fourteenth century, and that having been employed a few times in northern France was not used thereafter.

Copies of the Aratea have no crocodile constellation for Scorpius or any other figure. Even the Roman-era, Egypto-Graeo-Roman ceiling of Dendera shows the scorpion fairly much as we’re used to seeing it, save a few apotropaic adjustments. (scorpions do not have 10 legs; their bodies do not much resemble the cockroach’s).

One eleventh century Byzantine manuscript, as we’ve seen, hints at equation between scorpion and crocodile, but the work is no treatise on astrology or astronomy and evidently remained in the Byzantine sphere until the sixteenth century.

The manuscript is bound in a 16th-century Byzantine-style cover with thick wooden boards.

A clue to the brief substitution of crocodile for Scorpion in western works may be is provided by the Talmud, on the sense of the Hebrew word livyathan. According to Pinney, the Talmud “accepted the creature as being unquestionably the crocodile” noting that the word has been variously translated as ” a wreathed animal”, “a twisted animal”, and as one “spirally wound” though Isaiah uses it to mean ‘crooked serpent’.

One begins to understand the basis for those convoluted forms given Scorpius in the medieval bestiaries, and the inclusion of a wreath with the November beast in Otranto.

But with all due respect to Pinney, that acceptance is not reflected in our few remaining examples of Jewish calendar series in manuscript art, so far as I’ve found; a specialist may know better.

It is usual for us today to associate the biblical ‘Leviathan’ with a large marine creature – often a whale or a sea-monster – which type is associated also with the constellation Cetus. However, in a footnote to one of his papers, Sela mentions that another name for Cetus was al-timsāḥ meaning literally ‘crocodile’. The term occurs in that sense in a thirteenth century translation into Hebrew of al-Fargani’s Elements, though it is never found in the Arabic Ptolemaic tradition. The term is still current as a place-name in Egypt – Timsah for Buḥairat at Timsāḥ.

Roy Pinney, The Animals in the Bible: the identity and natural history of all the animals mentioned in the Bible (1964) pp. 178-179.
Shlomo Sela, ‘Al-Farghānī on the 48 Ptolemaic Constellations: A Newly Discovered Text in Hebrew Translation’, Aleph , Vol. 16, No. 2 (2016), pp. 249-365. n.41.
Rachel Hachlili, ‘The Zodiac in Ancient Jewish Art: Representation and Significance’, Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, No. 228 (Dec., 1977), pp. 61-77. Seminal study, still a stanadard reference.

We can accept, as a possibility, that identification of livyathan and al-timsah with the amphibious crocodile over an entirely marine monster might transfer to Scorpius if the sky-path of the Milky Way were regarded instead as a River-road, and of such a pairing we have an example from the early centuries AD, in Praeneste’s famed ‘Nile landscape’ mosaic.

Praeneste is modern Palestrina, and lies about ten minutes’ drive from Frascati, the town where, in the Villa Mondragone, Wilfrid Voynich first saw the manuscript that is now Beinecke MS 408.

In speaking of astronomical images created in the Mediterranean world, it has to be remembered that the Romans never knew the works of Claudius Ptolemy.

The Romans never heard of Ptolemy

Astounding as that may seem, all sources are unanimous in saying that Claudius Ptolemy’s best-known works were not translated into Latin until long after the fall of the Roman Empire. Ptolemy is not a ‘Roman’ astronomer or geographer in any meaningful sense. He was an Egyptian of Macedonian descent who happened to live under Roman rule in, or near Alexandria. Because scholars are unanimous on the point, a wiki writer may speak for all.

First, about the Almagest:

No Latin translation was made in Ancient Rome nor the Medieval West before the 12th century. Henry Aristippus made the first Latin translation directly from a Greek copy, but it was not as influential as a later translation into Latin made in Spain by Gerard of Cremona* from the Arabic (finished in 1175).

*Readers should be aware there is reason doubt Gerard of Cremona made even half the translations credited to him, though none doubts he took the credit for them.

According to an online article by Dirk Grupe, which sadly fails to add his references::

Today, three mediaeval Latin translations of the Almagest are known – two made from Arabic and one from Greek. All three translations were produced within the same relatively short period of time during the mid- and late-twelfth century, but each version was made independently from the others, under different conditions and in a different part of the Mediterranean world. Furthermore, each of the versions is based on a different source tradition and had varying degrees of influence in Europe.

One was, according to Grupe, made in Antioch by “Ebdelmessie Wintoniensis” but here one may have reservations. ʿAbd al-Masīḥ [-ibn Isḥāq] was al-Kindi’s pseudonymous title* and ‘Wintoniensis’ is Winchester. That a copy of Al-Kindi might have been gained from Christian Antioch and turn up in Winchester is not unreasonable, and al-Kindi, who worked in Baghdad certainly took his view of the solar system from Ptolemy.

*pseudonymous … according to Bottini, Laura, “al-Kindī, ʿAbd al-Masīḥ ibn Isḥāq (pseudonym)”, in David Thomas (ed.), Christian-Muslim Relations 600 – 1500: A Bibliographical History.

Similarly, it is undisputed that Ptolemy’s Geography had never been translated into Latin before 1406.

Writers of Byzantine history may presume that, as a work written in Greek, Ptolemy’s master works had always been preserved in the Byzantine sphere, but evidence is wanting and the fact may be that we owe any knowledge of Ptolemy to the Sabaeans of Harran, who requested of an early Muslim governor that they be given their holy books – among them them Aratus’ text, and Euclid’s – which until then were in an Egyptian temple in Alexandria. These Harranians subsequently formed the core of early mathematical and astronomical Arabic studies in Baghdad, from which copies of Ptolemy’s Almagest emerged and circulated in Arabic translation five hundred years after Ptolemy’s death, but it would be another half-millennium knowledge of it reached the Latin-speaking west.

So, while it is true that the Romans’ zodiac had always included the figure of a Scorpion as a scorpion and that the Romans knew Aratus well, it is equally true that they had no single or precise definition of the constellations or the positions of stars, and that independent traditions survived in some regions (if not in the west) despite Roman insistence on uniformity.

However, our assumption that the Voynich emblem is an astronomical figure remains just that – an assumption. Even if that assumption is reasonable, to think it serves as token for Scorpius relies chiefly on medieval and modern ideas about etymology, and to some extent on the often-surprising information retained by early modern makers of celestial charts. Ancient ideas and figures are sometimes preserved in them by being differently clothed or assigned by form or character to newly-invented constellations. The constellation Lacerta is a case in point. It was invented by Johannes Hevelius in 1687, illustrated by a type of lizard which still hinted at crocodile or (for a new world audience) the alligator – the key being that it should be well-muscled and ‘weeping’.

The variant spelling for lizard *lacer-, to *lacro, resembles the Latin cognate for tear (as in ‘crocodile tears’). Isidore writes that “The lizard (lacertus) is a type of reptile, so named because it has arms [cf lacertus, ‘upper arm’]. and later that “In the arms is the brawn of the upper arms (lacertus), and there the marked strength of the muscles is located” and “Some believe that the word for tears (lacrima) comes from an injury of the mind (laceratiomentis); others maintain that it is identical with what is called lakruon (‘tear’) in Greek.”

Isidore’s description of the crocodile reads,

The crocodile (crocodillus), named from its saffron (croceus) color, is born in the Nile. It is a quadruped animal, powerful on land and also in the water. It is commonly twenty cubits in length, armed with huge teeth and claws, with skin so tough that it repels blows from stones, however strong, against its back. It rests in the water at night, and on the land during the day.

With the great period of ‘recovery’ which a modern scholar described as ‘renaissance’, Latin Europe discovered a wealth of ancient information more accurate and informed than it dreamed had ever existed. A story of European culture then imagined for itself a history running from Babylonia through the Greeks to Rome and Byzantium, granting ‘Aryan’ status to Arabs for that narrative but omitting Celts, Semitic peoples, North Africans and so forth. Egypt became a land of importance only for its Pharaonic tombs and ancient religion, all of which was imagined ending the moment Julius Caesar stepped off his ship.

It wasn’t quite so simple. Beginning from the time of that Cleopatra, the image of the crocodile was used as an esoteric sign, a rallying call to Egypt and its allies to drive out the Roman invaders and more exactly to assist in building (and after Actium, rebulding) an Egyptian navy.

The Romans responded with a campaign of counter-propaganda, disseminated through the most widely-distributed and the most enduring media – coins, mosaics, and reliefs, and they focused on Alexandria and on regions which had earlier supported Carthage or Egypt against Rome.

In Nimes (right), the Romans had chosen one Celtic tribe, separating it from the loose confederacy of Gallic tribes of that region, and by patronising it and massively re-populating and rebuilding the town, held Gaul. Nimes was so thoroughly re-made that today the city proudly describes itself as the ‘French Rome’. Nimes is in Occitania. Here the crocodile is firmly chained to the palm-tree. ‘Aegypta capta’ reads an inscription on the other side – and this more than a century after Cleopatra’s death.

As in Gaul, so in Spain, in passing through both of which Hannibal had been supported. Here, the Roman mosaic shows Egyptians or Libyans being hunted by their own crocodiles. Both had access to good timber.

.. and in Syria, in Emessa, which controlled some of cedar routes, the message of this Roman villa seems to be ‘Try passing, if you dare”. The flower is the Nile’s lotus.

In Italy Italy itself, from the same period, a replica ‘Canopus’ was created, and underneath the crocodile’s concrete casing, you can still see the remains of a corroded bronze original.

.. which brings us back to Praeneste.

One native of Praeneste who lived about the time Claudius Ptolemy was living and in Egypt, was named Claudius Aelianus, better known as Aelian. His native city had been twice destroyed by Romans, and on the second occasion every male was slaughtered and those who remained driven to lower ground while a colony of ex-soldiers was given the upper city in which was an ancient religious site, originally used by Phoenicians and Etruscans, but which was now being made a very grand temple which the Romans called the Temple of Fortuna Primigenia.

Aelian preferred to speak and write in Greek, and one text which he composed we know as ‘On the Characteristics of Animals’. It was never part of the western bestiary tradition, and the earliest instance of his work’s being re-used in any manuscript held by the British Library dates to the second half of the fifteenth century where the parts transcribed have been copied in Greek, The purpose of that compilation is, as with BNF lat.3751 to serve the interests of physicians. (Brit.Lib. Harley MS 6295, ff 65v-73*).

Paper. dimensions 210 x 145. Single column. It is described as of eastern Mediterranean provenance, and having at some time been owned by the Jesuit College, Agen prior to its acquisition either by Robert Harley (1661-1724), or by Edward Harley (1689-1741). The library notes that the manuscript’s fore-edges are each decorated in Cretan style, with two circles linked by an interlace pattern in ink and colour wash.

Aelian says of crocodiles:

I have heard that the Egyptians assert that the sacred crocodiles are tame, and … the Egyptians assert that the aforesaid crocodiles are endowed with prophecy, and adduce the following evidence. Ptolemy (which of the line it was, you must ask them) was calling to the tamest of the crocodiles, but it paid no attention and would not accept the food he offered. And the priests realised that the crocodile knew that Ptolemy’s end was approaching and consequently declined to take food from him. -‘
Aelian, ‘On the characteristics of Animals’ Bk.8.4,ii. The English trans. by A.F.Scholfield (1958).

The Romans of that time were yet to encounter the concept we call ‘cultural sensitivity’ and in Preaneste a relief commemorating the Battle of Actium – the battle which saw Cleopatra’s Egyptian navy destroyed and herself choose suicide over the predictable humiliations and reprisals inflicted on captives, prisoners of war, and defeated peoples by the Romans. The human head you see through the open oars-locker is probably Cleopatra’s and inclusion of Egypt’s prophetic beast an example of Roman wit.

In the following century, the Christian Greek patristic author, Eusebius, sees the crocodile as an agent of divine justice, snatching away the impure soul… Ammit reprised.

Achthoēs … was the most terrible of all the kings up to his time. He cruelly maltreated the inhabitants throughout Egypt .. fell into madness and was killed by a crocodile.
Eusebius, Chronicle. English trans. from one based on a Latin translation of the Armenian translation of the Greek original – courtesy of attalus.org.

The Roman ‘propaganda war’ which continues from the 2ndC BC to the 2ndC AD, reviving ‘crocodile’ imagery as needed, was interested neither in moral or in astronomical issues, though like everyone else Romans believed one’s fate ‘written in the stars’ and Roman emperors continued to worship Anubis as part of their own version of Egypt’s Isis cult until the 4thC AD.

Within Egypt itself, the religion’s four thousand year history was not erased, even by Rome and crocodiles were still treated as noble souls, were mummified and sometimes worshipped as – so to speak – the ‘guardian hounds’ of the Nile as late as the fifth or sixth century, ceasing only about the time the last hieroglyphics were inscribed in Philae.

This image from Oxychrinchus seems to me to consciously to equate the crocodile, whose head is given a kind of mask, with the form of a galley.

Perhaps this will help clarify:

The point of those illustrations is that if a fifteenth-century European living in Italy or around the south-western Mediterranean, and especially if they were now excited by things antique, could find a good image of the crocodile in various relics of the Roman era, including a bronze statue in what was once Hadrian’s Villa (118-133AD), a few minutes drive from the Villa d’Este.

I admit it makes me wonder whether Georg Baresh’s information had been garbled in transmission – whether the collector of the matter in Beinecke MS 408 had actually ‘travelled east’ or instead to the ‘d’Este’. But that’s dangeously close to morphing into a theory, so I’ll drop it, right now.

A last comment on the ‘Nile Landscape’ mosaic originally in the temple complex of Fortuna Primigenia.

Praeneste’s Nile Mosaic … ..was noticed by Antonio Volsco shortly before 1507; the mosaics were still in place among the vestiges of Sulla’s sanctuary of Fortuna Primigenia. At that time, the Colonna family of Rome owned the town (mod. Palestina). In the 17th century, Palestrina passed to the Barberini family, who between 1624 and 1626 removed most of the mosaic from its setting, without recording the overall composition, and, after further movements and damage, put it on exhibition in the Palazzo Barberini in Palestrina, where it remains. – Jasnow reviewing Mabloom’s study.

It has been badly messed about – the camel’s hump, for eample, is now upon its shoulder. No other Roman-era version gives the crocodile a face mid-way between that of a dog and of a human.

detail from the damaged Praeneste ‘Nile’ mosaic.

A well illustrated article online: ‘The Nile Mosaic of Palestrina: A Hellenistic Depiction of the River Nile’s Route to the Mediterranean‘, The Archaeologist blog. (December 17, 2021)

The chief issues concerning the Nile Mosaic are the date and iconography. K. Parlasca posits an Augustan date, while G. Weill-Goudchaux favors the time of Hadrian. Meyboom himself believes that the mosaic belongs to “the last quarter of the second century and, more precisely, from between 120 and 110 B.c.” (p. 19). There is certainly nothing which precludes such a dating. Roman interest in knowledge of Egypt is well documented at this time. ..

From the ‘Book of Faiyum‘ – extant copies date from 332 BC E – 359 AD, Note the styles of hatching and patterning used here.

As I’ve said, this series of diagrams with their central emblems is termed a ‘calendar’ only because the centres are inscribed with month-names. The central emblems don’t form a zodiac but are are among the handful of drawings in Beinecke MS 408 which use a visual language reasonably compatible with the conventions of western medieval art.

They require no date later than the range we have for the vellum (1405-1438)* and more narrowly still, not later than about 1350 or so, meaning that the fifteenth-century copyists appear to have gained much, if not all, of this section from one or more exemplars.

*Please don’t write to ask why the Beinecke Library catalogue entry adds, another two hundred years to that range. The entry was written in the late 1960s or early 1970s by the head librarian but apparently not from any codicological or palaeographical assessments, these having already dated the quires’ inscription to the early fifteenth century.

centre of the ‘Crocodile rota’ in SIgismondo Fanti’s *Trionfo di Fortuna*. 1527. [private copy]

Sept. 6th. – ‘Primagenia’ corrected to ‘Primigenia’ – the fault entirely due to my appalling handwriting and not the long-suffering typist.

Postscript:

Not only, but not least for its connection to Crete, a page from a late sixteenth century copy of another rarely-mentioned poem about the nature of animals,

Written by Manuel Philes (c.1275-c.1345), it is known as De Animalium Proprietate, and we are indebted to the Cretan scribe, Angelos Bergikios, for knowledge of it, for (as the British library catalogue says) “he made something of a career out of producing lavishly-illustrated copies of this poem for French aristocrats during the last quarter of the sixteenth century.”

Such earlier copies as have been found in the Greek-speaking world appear have no illustrations, but perhaps an illustrated version had existed in Crete. Whatever the case, enjoy Bergikios’ really beautiful script.

Glass and the pearl band

two prior:

“Pharma”? Pt 2-ii. glass? (August 15th., 2021)
‘Pharma’ – Pt 2-i. the legend (August 9th., 2021)

FOR AN ARCHAEOLOGIST, or anyone specialising in a some specific field of technology or art, one’s first instinct when presented with a problematic artefact is to seek that point, within the axes of time and of geography, that it rightly belongs. In the present case, though, another preliminary step must intervene, because since 1912 Beineke MS 408 has been seen through an old and narrowly-defined Eurocentric lens.

That narrative is still substantially that which Wilfrid Voynich created, which was early adopted and maintained by William Romaine Newbold, and later fixed in the public imagination by its repetition in prestigious sources such as d’Imperio’s Elegant Enigma and the holding library’s catalogue entry.

Pressures of repetition, and earnest efforts to justify one or more aspects of Wilfrid’s narrative after the fact (while still altering it the better to support some variant) have fixed an impression among most people that among the few items we can say ‘we know’ is that the whole content of the manuscript should exhibit an exclusively western Latin Christian character.

Given the consistency with which those assumptions have been maintained despite (or perhaps because of) never being investigated with a critical eye, it is perfectly understandable that any suggestion about the content’s perhaps including unmediated foreign matter would cause disquiet.

So in this post, rather than risk being thought to have dispensed arbitrarily with a Eurocentric focus, I’ll do what I can to re-define what might be called the medieval ‘European horizon’.

In the map below, the darker coloured area had been, over the centuries, part of the Persian empire, then of Alexander’s empire, and next of the Median-Persian and Sasanian empire. It then became part of the Islamic empire until, during the thirteenth century AD, much of it fell to the Mongols, whose policy during the first wave of conquests was to wipe from the map any city offering active resistance.

Some sites named in that map (above) were household names in medieval Europe because they find mention in the Bible. Nineveh is mentioned repeatedly and not only in the Jewish religious books incorporated into the Christian bible but in the Christian testament itself (e.g. Luke 11:32).

Babylon was another proverbial name, so well known that when the western pope took his court to Avignon and it remained there almost seventy years (1309 to 1376), the period was commonly called its ‘Babylonian captivity’.

Tabriz I’ve had reason to mention* as the city where Claudius’ Ptolemy’s astronomical co-ordinates were updated and that new data acquired by the Byzantine scholar Gregory Chioniades between 1295-96. He called it the ‘Persian syntaxis’.

*see post of July 11th., 2021

Across the whole width of that territory and to as far as China, western Christian missionaries, diplomats and traders were already passing before the end of the thirteenth century.

By 1350 – about half a century before the Voynich manuscript was made – a census of Franciscan houses lists twenty-two on the route from Constantinople through the Black Sea and overland to as far as China, with four houses established by then in China itself – two in Peking at the terminus of the overland routes, and two in the southern, foreigners’ port known as ‘Zayton’ (Guangzhou) where the Genoese or Venetian Katarina Vilioni had died in 1342.

For a time, early in the seventh century, the Sasanian Empire had included the whole of present-day Iran and Iraq and also much of the eastern Mediterranean (including Anatolia and Egypt.

The Byzantines had reason to remember the Sassanians, whose army had alone succeeded in resisting Rome, and it was never forgotten that in c.260AD King Shapur had captured the Roman Emperor Valerian and him kept in captivity for the rest of his life.

(Those familiar with the Voynich manuscript may recognise in Shapur’s stepped-turreted crown a form similar to that given a female figure appearing twice in the Voynich calendar. In both cases (see diagrams for July and August); the figure holds a large 9-pointed ‘aster’ and is set on the innermost tier at 90 degrees right from the vertical. The inset in the picture (below) shows the example from July, where the crown and certain other details are evidently late additions to the original.

In 532 AD and following several major losses to the Persians, the Byzantine emperor Justinian I agreed to pay 440,000 gold pieces in return for an ‘eternal peace’.

Justinian evidently treated this final defeat as a triumph of diplomacy, and it is memorialised in a mosaic made for the basilica S.Vitali in Ravenna, the work begun in 526 and completed in 547.

Sassanian seal-ring set with a carnelian ‘sardion’.

The mosaic shows Justinian wearing as his ‘badge of honour’ a gem then called a ‘Sardion’ after the city of Sardis, stones of this type often used as a seal-stone by the Sasanians (see example at right).

Worn as Justinian’s badge of honour, the stone is shown surrounded by ‘ring of dots’ as pearls – another typically Sasanian-Persian motif in textiles, ceramics and glass but one equally characteristic of Byzantine art.

The bowl which Justinian carries is also patterned in Sasanian style, though the glass appears richly gilded.

(detail) Justinian I. 6thC mosaic, Ravenna. Basilica San Vitale.

Chan mentions that within each of the hexagons that form that bowl’s basic honeycomb pattern is set another and smaller one. In the upper left of the photograph (above) one of them can be seen fairly clearly – it appears as a ‘dot’.

However, the Sasanian emperor almost immediately broke that first ‘eternal peace’ and another mosaic portrait of Justinian, made for Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna, shows Justinian now without his ‘sard’ and wearing a different expression.

This mosaic is believed made in 561 AD or shortly before, when work on Sant’Apollinare Nuovo was completed. A second ‘eternal peace’ would finally be achieved in 562, after six hundred years’ war between the Romans and Sasanian Persia.

The point I want to make is that even if we ignore the probable significance for the Sasanians of that ‘circle of pearls/dots’ it was an established motif in Byzantine art, and for those who made glass, and fabric, and mosaics.

Tesserae of both stone and glass were employed for mosaics, and such motifs as the ‘pearl band’ remained as a constantly present model for the ‘finishing’ or ‘crowning’ touch, even when the subject was not a member of the Byzantine court.

Ravenna is a little more than a hundred miles down the Adriatic coast from Venice, and its magnificent basilicas remained a model of what could be achieved, if only one had the technical means and skilled artisans. Thus, we know (although not every Venetian site will say so) that when Venice decided to remodel the Basilica of S.Marco during the thirteenth century, it imported both eastern materials, and workers. A nicely condensed account of this basilica’s complicated history is offered by the author of a wiki article, who writes:

The earliest surviving [mosaic] work, in the main porch, perhaps dates to as early as 1070, and was probably by a workshop that had left Constantinople in the mid-11th century and worked at Torcello Cathedral.* They are in “a fairly pure Byzantine style” but in succeeding phases of work Byzantine influence … was reduced by stages, disappearing altogether by about the 1130s, after which the style was Italian in essentials, reflecting “a change from a colonial to a local art”. The main period of decoration was the 12th century, a period of deteriorating relations between Venice and Byzantium, but very little is known about the process .. The main work on the interior mosaics was apparently complete by the 1270s, with work on the atrium continuing into the 1290s.

*we have already noted, in the post previous to this, that at Torcello the glass objects were made ” using cullet (glass refuse) or glass cakes imported from the eastern Mediterranean’.

The basic drawings may have been ‘local art’ but the artisans were apparently not from any local tradition of mosaic-making, for..

After [the 1279s-90s]the St Marks workshop seems to have been disbanded, so that when a fire in 1419 caused serious damage, the only Venetian capable of the work had just died and the Signoria of Florence had to be asked for help; they sent Paolo Uccello.

San Marco never made the transition to fresco wall paintings … probably partly due to Venetian conservatism and also to a wish to support the local Murano glass industry, which supplied the tesserae. The point is that from 1290 – 1419 (at least) no mosaics were added.

Who then is the ‘old master’ among the 13thC images of Venetian trades? His ‘Sasanian’ cap is enough to point us in the right direction, even without the visual pun of his ‘Mosaic’ beard.

It cannot be Master Aldrevandin, but is perhaps his teacher.

Work on S. Marco’s mosaics finished officially in the 1290s – during which time glassmakers were first confined to Muran and then prohibited from leaving the city. Master Aldrevandin, as we know, then made beakers which introduced the the long-traditional ‘pearl band’ of Sasanian and Byzantine work into the traditions of Muran. They served initially in western Europe as his own hallmark and then became a standard motif on Murano glass. Sasanian ‘crystal’ glass had been known to as far as China by the 3rdC AD.

coins Sasanian headwear — photos: (above) two versions of Sasanian headwear.

Ge Hong (283-343), a well-known .. Daoist philosopher with an expertise in alchemy left an important information in his work ‘Baopuzi’ that ‘the crystal bowls made in foreign countries, are in fact prepared by compounding five sorts of (mineral) ashes. Today this method is being commonly practiced in Jiao and Guang (that is, Annan and Guangdong). Now if one tells this to ordinary people, they will certainly not believe it, saying that crystal is a natural product belonging to the class of rock crystal.’

Mei-Ling Chen, ‘The Importation of Byzantine and Sasanian Glass into China during the fourth to sixth centuries,” in Harris, Incipient Globalization?, 47-52 [pdf].

One of the curious details relayed to Nick Pelling by the curators of the Murano glass museum was the secret by which Angelo Barovier produced his hard, clear glass in 1450, was allegedly “a special flux, made of a sort of alum obtained from eastern plants.” (Curse p.).

Plant-ash sodas are not a form of alum, but that type of plant-ash alkali was regularly preferred in Muran, even when other Italian glassmakers used natron, and was known popularly as alluma catana, literally ‘basin alum’. Of itself, however, it couldn’t harden or clarify glass and in theory the ashes from sola kali would not produce a different result, whether burned in Spain, in ‘the east’ or in Italy. The important question, of course, is “how could Barovier know?” If the seller told him the virtues of a new type of plant-ash, it was not Barovier’s invention. If not, where and how would a man restricted to his island and prohibited from discussing his craft, even think to look for and then to find and import the right sort of ‘plant-ash’? Is it more likely that some Venetian trader brought back both the material and an understanding of those ‘five mineral ashes’?

I suspect the ‘eastern plant ash’ was another of those memories passed down in Murano from the time of Master Aldrevandin, but Barovier’s method for clarifying and hardening glass is still not easy to discover. The answer may lie in one of the following references. I’ve been unable to sight either during the past few months.

Cesare Moretti and Tullio Toninato (eds.) and David C. Watts and Cesare Moretti (ed. and trans.),Glass Recipes of the Renaissance: Transcription of an Anonymous Venetian Manuscript. (2011).
Antonio Neri, L’Arte vetraria = The Art of Glass, translated and annotated by Paul Engle, 3 vols., (2003–2007).

for those references, I am indebted to the author of

Corning Museum of Art, ‘Glass as a Material in Renaissance Venice’.

(above) The three wise men from the east. Artefacts display characteristically Sasanian techniques in metalwork (and glass?). detail of a mosaic in Sant’Apollinare Nuovo, Ravenna.

__________________

POSTSCRIPT – regarding the figure who holds a nine-point ‘aster’ in the Voynich calendar’s months of July and August:

Persia’s star was ever Perseus ‘the destroyer’ envisaged as a horse mounted by a skeleton or phantom rider. The equation was known to Herodotus in the 5thC BC and still in the fifteenth century AD – at least to some. Herodotus therefore has Perseus as the progenitor of the Persian people. Ibn Majid, writing in the fifteenth century, names this horse (as the constellation was earlier envisaged) ‘Al Kumait’ – the unbridled. The image on the card below, showing the rider ‘backward-turned’ is the older and more authentic form. See also Alamy image (WP338D) which I cannot include here.

The pictures in this set of 17 cards show a markedly different origin and intellectual level from all others known in Europe. Unlike most who comment on such game-cards, I’m of the opinion that these represent an original type and I’m quite prepared to believe such cards as these might have served as tutorial aids in fourteenth century France.

If that ‘aster’-holding figure is meant for the Persians’ star, it is most likely to refer to Algol, properly named Al-ghul in the Arabic, though I don’t know the old Persian term for it. The star was envisaged as a blaze, or trophy (see above, and below) on the horse’s hip, though at other times represented as a trophy-head -or even as a wine or water-skin. (see further below).

…as a wine-skin or water-skin.

Due to precession, Perseus’ ‘rain of arrows’ (the Perseid meteor showers) now peaks in August. For more on this see: here. The floating scarves parallel the wisps of the Milky Way.

On retention of pre-Islamic elements in later Iranian art, including the ‘flying gallop’ and the scarves, see ‘ART IN IRAN xii. Iranian pre-Islamic Elements in Islamic Art’, Encyclopaedia Iranica. (online).

In the Greek astronomy, Perseus is a human figure and the ‘ghul’ the trophy as Medusa’s head.

PPS – apologies to readers for the numerous ‘updates’ – mainly typos, grammatical errors and other small annoyances. Just had my second inoculation and the brain isn’t working properly.

Dec. 29th., 2021.

Happening to re-read this today, I see I should have been more specific AND should have included the ‘petal’ held by the figures. ‘Nine-petals’ is probably more accurate. Here are the details I mean. My one reservation is that Perseus’ temporary victory into the North occurs now, yet these figures appear at ninety degrees to the vertical. The distinction, I expect, is more apparent that real. More – this example again seems to me to indicate that the inner circuit refers to the polar and circumpolar stars and the outer to those on or near the horizon. I admit to having devoted less time to this question than it deserves. Here are the details I mean. from July and August in the Voynich calendar.

“Pharma”? Pt 2-ii. glass?

Recap of previous post.

William Romaine Newbold relied on nothing but his imagination and a false analogy in supposing that a section of the manuscript shows “receptacles used by [western European] pharmacists”.

But that notion was relayed, untested, through following generations of Voynich writers, until its repetition in Mary d’Imperio’s Elegant Enigma and in the Beinecke Library’s catalogue, now sees Newbold’s notion constantly mistaken for fact.

H.P. Kraus may have influenced the Beinecke and d’Imperio, but his description (Enigma* p.79) mentions neither ‘pharmacy’ nor ‘pharmaceutical jars’.

Investigation of the pictorial, documentary and archaeological records, however, shows that medieval pharmacies in western Europe were using the same practical, utilitarian containers at that time as they had done for generations before and would continue to do for generations more. Most of the forms and varieties of pharmacists’ containers, other than the albarello and some unguent containers (as seen in images of the ‘three Marys’) are accurately shown in the scene below, in painting made fully sixty years after the manuscript’s radiocarbon range of 1404-1438.

Glass?

Abstract. Setting aside Newbold’s anachronistic ‘pharma-‘ jars, it is still worth asking whether any drawings in the ‘leaf and root’ section were meant to describe items made of glass. Information given to Nick Pelling during his visits to the Murano glass museum, and which he reported in his Curse of the Voynich (2006) opens new avenues for research when considered in the broader historical context, including the work of a ‘Master Aldrevandin’ who worked in Muran from 1290 to 1350.

An editorial comment considers problems of interpretation and whether we may reasonably read some drawings in the ‘leaf and root’ section as representing glass.

In a subsequent post, we track the re-emergence of clear (colourless) hard glass from thirteenth-century Venice back to Syria and Egypt where, after 1221, such glass had suddenly re-emerged in beautifully enamelled and gilded glass objects, centuries after the secret of making such glass had been thought lost.

____________

Preliminary note: About the Voynich manuscript’s written text – when it was first composed and whether what we now have is a transcription, translation, a text newly composed in the fifteenth century and/or an enciphered text I have no opinion and none, I think, has yet been established certainly. More accessible information is offered by the manuscript’s pictorial text – if treated seriously- and it is with that we are here concerned.

NICK PELLING made his first visit to the Murano glass museum in December 2004, before samples of the manuscript’s vellum returned an adjusted radiocarbon date-range of 1404-1438 AD.

Pelling was hoping to resolve a question as to whether these ‘ornate and florid’ forms (as d’Imperio called them) found any counterpart in glass produced from fifteenth-century Venice. In 2004, Pelling was one of a very few current researchers who considered the manuscript to have been produced during the fifteenth century. (The others who reached that view before the radiocarbon-14 results were published were Philip Neal, Patrick Lockerby and Edith Sherwood. The present author, dating the content distinct from manufacture, had the early fifteenth century as terminus ad quem).

When Acco fell to the Mamluks in 1271 AD, Latin Europe lost its last possession in the Mediterranean’s eastern shore. Venice managed to maintain certain prerogatives in the region (not least by actively collaborating with the Mongols’ plans to invade parts of Europe), but the city realised that it might also capitalise on the fact that other regions of Europe no longer had easy access to glass or to materials needed for its making.

The very next year, 1272, saw Venice issue a law forbidding glass furnaces to be built anywhere in its territory save on the island of Muran, and the glassmakers were thus obliged to remove there too.

(detail) from a 17thC map of Venice and environs. Note that the islands were not yet (or not shown) linked by bridges to each other or to the mainland.

Among the earliest of the glass-makers to arrive were the Barovier family and a certain ‘Master Aldrevandin’. It is possible that the latter, who had the secret of making a good, hard clear glass, was the reason that in 1295 Venice issued a further law, prohibiting glassmakers from leaving Venice, under pain of death.* Muran then became a ghetto but we should not think of it as an artisans’ commune. Epstein, citing Trivellato, speaks of how the concentration of Venetian glassmakers along one street of that small island fostered intense competition. As ever, a technical secret was one’s fortune.

*‘under pain of death’ – allegedly. I’ve not yet verified this.

S. R. Epstein, ‘Craft Guilds, Apprenticeship, and Technological Change in Preindustrial Europe’, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Sep., 1998), pp. 684-713. p.701n.
Trivellato, Francesca. “Was Technology Determinant? The Case of Venetian Glass Manufacture, Late 17th Century – Late 18th Century.” Mimeo, University of Venice, 1996.

But none of these laws could overcome the fact that Venice was not naturally endowed with the materials needed for glassmaking. In theory, glassmaking needs silica, usually in the form of sand, and an alkali which was usually natron or ash obtained from salt-loving members of the ‘glasswort’ family and, of course, a constant plentiful supply of fuel for the furnaces. Muran had none of those things, and the Adriatic did not contain sand suitable for glassmaking, nor the right sort of plants to make the right sort of soda-ash..

In Italy, at Torcello (seventh–eighth centuries) and at San Vincenzo al Volturno (ninth century), glass waste found on the site was interpreted as evidence not for a glass factory but for the making of objects from glass using cullet (glass refuse) or glass cakes imported from the eastern Mediterranean. Venice became a major glass-making centre, manufacturing both raw glass and glass objects, only by the [late] thirteenth century. To achieve this status, however, the city was forced to import a considerable range of raw materials, natron, plant ash, sand and cullet, from elsewhere in Italy and the Levant, and to impose stringent trading restrictions on these materials. This level of imports suggests that a trade in raw glass alone might have been generally easier and more straightforward than one in the materials for glass manufacture. (p.36)

Liz James, ‘Byzantine glass mosaic tesserae: some material considerations’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies Vol. 30 No. 1 (2006) 29–47.

Discerning intention – editorial comment.

Apart from other important considerations, it must be kept in mind that in different places, and in different times, different codes have been employed to represent three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface.

For example, Europe began indicating depth and distance by use of a ‘vanishing point’ perspective, where e.g. the side of a table nearest the viewer was drawn larger and the more distant, smaller. East Asian art, and Manichaean art did the opposite. What we find in the Voynich drawings is an apparent lack of interest in, or lack of awareness of, either of those two conventions. This is one reason that Panofsky could say that these drawings are no product of the Renaissance (which in his time was dated from c.1500).

The ‘leaf-and-root’ section uses a very limited palette, This means that we cannot presume that the colours used are being used literally, and in fact we cannot know certainly whether the colours we see now are those of the first enunciation of these drawings.

We cannot presume that the colours used for parts of these artefacts are used literally, or whether some are employed according to a code of significance – as for example, whether green might mean one material and red another – as between metal and ceramic, or silver versus gold.

Since the palette includes no pigments in the range from pink though purple to black so – to take another hypothetical example – if one wanted to represent a black stone mounted in silver, the convention might be to leave the silver areas blank and represent black by the darkest colour in the palette, which in this case might be blue or dark red.

The important factor is not what seems ‘commonsense’ to a twenty-first century, western-educated and literate person, but what graphic conventions were shared by the first enunciator and his contemporary audience.

Surfaces which are coloured red, as in examples [A,B] (below) might be intended to be interpreted as showing a red substance through a translucent or transparent material but might, equally, mean that the surface is coated with coloured earth, paint, or enamel – or that it is of some particular material, such as marble or gold.

In example [A] the correct reading might be of a stoppered bottle. Or instead, a solid or a hollow elipsoid with metal mounting. To illustrate the latter, I’ve chosen an object made in nineteenth-century Australia to ensure that no inference will be taken that their juxtaposition implies a Voynich theory.

Then we have the ‘dots’ seen on some of these drawings; they might be simple ornament as Pelling initially supposed, or they might signify that the material is pieced, or set with jewels, or patterned with dots repousse.,, or something else again.

In my experience, comments made about the drawings in the Voynich manuscript have most often fallen into easy errors when the most intelligent and self-confident researchers suppose that research is unnecessary – who would not bother testing a Venetian hypothesis by visiting a Venetian museum, but would expect the answer could be gained by subjective impressions, or ‘commonsense’. What any group of people regard as ‘commonsense’ is a product of their own time and community; there are very few universals – not even about whether human beings cannot fly unaided or walk on water, let alone how to convey information through the graphic line.

One error is especially common among Voynich writers, and that it to adopt a ‘binary’ attitude to images, seeing them as being either easy because literal ‘portraits’ of a thing, or as being essentially inaccessible because the result of some ‘artist’s personal creative vision, with which the reader can only connect by turning to his own emotions and responses to the picture.

Newbold made that mistake. He supposed the ‘leaf and root’ section comprised of portrait-style drawings and his ‘commonsense’ reading resulted in anachronism. For other sections, especially the ‘ladies’ pages, he relied on his personal emotions and responses and so interpreted them as a combination of biology and late-classical philosophy.

Botanical scientists have been among the most over-confident, presuming that a plant-picture ‘ought’ to be a specimen-portrait and (worse) one informed by the categories of Linnaeus. Finding that the drawings do not allow such easy reading, most have ignored the fact that these are drawings, not photos nor plants, and have ignored or arbitrarily ‘corrected’ what is on the page – so they identify drawings from a virtual-Voynich manuscript, not the real one. O’Neill was among the first, but has not been the last to presume as default that the purpose of a botanical image is to relieve ignorance. A farmer needs no scientifically accurate drawing to know a cabbage; an embroiderer may not care at all whether a design is botanically accurate.

I consider that the vegetable elements in the ‘leaf-and-root’ section, as distinct from the larger plant-pictures, were meant fairly literally – a little stylized to be sure, and with the most important points exaggerated or dramatised (as e.g. spines of Bombax ceiba) but I do not presume the same true of the way these accompanying artefacts are rendered.

Attempting to discern how those details were designed to be read might be easier if we could access the written text. As it is, the only way is the harder way.

Five examples.

What persuades me that some, at least, of the artefacts in this section are meant to be read as made of glass is the depiction of a thick ‘white ring’ around the neck of example [C].

‘The neck-ring ‘wreath’

It is a regular feature of glass made during the period of Roman and of Roman-Byzantine rule in those glass-making areas of the lower, eastern Mediterranean shores – the region that was then and which remained the principal source of glass objects and of materials for glass-making.

Photos below: (left) an example from Karanais in Egypt (3rd-4thC AD); The wide top is intended to hold a strainer or materials serving that purpose. (centre and right) four examples from Palestine under Byzantine-Roman rule (3rd-7thC AD).

A scientific study published in 2020 has finally proven beyond doubt that both opaque and transparent decolourised glass (‘white’ and ‘clear’ glass) originated in the same region and principally in what had been the multicultural Hellenistic city of Alexandria. The term ‘Roman’ glass speaks to a period of time, not to provenance.

The sand along the Mediterranean coast of Egypt and Levant (Palestine, Israel, Lebanon and Syria) originates from the Nile and is ideal for glass production because it naturally contains the amount of lime needed to keep the glass stable and not degradable. In the Levant, they made transparent glass by adding manganese – it was good, but not perfect. The second type of Roman glass, which scientists now show came from Egypt, the glassmakers made transparent by adding antimony (Sb), which made it crystal clear….The research team who made the discovery stated that Roman glass was “not surpassed until the rise of the European industries in the eighteenth century,” news release dated July 9th., 2020.

Scientific Reports DOI 10.1038/s41598-020-68089-w
.

The curious thing is that the secret of making ‘clear’ glass by either method appears to have been lost in about the 2ndC AD, and would not reappear until it does so quite suddenly, in Syria from c.1221 AD … and then in Europe in the last decade of that century or the first half of the next, first and most notably in the works of Master Aldrevandin within Europe.

Contrary to what the historians of Murano glass would have us believe, the technique for making clear hard glass was not ‘invented’ there by Angelo Barovier in 1450.

All of which means that if any drawings in the manuscript’s ‘leaf and root’ section are meant to be read as clear glass, and yet lack any figural decoration, our likely options are limited:

the image was first enunciated within the Roman world before the end of the 2ndC AD.
it was first enunciated in whatever region the secret was then preserved, and from whence it would return to the Mediterranean coast early in the thirteenth century.
It was first enunciated in the Levant after c.1221 by persons of unknown origin.
it was first enunciated in Europe by the only person in Europe who seems to have had the secret of making clear glass before 1440, the a person we know only as ‘Master Aldrevandin’ and who is associated with Muran between the years 1291/2-1350. So far all known examples of his work are drinking beakers and simple, small, bottles. None has a profile ‘ornate’ or ‘florid’.

Thus, understanding these Voynich drawings reduces to two factors – the question of clear glass, and comparable function and/or profiles.

What is not typical of Roman glasses any is inclusion of a lower ring about the object’s stem – as seen in examples [B,C,D] though it does occur in regions of Umayyad influence

In Muran, where the early models imitated pottery goblets we see knobbed stems. The more interesting detail on this example, however, is the style of the gilded ornament as a very simple interlace-and-dot that may be compared with the finer border from a mid-fourteenth century beaker from Mamluk Egypt or Syria, where the ‘dots’ are within the interlace.

early glass [15thC?} from Muran. Photo courtesy N.Pelling (2004)

The conclusion which appears unavoidable, in relation to Muran, is that ‘Master Aldrevandin’ had acquired the secret himself or, more likely, through a master who had worked in Alexandria or in the Levant after 1221 but before 1290 when Master Aldrevandin is said to have arrived in Muran.

Since nothing known of Master Aldrevandin’s work suggests he made other than small beakers and small bottles, and the clear glass of Angelo Barovier comes too late, so the obvious next step is to look to the east.

A series of carvings on S.Marco represent Venetian crafts. Among them is one curious figure, described as an ‘old man’ though his skin is not shown withered; his face is fully-fleshed and his limbs well rounded. He wears a Sasanian(?) style helmet or turban, has a ‘Mosaic’ sort of beard. His eyes are provided pupils yet he appears to be both blind and lame. He sits in a chair, like a master, but with the robe hitched up to show a bare foot. What is he doing there, among the farmers and wine-makers, cobblers and fishermen? The lameness may be literal, and so too the blindness. Both were professional diseases of those who worked with metal or with glass and this is so well known that a seventeenth-century map of Venice makes the wind which blows upon Muran a figure with covered eyes.

In the closed-off world of the Muran glass-makers, talk of old Master Aldrevandin’s clear glass and its lost secret was surely transmitted down the years until, a century later, one of the Barovier family managed to make a similar glass. It was obvious that a fortune had awaited the first to obtain that secret and fame as well as fortune then followed Angelo Barovier.

Unlike the technique for decolourising glass, that of enamelling (well or badly) is quite widely attested and the evidence also suggests that the plain glasses were exported from Muran, and painted by others, to the buyer’s order.

Beaker with prunting 13thC. provenance uncertain. Possibly Germany.

In 1290, Master Aldrevandin may have remained on Muran, but his glasses appear elsewhere in Europe and bear his name, so it is thought possible that he went travelling for a time, making his clear glass beakers and small bottles – perhaps in England but with a better argument possible for Germany where, however, glass of such clarity soon after ceases to appear in the archaeological record.

All our evidence to date indicates that during the last years of the thirteenth century, Master Aldrevandin was, quite literally, the only glassmaker in Europe who knew that secret – which is why it is conceivable that he was a chief reason for the Republic’s introducing the more restrictive law of 1295 prohibiting any glassmaker from attempting to leave the city.

William Gudenrath, ‘History of Venetian Glassblowing: The Aldrevandin Group‘, The Techniques of Renaissance Venetian Glassworking. Web publication by the Corning Museum of Glass.

So we have two threads to Master Aldrevandin’s story. One has it that he produced glass only in Venice for sixty years, from 1290-1350, and the other that for a time he made glass elsewhere (rather than Venice’s simply exporting it) and did so chiefly, if not only, in Germany so far as the current archaeological evidence would indicate. One Aldrevandin beaker carries heraldic motifs that were again recorded in the “Züricher Wappenrolle”, dated to about 1320-1330. (Krueger, op.cit.) But for such work, the glassmaker needn’t have been in Germany, nor the enamelling done in Muran.

Ingeborg Krueger, ‘A Second Aldrevandin beaker and an update on a group of enameled glasses’, Journal of Glass Studies, Vol. 44 (2002) pp. 111-132. (with thanks to Nick Pelling for drawing my attention to the article).

His production ceases in 1350 and though one might posit that the master-apprentice line (if any) was then broken when Plague arrived in Venice in January 1348, two years at most before his death, we have no information about why the secret of his clear glass remained lost to Venice for the following century – that is, until after the date-range for the Voynich manuscript.

The chief objection to positing any European origin for the artefacts in the ‘leaf and root’ section, is that during the years 1404-1438 it appears there was no-one within Europe who made such objects and none living who knew the secret of clear colourless glass – if any is meant to represent glass of that sort.

The next logical place to look is the eastern Mediterranean, where we find some echoes and some items of apparently comparable purpose, though no exact matches.

The curious-looking base of [D] for example, finds an echo, if not ‘match’ in pottery produced in Palestine under Byzantine rule (below, left). (The chevron patterns on those glass and pottery items, like the spiral trail about the bottle’s neck remind us that transmission of a craft in the old way tended to preserve forms over millennia so long as the master-apprentice line could be maintained).

The structure given the object in drawing [B] appears to me to indicate its purpose was that of a strainer and/or cooler for some liquid, possibly wine if we are to read the red pigment literally, but as a rule when a bowl-shape is found formed without any attached base, we should describe it as lamp.* I know of no example having a precisely similar form, but artefacts having that function and a design on similar principles are attested in the same region – as the example shown (below, right). Apparently the drawing envisages a smaller strainer (if that’s what it is) able to sit over an individual vessel (goblet?). Such an arrangement might also be used to add a scent or flavour to the liquid.

for numerous examples, including examples with bowl of similar ‘goblet’ profile see e.g. Shulamit Hadad, ‘Excavations at Bet Shean, Vol.2: Islamic Glass Vessels from the Hebrew University Excavations at Bet Shean’, Qedem* Reports, Vol. 8 (2005), pp. I-IX,1-202.

An engineer could doubtless explain in technical terms the meaning of the drawing’s ‘cutaway’ parts [B, enlargement below]. My impression – and it is only an impression – is that the parts coloured green might be meant for pottery rather than glass.

The most interesting drawing of our five examples, I think, is drawing [B] if the lower part is intended to represent a substance seen through a transparent or translucent material.

Others of our five examples, and indeed all of them, might be meant for glass, but the rest can be explained as easily as ceramic or as opaque glass of a type made in the Mediterranean from ancient times.

And ‘from ancient times’ may well be a clue, since we know that in late medieval Italy, all things ‘antique’ were highly valued both aesthetically and financially. I think one might also expect that ‘Roman’ glass pieces turned up more often then than now.

Even so the weight of evidence is that the artefacts in the leaf-and-root section, being depicted before 1440, refer either to the pre-Christian era or to Syria and Egypt after .1221 for there too the secret of clear glass, which had been lost for centuries, re-appears suddenly, in the form of clear glass beakers superbly enamelled and gilded.

Postscript –

It is interesting to speculate, but is a matter for the genealogists to discover, whether Master Aldrevandin is related to Ulisse Aldrovandi, a sixteenth-century collector of many things, one of which was a Ming bowl, and another a small group of curious medieval plant-books, for which Aldrovandi coined the term ‘herbals of the alchemists‘ (- not “alchemical herbals” as is sometimes said).

A Scythian Bow – history and inferences.

Scythopolis/Beth Shean in Galilee

Bede’s source for the “Ausonian verses”

Bobbio the Irish and Piacenza.

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Re-collect.

The Romans never heard of Ptolemy

Postscript:

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two prior:

“Pharma”? Pt 2-ii. glass? (August 15th., 2021)

‘Pharma’ – Pt 2-i. the legend (August 9th., 2021)

*see post of July 11th., 2021

*we have already noted, in the post previous to this, that at Torcello the glass objects were made ” using cullet (glass refuse) or glass cakes imported from the eastern Mediterranean’.

Mei-Ling Chen, ‘The Importation of Byzantine and Sasanian Glass into China during the fourth to sixth centuries,” in Harris, Incipient Globalization?, 47-52 [pdf].

Cesare Moretti and Tullio Toninato (eds.) and David C. Watts and Cesare Moretti (ed. and trans.),Glass Recipes of the Renaissance: Transcription of an Anonymous Venetian Manuscript. (2011).

Antonio Neri, L’Arte vetraria = The Art of Glass, translated and annotated by Paul Engle, 3 vols., (2003–2007).

…as a wine-skin or water-skin.

Due to precession, Perseus’ ‘rain of arrows’ (the Perseid meteor showers) now peaks in August. For more on this see: here. The floating scarves parallel the wisps of the Milky Way.

On retention of pre-Islamic elements in later Iranian art, including the ‘flying gallop’ and the scarves, see ‘ART IN IRAN xii. Iranian pre-Islamic Elements in Islamic Art’, Encyclopaedia Iranica. (online).

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Recap of previous post.

William Romaine Newbold relied on nothing but his imagination and a false analogy in supposing that a section of the manuscript shows “receptacles used by [western European] pharmacists”.

But that notion was relayed, untested, through following generations of Voynich writers, until its repetition in Mary d’Imperio’s Elegant Enigma and in the Beinecke Library’s catalogue, now sees Newbold’s notion constantly mistaken for fact.

*H.P. Kraus may have influenced the Beinecke and d’Imperio, but his description (Enigma p.79) mentions neither ‘pharmacy’ nor ‘pharmaceutical jars’.

Glass?

An editorial comment considers problems of interpretation and whether we may reasonably read some drawings in the ‘leaf and root’ section as representing glass.

*‘under pain of death’ – allegedly. I’ve not yet verified this.

S. R. Epstein, ‘Craft Guilds, Apprenticeship, and Technological Change in Preindustrial Europe’, The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Sep., 1998), pp. 684-713. p.701n.

Trivellato, Francesca. “Was Technology Determinant? The Case of Venetian Glass Manufacture, Late 17th Century – Late 18th Century.” Mimeo, University of Venice, 1996.

Liz James, ‘Byzantine glass mosaic tesserae: some material considerations’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies Vol. 30 No. 1 (2006) 29–47.

see also.

various papers in Marlia Mundell Mango (ed..), Byzantine Trade, 4th-12th Centuries: The Archaeology of Local, Regional and International Exchange : Papers of the Thirty-eighth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, St John’s College, University of Oxford, March 2004, (2009) pp.199-220. (p.208).

Discerning intention – editorial comment.

Apart from other important considerations, it must be kept in mind that in different places, and in different times, different codes have been employed to represent three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface.

The ‘leaf-and-root’ section uses a very limited palette, This means that we cannot presume that the colours used are being used literally, and in fact we cannot know certainly whether the colours we see now are those of the first enunciation of these drawings.

We cannot presume that the colours used for parts of these artefacts are used literally, or whether some are employed according to a code of significance – as for example, whether green might mean one material and red another – as between metal and ceramic, or silver versus gold.

The important factor is not what seems ‘commonsense’ to a twenty-first century, western-educated and literate person, but what graphic conventions were shared by the first enunciator and his contemporary audience.

Then we have the ‘dots’ seen on some of these drawings; they might be simple ornament as Pelling initially supposed, or they might signify that the material is pieced, or set with jewels, or patterned with dots repousse.,, or something else again.

Attempting to discern how those details were designed to be read might be easier if we could access the written text. As it is, the only way is the harder way.

Five examples.

Photos below: (left) an example from Karanais in Egypt (3rd-4thC AD); The wide top is intended to hold a strainer or materials serving that purpose. (centre and right) four examples from Palestine under Byzantine-Roman rule (3rd-7thC AD).

William Gudenrath, ‘History of Venetian Glassblowing: The Aldrevandin Group‘, The Techniques of Renaissance Venetian Glassworking. Web publication by the Corning Museum of Glass.

Ingeborg Krueger, ‘A Second Aldrevandin beaker and an update on a group of enameled glasses’, Journal of Glass Studies, Vol. 44 (2002) pp. 111-132. (with thanks to Nick Pelling for drawing my attention to the article).

*for numerous examples, including examples with bowl of similar ‘goblet’ profile see e.g. Shulamit Hadad, ‘Excavations at Bet Shean, Vol.2: Islamic Glass Vessels from the Hebrew University Excavations at Bet Shean’, Qedem Reports, Vol. 8 (2005), pp. I-IX,1-202.

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H.P. Kraus may have influenced the Beinecke and d’Imperio, but his description (Enigma* p.79) mentions neither ‘pharmacy’ nor ‘pharmaceutical jars’.

for numerous examples, including examples with bowl of similar ‘goblet’ profile see e.g. Shulamit Hadad, ‘Excavations at Bet Shean, Vol.2: Islamic Glass Vessels from the Hebrew University Excavations at Bet Shean’, Qedem* Reports, Vol. 8 (2005), pp. I-IX,1-202.