I can say this is the first time I've clicked on a Voynich Manuscript themed video and been hit in the face with factual and referenced research. Great stuff!
Yes! If it's a fake, then a fake what exactly? The thing it is trying to be a fake of doesn't exist. We know from actual forgeries and fakes that they always intend to be clearly understood as something: a painting by Van Gogh, a page from a book of Hours, a manuscript leaf illustrating Columbus' arrival in the New World (the Spanish Forger did something like this).
Am I the only one who thinks it's plausible someone could just make up a language and make up fantasy herbs just like people today come up with fantasy languages, fantasy maps, fantasy creatures because they like fiction and fantasy as a genre? Someone in the past could have done that for the same reason.
Of course they did. Honestly, the Victorian era and its infatuation with mysteries and religious rituals is still present in how we in the West regard common life in the past. Sometimes it is just as easy as someone a long time ago wanted to do a Thing. And now we speculate that the Thing is somehow a calender.
He says in the beginning of the video that it is plausible, so definitely not the only one. I won't comment on the language, but I don't think the herbal illustrations even need to be fantasy. Or rather, I don't think any medieval illustrator painted anything but fantasy herbs. If you look at any pre printing-press herbal guides, you'll notice a distinct lack of realism in the illustrations. I believe that most illustrators didn't even know what the plant looked like - and if they did, illustrations had to be exclusively left to artistic interpretation.
Truly an astoshingly refreshing dive into the Voynich Manuscript. Instant sub. I look forward to updates on the locations regarding the handwriting analysis, that is so interesting!
Awesome, thank you! We do have some surprising insights in the locations. If all goes according to plan, we will report on the study in full in August.
Thanks very much for this Koen! To add my 2 cents to the "Fake" arguement from a purely common sense standpoint and why it never made very much sense to me. One or more statements are usually true. 1. A fake is made to look older than it is 2. A fake is made to look like it was by someone famous 3. A fake pretends to offer special/secret knowledge 4. A fake pretends to be more valuable than it is, or immitate something very valuable (3 and 4 are more modern ideas of "fake" but I'll leave them in) Answers. 1. You covered this in detail. 2. The manuscript does not attribute itself to anyone. 3. No one can read it. Also this would mean every alchemy manuscript is "fake". 4. The manuscript was made using relatively inexpensive componants and the artwork is poorly done. So, what are you peddling to Rudolph? I think all considered the answer you are left with is point 3.. which essentially means you wrote an alchemy book to sell, which is hardly a grand conspiracy and not a "fake".
Yeah, exactly. Regarding encoding, I guess people would only call the text fake if it pretends to be an encoded text, while in fact it's nonsense. But like I said in the video, meaning and the author's intentions can only be speculated about right now.
Yeah, my linguistics professor thought it was best described as a hoax rather than a fake. Its encoding is nonsense and 98% of the text encodes nothing even if the remaining 2% contains easter eggs. It isn't however faking its age.
Hey I just wanted to say thanks I found this channel about a month ago and watched all the videos within a day or two. I really enjoy medieval literature so I had heard about the voynich manuscript but it was fascinating to go on such a deep dive. Glad to hear you plan to try to post around once a month I was you the best that you for the content!
I'm going to feed the algorithm before even watching this. A channel with 2k subs, tackling a well-covered and controversial subject, for 31minutes? I am impressed just by the ambition and initiative. The next 31minutes is your chance to win a sub.
Yep, this is something special. Focused script avoids rehashing the well-trodden narrative. Good (and real) voice. Detailed and thorough research. Superb production values. 10/10. you win a sub!
Thanks! I'd have ten times more views if I claimed to have solved it... But well, this is only my second video that got some more traction, so there is still room for growth :) To be honest I never even expected to reach anything close to 10k viewers.
Fantastic video! Recommended out of nowhere, and this is my first hearing about the manuscript, but I am now quite fascinated. I really appreciate your straightforward and measured delivery. Looking forward to more.
I had no idea that hats and sleeves could so easily give away the date the manuscript was likely written! But it does make perfect sense: fashion between 1990 and now seems to have changed less than in 1390 to 1424, but I'd find it pretty easy to tell which decade a photo in a magazine was taken based on clothes alone. The blossom hat doesn't lie...
yep! And it's not like it's something you can depend on by itself, an artist could always be depicting an older period, or just not up on the latest fashion, but when you combine it with other things that all point to the same narrow date range, it can form part of a very reliable dating
My issue with the theory of it being a fake has always been: why would you fake an ugly and unreadable book of herb-lore? A lot of effort and expense went into producing the manuscript, if it was a fake, made for profit, then why not make the subject matter something more appealing and valuable? The philosopher's stone, the holy grail, a cure for baldness, etc.?
This is a very good point. The vellum alone would probably have been more valuable. Such a big pile of unused pre-1450 vellum is extremely rare (I'm not sure if there is any known case. I do know of some later ones.)
My issue with this kind of stance (also often find in ufology) Is that humans will fake almost anything with any type of motivation. You literally cannot conclude that something is unlikely to be done by a human so it wasn't done by one. We have so many examples to the contrary
@@koengheuens I think it's not a good point actually. The obvious answer is that if it *is* a fake, then it was intended to be as mysterious as possible, because that's what would get a lot of attention. And if that's the case then it clearly worked - the manuscript is now extremely famous and people are still talking about it to this day.
@@koengheuens What do you mean? I'm pointing out that, if we entertain the hypothesis that it may have been created at a later date but was deliberately made to appear to be a mysterious manuscript of the 15th century (thus being a fake), then there is an obvious motive on the part of the creator to make it unreadable and strange.
There is some evidence that two different people wrote (or copied) the manuscript; apparently there are some subtle differences in the handwriting. Someone else may have done the illustrations.
If it's a fake, then the person behind it went to great lengths, both personal and financial, to produce it in a time period where such materials were rare and highly expensive. It would have cost more to produce it than to sell it, defeating the purpose of being a scam. Occam's razor says that the simplest answer is usually the most logical and closer to the truth, and with that in mind it makes far more sense that the text itself is authentic. However it was probably written in an invented language only the author(s) used. That's why nobody can "crack" it, because it's not a code. It's an invented language. For what purpose? One can only speculate, but it clearly had a purpose to it. I personally hold the view that it was an early biology book of some sort, perhaps also tied with an Esoteric/Occult tradition based on the artistic depictions and alchemical symbols.
And other little things I discovered: There are a total of 104 two letter words possible in the Voynich script. There are 13 letters that can appear as a first letter, and 8 that can appear as a last letter. In English, that number is 26*26, so 676 possible two letter words. English has 127 two letter words, so about 18% of all possible combinations. The Voynich script has 89 different two letter words. That's 85% of all possible two letter words. That doesn't make sense. Three letter words have similar problems.
The Voynich script does not make any sense as a directly written language. Perhaps the most confusing part is: The »words« get shorter from the beginning to the end of a line; and the same (but a little weaker) from the top lines to the bottom lines. And there are still some in-»word«-patterns, which are easily explained by different glyph forms on the start, in the middle and at the end of a word, until you notice how much the »alphabet« shrinks down to something, which simply can not be a direct represantation of phonemes of a language we know of. That's the fascination of the Voynich manuscript: At a first glance, it looks easy and you don't unterstand, why it can be that hard to read it. And it seems to be written so incredible fluently, surely by a proficient hand. No trace of using elaborated cryptological calculations or tools. But the deeper one dives in it, the more the confusion gets overwhelming.
@goebelmasse I did some superficial checks on a transliteration. There's 29000 words. There are 6000 unique words. 4000 of them appears only once. That makes no sense.
Not fake in the sense of being a document not of the age it seems to be from. But fake in the sense of pretending to be, but not really being a document with decipherable text, we don't know.
exactly. it could just be a mentally ill person creating and using a script of their own design I'm developmentally delayed, but i would do a similar system when I realized how similar pqbd was and WM symmetry was this might just be some artistic and autistic teenager's system we don't know what the hell it's saying. but it's not fake as in, it's genuine artifact, and we don't know the intentions. it's just unknown. it's like the concept of a crochet machine.
I'm not an expert, but looking at the language they used it seems to me that it may in fact not contain any real information and the person who wrote it produced one or more books just to be decoration.
I'm no expert, and I'm not even a big Voynich follower! But language is always fascinating, so Voynich vids pop up in my recommends. And one by this channel a while back mentioned the fact that the frequency analysis was out of whack, and that some characters seem to come up more often at the end of a page - nothing to do with the text, but the position on the page. That convinced me that it was decoration. I mentioned it in the comments on another Voynich channel, and the guy replied that he'd felt that way too, and discussed it at length elsewhere. I think our consensus would be; 'the pics have meaning, the text is gibberish'!
@@LittleNala But there was significant effort poured into producing said gibberish-it looks like a real script at first glance-which raises questions about the motives of the authors.
@@CjqNslXUcM Imitation. Could have been a mentally challenged person, autistic maybe. The person was able to "write" a book without being able to read, just by imitating what others do.
@@CjqNslXUcM Absolutely! I would not deny for one second that it took a lot of work. As Kobold666 below says, perhaps it was an autistic person (with access to funds, of course). But have you seen the sort of things people do just for larks? They build the Notre Dame from matchsticks! The amount of time and cash I put into my own hobbies is embarrassing! ;-) I honestly don't think the fact someone put a lot of effort into it is a deal breaker. People do all sorts of nutty stuff - always have.
Whoever the unknown individual able to create such convincing fake is they deserves a metal And maybe if they put their genius into something more productive, we would be on Mars by now
Yeah exactly. This became increasingly clear to me as I was writing this video. If someone made this later, their expertise was so great that they literally became a medieval scribe. John Dee lived in a time where the subject of art history was virtually non-existent, and artists had the custom of adapting fashion to that of their own period. And Wilfrid Voynich was a trader, a businessman. Definitely not an art historian.
Just to play devils advocate a bit: would it be possible that the whole manuscript is legitimate and from the 1410-1425 period… but that the lettering was somehow altered to make the thing unintelligible for whatever reason? Or would ink analysis have picked up on that? Love the fashion break down! Dates the document very firmly!
A video where you talk about what we can know about the author of the Voynich manuscript would be interesting. Like, is it fair to say he had a lot of disposable income?
Having pinned down the date period of the manuscript might it be worth making a list of all known persons who lived then who had an deep interest in the type of material illustrated in the manuscript?
Yes. One issue is that many named figures we know of lived later. It's really only the big names that survive to this day. Who knows how many anonymous people with these kinds of interests were active in the first quarter of the 15th century?
Im more happy with this conclusion, someone will figure it out and that probably kills the mystery when it turns out to be the frst naughty cookbook XD
Great job! Wouldn't it also be useful to compare it to the dates of the herbal books that share the same plants illustrated by Voynich's scribes. Most interesting of all would be the dates of the books that share plants with Voynich that cannot be identified today.
That would be tricky. Herbal manuscripts are highly tradition-forming. The plants come in standard groups that are copied, recombined etc throughout the centuries. The Voynich is one of the very few known herbal manuscripts that absolutely does not adhere to any of these traditions... It's really hard to compare it to anything else.
@@koengheuens I have read that some of the plants that can't be identified are found in at least one other herbal manuscript. Maybe that's where we should focus, the plants that can't be identified. Do I take it that you don't agree with Elizabeth Sherwood's identifications?
@@GeraldM_inNC well, I can't say that she's wrong about everything. But let's say her list of identifications is definitely not my favorite :) To be honest, my feelings about the plants have changed so often that I don't even know what to think anymore. If there is a connection, I'd probably say it's mostly to the Greek (i.e. Byzantine) traditions. See herculeaf.wordpress.com/2024/07/04/some-thoughts-on-dioscorides/
Over 50 years ago, during boring school classes, I used to cover my exercise books with long tracts of made up text. Sentences, paragraphs, punctuation, the lot. One time, a teacher walked past and said how creative it was, but that I really should be actually taking note of the lesson he was teaching! ;-) So for personal reasons, I feel the Voynich script is something similar, No malice or cheating - just text made up to look attractive on the page. The whole manuscript is a work of art - it doesn't contain any hidden secrets. It is art - that's all. A 'pastiche' of a contemporary (late Middle Age) scientific tract.
It's possible, though an objection would be that expensive and carefully prepared vellum is not exactly a notebook. They already had cheaper paper available to them in these days. I wouldn't be surprised if the VM turns out to be some kind of student's project though.
@@koengheuens Oh no, that's not what I meant at all! I can relate to it because I did it at school, but I think this was some wealthy person with an art background, indulging themselves with a little project to raise eyebrows. Nothing to so with students or schoolkids. Sorry if I gave that impression - it never crossed my mind.
@@elio7610 I only said I could relate because I did it when I was a schoolkid. I didn't think the person who produced the VM was also a schoolkid! I think they were a wealthy person with creative tendencies, and leisure time, who did it as a form of art project. Sorry - I didn't make clear that it never crossed my mind that the VM was made by a student for fun! I think whoever did it had money, and time, and a creative itch.
Yeah we had the first one this year (2024). We picked the 4th of August (04/08 in international notation) because the shelf number of the manuscript is Beinecke MS 408 :)
11:19 -- Vellum can be "recycled". There are a handful of extant manuscripts where the original underlying text was erased (well, scraped off) and new text applied to the surface.
Yes, these are called palimpsests. We know from imaging of the MS that the Voynich is not one. And I don't even think anyone claims this. This is probably something I should have mentioned though!
Maybe it's an early example of schizophrenia or autism originated outsider art, a mediaeval equivalent of Henry Darger's The Story of the Vivian Girls or Louis Wain's Cat paintings. It is not fake, but meaningless or almost meaningless (though it contained great meaning to the author).
That's what I think too. There's a lot of pieces of art like that in the modern day that would undoubtedly confuse potential future archeologists and researchers.
I’ve done quite a bit of academic research on outsider art (and I’m autistic to boot) and while I’m not sure how much I believe that’s what it is, I can definitely see the connection. It’s fairly obvious that the artist isn’t formally trained (pretty much the absolute baseline of any definition of ‘outsider art’ and it’s many offshoots) when compared to more formal manuscript art created by monks and scribes from the time. The fictional language also reminds me quite a bit of James Hampton’s ‘Hamptonese’, another very well known outsider artist whose language we’ve yet to decipher. It makes me both deeply saddened and deeply inspired to think how many beautiful and creative pieces of outsider art we may have lost through the centuries because of people’s lack of love or care for them and their creators
> Maybe it's an early example of schizophrenia or autism originated outsider art Maybe, or maybe the author had a stroke or a brain tumor; or literally any other pathology of the nervous system. It's a very 'modern' thing to attribute everything unusual as being the result of autism in particular. It's not a particularly informative exercise to speculate on his/her neurological function, there's just no way of knowing. It's a profound waste of time and effort, and reeks of terminally online Americans and their obsession with autism specifically. I say that as an aspie.
I don't know why the northern Italian fashion makes me think the text is somehow related to Etruscan or is a Tyrsenian language. (I'm just an amateur linguist interested in Pre-PIE Europe) If it was so that would mean the language family survived into the 15th century when most related languages died in the 1st-2nd century. But if it was Etruscan-related, it still would not explain anything except give that extinct language family an almost unrealistic 14-hundred-year extra period.
I've never believed the manuscript was a fake, but it always struck me as pretty odd that if the author/scribe went to the trouble of inventing some super secure encryption in order to keep the contents secret, they'd then include so many images within the book, if those images bore any significance to whatever the text contained, it just wouldn't make any sense. But what do I know? I'm just a random idiot on the internet 🤔🤪😁
It's not uncommon for medieval images to also be "encoded" in a way. You don't even have to go to alchemy to find examples. A flute under a maiden's bed may mean that she's promiscuous. Stuff like that. They were used to non-literal imagery.
I'm aware it's common for scribes to include images on manuscripts, I think you misunderstood my point - why write down a secret in code, only to illustrate the exact meaning on the same manuscript? It'd be like the CIA including a handy key in plain text with every top secret message they sent to their field operatives. I'm not convinced the imagery is important to decyphering the text, unless it's also part of the code, forms some sort of public key perhaps, OR we are missing something significant entirely. Just a thought. There's a lot of nonsense on the internet about this manuscript, it's so nice to have something available to us from someone who actually knows what he's talking about by the way - thank you.
The Council of Constance brought many men of means, including prodigious book buyers like Poggio Bracciolini, to the Bodensee region for *four years*. I've always wondered if someone got to writing at this time, claiming to be able to present a unique Hermetic text.
This is definitely possible. The period of the council (1414-1418) and the years after it coincide well with my preferred narrower date range for the MS. This would still leave the question why and how they came up with this exact system though.
I watched a random documentary about two guys who were able to decipher it. Apparently it was written by somebody who was illiterate, writing an ancient form of an old Turkish language. Maybe not illiterate, but not very good at spelling.
I have often theorized that it was put together by an illiterate scribe. Throughout history, people have been trained to imitate letters and to copy material without being able to read it. In the ancient world, it was a common practice. We assumed that everyone is literate because in the modern era people basically are, but the ability to read written language was not universal in the past. This manuscript often feels childlike to me, as if it was put together for visual impressions rather than for the content of the words.
You, claiming this was "common practice"...you know better, you're just a lying fucking troll. Illiterates cannot accurately copy text...try it, you seem illiterate enough. For that matter, try giving a quill to an illiterate, and see if they can figure out how to make letters with it....also not as easy as you "think". You're just another moron, opening your yap with nothing intelligent to say.
The monasteries would make a lot of the books by commission from various nobles and well to do citizens. It is not a stretch to think that at some point a monk cranked out nonsense for some illiterate that was buying a book as a status symbol. But this is exactly what these Ai LLM's could solve by comparing word associations and lengths to all known languages in a matter of hours.
A lot of people claiming it could be a work of a mentally ill person or someone autistic or some example of outsider art in the comments. But it feels the sheer cost of such an endeavor would eliminate that possibility, no?
Theories like these feel kind of weird to me, like a cop out. "Probably some crazy person did it". There is no way this could ever be demonstrated, especially within a society where religion and magical thinking are pervasive to begin with.
"you wouldnt call these paintings fake just because the text is made up" ummm yeah i would have but your intonation made it sound obvious not too so i wont i guess
We can actually conclude that the text contains no information through linguistic statistics. There's just isn't enough characters to represent a human language. (Edit: See Koen Gheuens video a month ago).
What do you mean by characters? If you mean letter shapes (at least what seems to look like letter shapes) there are more than enough distinct shapes to convey a human language. For comparison, Hawaiian needs only 13 letters. Now if you mean distinct "words" (strings of characters with a space on either side) that's a different story.
@@Drabkikker There are massive problems with those distinct shapes, as some only appear at the start of words and other at ends, etc, which is not how languages generally work. But mainly the problem is the words, yes, the text is extremely repetitive.
Interesting tidbit. From an encryption perspective, maybe your observation could be interpreted as a "failed, undecipherable encryption" because the encryption actually destroyed linguistic information.
@@1Adamrpg It would be a very strange encryption, and also, I feel that if you make an encryption, you will test if it works. Unless you are slightly insane. But that would also explain the manuscript entirely free from encryption.
Some notes - 1. Good point that efforts to represent other scripts might be hopelessly inaccurate 'Pseudo-Kufic' - etc., doesn't imply dishonest intentions. 2. On the point of 'intention' - the term is commonly used in iconographic analysis, where it is near-synonymous with purpose. It bothers some amateurs, but as you rightly say when speaking about the painting by Mantegna, a person who has done their background research *can* discuss the maker's intentions - it's not to be called 'speculation' unless there's nothing more to it than guesswork. 3.The same goes for informed opinions about dating a manuscript. It all depends on how good the scholar is whose opinion is sought. Amateurs often forget that we have literally tens of thousands of medieval manuscripts, and still more paintings, all of which have been accurately dated by specialists - even as long ago as the 1800s without use of destructive tests such as radiocarbon dating. The radiocarbon dating was seriously flawed - biased by the patron's unconscious biases. Also affected tests of pigments - only a very small number were selected; the palette is still much larger and mostly still undefined. 4. About titanium. A big difference between titanium in black ink, and titanium white paint. It is said that titanium was found in ink from one of Gutenberg's Bibles. The amount of research needed to address this question is huge - natural deposits, comparative analytical studies of inks, investigation of imported materials, history of 'india ink' and much more. HUGE research topic before any opinion possible. 5. Pigments have to be assumed added at, or later than, the time the manuscript was made so the clothing argument is dubious. Beside that, the investigations only looked at a very narrow range of a very few regions in Europe, so affected by a substantial bias in the fashions sampling. Sorry. 6. It's important not to fall into the trap of conflating information about a manuscript's manufacture, and the origin or date of what it contains. Showing that a copy of the Bible was made in fifteenth-century Italy doesn't make the Bible a fifteenth-century Italian composition, does it? That's why, I think, Fagin Davis specifies "fifteenth-century *object* 7. Also, ,I dispute your claiming that the book-dealer and scholar who gave the ms to Yale is a greater specialist in medieval art than Erwin Panofsky, who had correctly dated it (1410-1420-1430) in 1932 when everyone else still believed the 'Bacon' story.
You seem to have misunderstood: Helmut Lehmann-Haupt is not a book dealer. He got his PhD in art history, worked at various museums and was one of the most respected bibliographers at the time. I agree that I should have included Panofsky, but then explaining his turn towards the New World would have added 10 minutes to this video...
@@koengheuens Yes, I know that Helmut Lehmann-Haupt was a scholar, but he was working with/for Kraus as his assistant, and spoke as agent for the bookdealer who was had been trying to find a buyer for the Vms. I also understand why you didn't want to mention Panofsky. After 1939, Panofsky didn't feel like openly opposing persons such as Friedman or O'Neill, and with good reason in McCarthy's America. But Panofsky's name has massively more weight, to this day, and he still had the right of it about dating and was the first to do it. He was also insistent, directly to Friedman, that it was genuine. To keep the balance, an historian has to be careful about what is included and what is effectively 'blanked' - but I'm sure you know that.
is it a very old book, completed c1420? yes. is it total nonsense, presenting as found knowledge of a foreign culture to validate travel tales or generate fraudulent income? probably. A lot of effort to no conceivable purpose other than fraud. A person with a wealth of time and creativity would make it less venal, an art project, as it were. But still to be considered a fake from c1420, until a key to translate is determined.
[Copy/paste from my comment on the Ninja forum, part l] Koen: You've made a very entertaining and well-produced video. You are really good at this... my attempts are fairly unpolished compared to yours! But the problem is that in an attempt to make a case for your "genuine circa 1420" theory, you have had to cherry pick only those facts, observations and opinions which support it. Left out, or casually dismissed from your video are a huge number of facts and expert opinions which would give your viewers a far more accurate picture of the true nature of the Voynich, so that they could come to their own conclusions with open eyes. The second major problem is that you misstate my own hypothesis and opinions, both by leaving important points out, and even re-writing core elements! You have created a Straw Man of my own ideas, and argued that, and not the actual hypothesis. But even if my hypothesis were not the focus of your video, I would feel compelled to address your omissions and alterations to the actual Voynich knowledge base. I'd also add that your rebuttal video, which, by necessity needs to ignore serious problems with the Voynich rather than address them, in order to seem to work, by doing so actually makes the case against your theory, and supports mine. 0:50 "This uncertainty... this 'not knowing"... has led some to question the authenticity of the manuscript". I can't speak for others, but since I am the focus of your video I want to correct you: I did not come to believe the Voynich is a modern fake because of "not knowing" what it was. Your claim here is a common attempt at minimizing the actual reasons for suspecting this. Among the actual motivations for believing it may be a fake are the high level of anomalous and anachronistic content, style and construction, all seemingly derived from, or influenced by, a great many sources ranging from the 14th through early 20th centuries. In additions is the lacking, and even contra-indicative "provenance" presented in "support" of it. 7:44 "1910- Wilfrid Voynich forges the MS (SantaColoma) Thank you for linking my blog in the description. 9:40 "Keep in mind that we know next to nothing about the exact origins of most manuscripts sitting in archives. So the fact that we can't trace it back to a specific Medieval scriptorium is what we would generally expect". There are two problems with this: First, whether common or not, the Voynich still does not have any provenance, as you agree, and so... well, it still has no provenance. Secondly, the cases of most other works without provenance is entirely different, because they are STILL are identifiable to one or more of: an age, geographic and cultural origin, approximate purpose, meaning, and so on. So while it is true we don't know, in many cases, specific authorship nor have a trail of provenance, other works are nothing like the Voynich, for which none of this can be determined, at best, or multiple, widely disparate and contradictory explanations exist. 10:00 "Radiocarbon dating"- Yes, claimed is a "certainty of 95%" that the calves died about 1404-1438. And almost certainly the vellum is from ABOUT that time. I agree. But it is not as exact as the 95% "result" implies, as the dates of the individual samples gave ages as much as 60 or more years apart, and were then "combined" under the "assumption" that the manuscript was created in a shorter time than that... the "assumption" being "under ten years". This is a problem because it is a form of confirmation bias, in which actual, raw results were manipulated to conform to a pre-concieved, desired, result. Well one might ask, "what difference does it make?", if one agrees, as I do, with those raw results? Because the actual results would be unusual in a book of that time. That is, it would not be normal to find a book made of sheets of vellum 60+ years apart in age. It is anomalous to a genuine book. To erase this problem, the dates were "combined" to give a more palatable result which fits "genuine" better. It is another case of "science done backwards", that is, letting preconceptions drive interpretation of raw data, when it should be the reverse: We should listen to the data, work with it, and figure out what it really tells us. 11:20 "You can just say that a forger found some old vellum lying around". You must be aware, by now, of Wilfrid's purchase of the Libreria Franceshini in 1908, which contained a 40 year collection of over a half million items of all types. Yet you do not mention it. 11:24 "Keep in mind, though, that vellum wasn't cheap..." Actually, various times in history, it was fairly cheap. In the comments under my blog post, here: proto57.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/but-who-would-use-vellum-anyway/ I use linked costs of vellum provided by Nick Pelling to calculate the cost of the vellum needed for "a" Voynich. Being conservative with the figures, it would come to only "... a couple of dozen shillings". But on the flip side, playing the devil's advocate and hypothetically accepting the cost would have been higher than this, even much higher, we have to remember that in the case of a forgery for sale to Rudolf II would have netted 600 ducats, and that if forged by Wilfrid, he hoped to sell it for over $100,000 in his time. With inflation, that would be something like $1.4 million dollars today. In either case, the cost of vellum to a forger would have been a negligible investment for the intended return. 11:30 "Finding a stack of unused 15th century vellum is probably like finding an unused vintage car" Actually, no, it is not the same. It is more akin to finding a vintage unused car PART. Whole cars, like unread books, would be less common than finding parts or blank leaves of vellum (a coincidental aside, I actually purchased the entire stock of unused antique car parts when I was 16 years old, for the staggering sum of $125, and became an Original Equipment Parts dealer for the next couple of years). There are a great deal of sources for unused vellum, which I discovered and outlined in several blog posts years ago. And arguably, in 1910 such sources would have been even more prolific. But my demonstrations of possible and actual sources became somewhat moot when I learned of the Libreria purchase in 1908, which effectively provides a plausible source for the vellum needed in the Voynich... proto57.wordpress.com/2011/02/26/something-sheepy-in-the-state-of-denmar/ ... especially if the manuscript was cut down from one quire's worth of full sized (folio) vellum: proto57.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/the-three-quire-theory/ 13:20 "In 2009, McCrone took samples of ink and various paints from the Voynich manuscript." 13:45 "... the ink is compatible with 15th century ink, lacking any modern ingredients. The same goes for the pigments..." 14:17 (Text) "Voynich: Medieval ink and pigments, NOT suspicious" This is incorrect, as it cherry picks from that McCrone report. Among the items were actually were anomalous were a "binder" that was not Gum Arabic, and not identified by McCrone as it was "not in [their] library" of binders. They called the finding of "copper and zinc" in the ink as "unusual", and only said it "could have" come from a brass inkwell. They found a "titanium compound" in some pigments, which they never explain. There is more than that in the report, and McCrone even suggested, more than once, that further testing was needed. When I asked about these issues, I got no response. So they are still an open question, not explained nor ever further tested. For instance, was it "unusual" for copper and zinc to dissolve into ink from a brass inkwell? Or was it simply "unusual" to find copper and zinc in Medieval ink? Could it have come from a [much later] brass nib? What FORM was the "titanium compound" in? Anatase smooth crystals (ghosts of the Vinland Map fiasco!)? Which "compound" was it? These questions are unresolved, yet very important. But by your leaving out these and other oddities from the report, you are clearly constructing an inaccurate and misleading picture, in support of your own conclusions.
[Part II]: 14:30 "Fashion trends" [as identifiers of age] 15:50 "It was [fashion] details like these which allowed early researchers to conclude, with confidence, that this style is compatible with 15th century Europe". This is patently untrue. You are aware of our long discussion of early expert analysis, so you also know that only one early expert... Lehmann-Haupt... dated the content of the Voynich to the early 15th century. The overwhelming number of experts of the pre-radiocarbon dating era dated the illustrations and writing over a wide range of eras, from the 13th to the 17th centuries. It is only by rejecting and ignoring upward of 15 or so highly qualified experts that you could make such a claim. Of course your (and others) comparisons to the crossbowman's outfit in the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries may be correct. It probably is correct. But it is again cherry picking, because the styles of dress and many other items in the Voynich have been favorably compared to those from many OTHER eras, too, but you leave those out. 17:10 "... these sleeves are sufficient to force a cut off point for the one tapestry that contains them?" But, in addition the reality of overwhelming expert opinion NOT backing early 15th century, and the cherry picking of only those style examples which do match the C14 dating, it is simply possible for anyone to copy older styles in a newer forgery. This renders the use of comparative styles moot to determining the Voynich's age or authenticity. And, in essence, you admit this, earlier in your video, when you correctly point out that a written date (if hypothetically found) would NOT be proof of age, because anyone can add an old date. Well, they can add in any old content, too, as well as a date. 23:00 I now see that you do acknowledge my listing of the overwhelming majority of experts (you even show my chart! Thank you.) who did NOT believe the manuscript was from the date range of the eventual radiocarbon dating. Then how and why can you claim, as you did, that "... details like these which allowed early researchers to conclude, with confidence, that this style is compatible with 15th century Europe". I mean, you admit it was only Lehmann-Haupt, so why do you use the plural "researchers"? As for eliminating the overwhelming majority of experts who disagreed with you (or would, if they were still alive), I also see you do give some reasoning here, in your next part, at: 23:35 You begin to pick off those experts who did not agree with Haupt, or early 15th century, with various rationalizations. Among them, the lack of radiocarbon dating! This is a tacit admission of something I have long argued, but has so far been strenuously denied: That the bias imposed by the radiocarbon dating has been improperly driving the interpretation of the content, and elimination of pre-C14 experts and their opinions. But this is science done backwards (again), for those opinions do, or should matter. Then you further dismiss the opinions the contrary experts by stating that they were "all over the place" (well that is true!), but it was because of the "grainy, black and white copies of a few folios". But you have now left out the fact that a great many of the researchers on that list actually saw either the actual Voynich, in person, and/or the original photostats... which Wilfrid and Ethel kept in the NYPL, for permitted scholars to examine. I've seen these in person, and they are very high quality, and quite detailed: proto57.wordpress.com/2012/08/15/the-first-voynich-photocopies/ They were in no way... not sure who was, if any, actually, hampered by those very bad illustrations published in newspapers, magazines, and even D'Imperio. We were also saddled with them up until the 2000's, in fact. You show one of THOSE in your video, not what the listed experts actually had at their disposal, which was quite good. 25:00 Here you elevate the ONE expert who happened to hit the eventual C14 dating range, Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt. I agree he was a capable scholar. But you have here demonstrated exactly the effect which is so obvious to me, and which I have pointed out many times: That the obvious problem to "genuine @1420" is the overwhelming number of scholars who told us that the content of the Voynich was all over the map and the centuries long calendar, and that all but one did NOT match the eventual C14 dating. So the "solution" to this dilemma is to pick the ONE person who happened to hit the C14 date, and simply discard the rest who didn't. And later, in your conclusions, at 28:47, you've declared Haupt "... the most qualified professional to comment on the manuscript's age". I absolutely disagree. Summarily dismissed by you is the expert input of Charles Singer, far more versed in the history of the herbal than Haupt. Also removed is the opinion of Panofsky, whose opinion was recently cited to me as the reason that person believed the Voynich was from the 15th century... until I pointed out that Panofsky actually changed his mind to circa 1510 on his further and more complete examination. And Steele, and O'Neil, so on, for all of them. They are all at worst, the equivalent of Haupt, at best, far more qualified for the task at hand. And Brumbaugh, whom you mention in passing? Yes, he believed it could have been created by Dee, an authorship we pretty much all agree is incorrect. But the important question is "why?" Brumbaugh would have seen "Dee like" elements in the Voynich. He was skilled, experienced and knowledgeable. So rather than dismiss his input as incorrect, I think one should explain it. I do have an explanation that fits my hypothesis, I do not need to ignore his informed input. proto57.wordpress.com/2024/03/17/i-do-listen-to-the-experts-do-you/ No, it is clear to me that no matter where in that list of experts the eventual carbon date landed, the person it landed on would be cited as the "best" expert, and the rest, discarded... along with Haupt. 27:43 Lisa Fagin Davis, "... there is absolutely nothing suspicious about the VMS." But in actuality, Lisa raised some important, and I would say, "suspicious" points about the VMS, in her recent lecture at Wellesley college. In that talk, Lisa calls the Rosettes foldout pages, “Completely inexplicable”. They are, foldouts like that have been said, even by the Yale examiners, "highly unusual for the age". She describes the quires, folio numbers, stitching, and such, and over and over, and says how “odd” many things are: The order, the reorder, and so on, and then she said, "You're not supposed to go back and forth by nested bifolia… that’s just STRANGE” It’s WRONG. It’s not how it’s supposed to work”. And in the Q&A after the talk: Q: “How unusual is it to have no punctuation?” A: “It’s extremely unusual. We would expect to see punctuation. To see capital letters- in a Western language, certainly, um, and so it’s not clear whether the lack of punctuation is… if it’s encoded, part of the coding process. The same for the quote-unquote “capital letters”: Is that part of the encoding? Is that part of the way that the language has been recorded? Maybe. I don’t know. But you would absolutely expect, in this period, to have punctuation and capital letters. It is a very unusual feature”. And so on, the lecture is here: ruclips.net/video/5VlSRZy0D_Y/видео.html The thing is... and I've seen this same effect over and over for over 15 years, and even in much content that came long before that, and it goes like this: A person insists that everything they see in the Voynich is perfectly fine, and not suspicious or out of the ordinary. But then, as the same time, when describing the manuscript they unavoidably point out the great many things that are anomalous, anachronistic, totally inexplicable and unexplainable. They honestly admit and describe these things, but then say they see nothing "suspicious". But, they do, they did, because they told us they did. We hear them tell us, and read when they write about them. The Yale book is another perfect example of this: Page after page of anomalies, anachronisms, and the inexplicable that does not match anything they've seen from the 15th century. And the conclusion? It's genuine, and from the 15th century. Go figure.
[Part III]: 28:15 "The best we can do, is consider the evidence". Well, I agree… but we have to consider ALL the evidence, and omit nothing. 29:11 In the following segment, you first of all use a straw man argument, in part, as you do not accurately describe my Modern Forgery hypothesis. - Yes, I do contend he "found a large stack of unused" vellum, but you leave out the fact he bought a mountain of materials when he bought the Libreria Franceshini. This is key, and very important, for it gives a very plausible source of vellum for a forged Voynich. - "Then, he decided to make a fake, 1420's manuscript". No, this is entirely incorrect. I do not believe he wanted to do that, nor tried to do that. I believe he intended the Voynich as an early 17th century manuscript, to look as though it came from the Court of Rudolf II. I do think he removed pages sometime after making it, and changed his desired authorship to Roger Bacon. - "Predict future technologies" No, again, this is a straw man, I do not believe he predicted anything of the kind: My actual contention is that the huge disparity between the early expert opinion and the later C14 dating is exactly because he could not predict such future technologies. He picked the wrong age vellum for his forgery BECAUSE he could not know. And in addition to that, the forger used vellum pages with a 60+ year spread, and not the narrow range derived from the raw data, commonly reported. This is further evidence the forger could not “predict future” C14, because if they could have, they would not have chosen vellum with this spread, either. - "Perfectly replicate Medieval inks and pigments, without leaving any trace of modern materials" As I pointed out, McCrone actually found an unknown binder, "unusual" copper and zinc, and an unexplained "titanium compound". You also leave out the well known fact that Wilfred's associate, Sidney Reilly (the "Ace of Spies), took out a book on making medieval inks. That being said, it is not inconceivable, and is possible, to make medieval inks, at any time, with no "modern materials". But, I don't think it was accomplished here, as per the McCrone tests. This ink has unexplained problems. - "... known of a short lived Medieval 'sleeve trend' relevant only to the exact period when the vellum was made". This cherry picks, again, one feature from the manuscript which fits your opinion. And of course any older "thing" could have been drawn in the Voynich at any time from it's first use in history, up until about 1911. The age of any item only gives an "earliest possible" date, not a latest possible. - "Fool specialists and science, leave no trace" Well I don't think, first of all, that any of the many people who believe this is a forgery by Wilfrid HAVE been fooled. I think he failed with some, and succeeded with many others. And I think the science does not say what you claim it does. The raw data, when examined critically, does not say what you think, either. And as for “no trace”, that is not true... and that is not my opinion, but what is actually found in the Yale book, the original carbon dating report, the McCrone report, and in many of the honest and well meant original finding of the experts. Many “traces” have been found, and they are there to be either rejected or accepted. My hypothesis needs to reject nothing to survive, while any genuine argument is like Swiss cheese. Koen, I would argue that in this video, you actually make my case for me. In order to support your own views, you have needed to cherry pick a very small subset of all the data and observations available, and discard the huge... overwhelming?... corpus of evidence and expert opinion contrary to your own. And further, you have needed to misstate my own views, findings and hypothesis, in order to create a false version of it, which you have found is more easily debated. I really do look forward to any eventual arguments which do include and address all the problems inherent in the Voynich and its backstory, but I have not yet seen anything close to that. If your video presentation was able to do that, I would have been very interested to hear it. I was and am still completely ready and willing to hang up my hat on the matter, and move forward with the "Genuine 1420 European Cipher Herbal" with you and many others. It just has not happened yet, if it ever will. Rich.
It seems probable that it is an elaborately produced fake. Making it indecipherable would make it an instant mystery, and object of fascination which would increase its value, compared with a conventional herbal, cosmogony, etc. Magical texts with invented angelic scripts, seals and sigils were produced in the same period. The older and more mysterious / 'esoteric' a manuscript was, the more value it would have. Including the idea of divine revelation which would give greater authority & value to it.
Personally, I agree that the Voynichese script could be related with magic or mysticism. After all, this was the case with invented scripts like Hildegard's Lingua Ignota, Giovanni Fontana's cipher or Dee and Kelley's Enochian. But I don't understand what you mean by "fake" with reference to "angelic scripts, seals and sigils". In the middle ages, many people believed in magic and almost everybody believed in angels, devils, exorcisms, miracles etc. These believes are not compatible with modern science, but I don't think that's enough to say they are fakes.
@@marcoponzi5398 By fake I mean intentionally fraudulent. It is certainly also possible that it was produced for personal use by someone who believed in revelation. Though the use of such expensive vellum seems at odds with a document intended for personal use, given no other person would ever be able to read it. It may also have been some combination of true believer and charlatan, as is generally thought to have been the case with Kelley & Dee. It was Kelley who was the scryer, who claimed to have visions of and receive dictation (often letter by letter or phrase by phrase) from angelic beings. As long as there have been believers, there have also been those (Joseph Smith comes to mind) intent on exploiting them.
That sounds awful, thanks for letting me know. To be honest I'm new to all of this and I'm just rolling with RUclips's presets. I will find the setting to change this manually.
It's interesting you mention Bacon, because the Bacon/Shakespeare conspiracy is, like this appears to be, a theory that attracts huge amounts of really clever people. Some of the smartest people around believe that theory. That there are codes hidden in Shakespeare's writing showing that Bacon was behind it all. So it says nothing about the validity of that theory, or this one, but it does show that clever people also can believe far out theories.
Look into some of the Codex from the Spanish after they came in context with the Mayan. To me... The paint... Art style and script looks like a perfect match. It was one of the codex saved and Ancient Americas has a video that displays videos from the manuscript. Its close enough I would guess its literally the same author and I wonder if he created it to preserve Mayan or middle eastern knowledge.
Yeah, this is another reason why many people were confused in the earlier 20th century. A botanist named Hugh O'Neill claimed that one of the plants was a sunflower, and everyone went with it because he was a botanist. Turns out the plant has very little in common with a sunflower. Now that we have instant access to good scans of the manuscript, we can see this for ourselves.
Yeah, that would be cool. But it's not. It can't be a letter by letter cipher, there's not enough letters, and it can't be a word cypher, there are over 6000 different words.
That only makes it "fake" if the author intended for people to think there was meaning that isn't actually there. That would require knowing the motivations of someone that's long dead whose name we don't even know. In other words, pure speculation with no evidence. Now if you want to claim it's likely meaningless, at least in the text, that's not entirely implausible. Seems like a lot of effort, but someone could have done that. Then the mystery isn't what the book says, but who made it and why.
My estimation of the likelihood of a later forgery is far below that of my fellow Voynich casuals, but so is my estimation of the likelihood that it's the Da Vinci Code.
It probably would have cost more to make than one could realistically sell it for back then, as anyone willing to pay the amount of money such a thing would cost would want it to be something useful and/or comprehensible.
All such attempts at translating the Voynich Cipher through simple substitution are doomed to fail, as the entropy and number of characters in the text are too low. Watch his last video where he debunked these methods of cracking the Manuscript.
I'd like to think I'm skeptical but open-minded; I'm willing to believe almost anything with enough compelling evidence, but as the saying goes, extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence. Got any proof 15th century aliens existed and made this, I'm willing to look at it.
Its alphabet isn’t complex enough to contain information and the pictures make no sense. It clearly contains no information. It might have been created as art, but it is fake in so far that there is no secret hidden and the idea of hidden secrets made it famous.
Na dude, those are micro-organisms. You can easily match the images up with many common yeast and bacteria. Why I never see more people discuss this is beyond me.
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This is a very clear, highly informative and entertaining video! I can only recommend it to everyone who wants to know more about this manuscript.
Thanks! For anyone interested in reading more, check Rene's opinion on the modern fake theory here: www.voynich.nu/extra/nofake.html
I can say this is the first time I've clicked on a Voynich Manuscript themed video and been hit in the face with factual and referenced research. Great stuff!
Thanks! Scripting this video did feel like writing an actual paper, but it's encouraging to see that people appreciate the extra effort.
Great video. Really interesting that you and others were able to narrow down the handwriting and fashion to such a narrow period. Very convincing
Thanks!
A 'fake' implies that it's passing off as something that it's not. But it's anybody's guess what that authentic something even is.
Yes! If it's a fake, then a fake what exactly? The thing it is trying to be a fake of doesn't exist. We know from actual forgeries and fakes that they always intend to be clearly understood as something: a painting by Van Gogh, a page from a book of Hours, a manuscript leaf illustrating Columbus' arrival in the New World (the Spanish Forger did something like this).
I really like the way you broke down the "fake" theory in the end.
That was the most fun part to animate. Always gotta get some shootin' in there.
Am I the only one who thinks it's plausible someone could just make up a language and make up fantasy herbs just like people today come up with fantasy languages, fantasy maps, fantasy creatures because they like fiction and fantasy as a genre? Someone in the past could have done that for the same reason.
Of course they did. Honestly, the Victorian era and its infatuation with mysteries and religious rituals is still present in how we in the West regard common life in the past.
Sometimes it is just as easy as someone a long time ago wanted to do a Thing. And now we speculate that the Thing is somehow a calender.
He says in the beginning of the video that it is plausible, so definitely not the only one. I won't comment on the language, but I don't think the herbal illustrations even need to be fantasy. Or rather, I don't think any medieval illustrator painted anything but fantasy herbs. If you look at any pre printing-press herbal guides, you'll notice a distinct lack of realism in the illustrations. I believe that most illustrators didn't even know what the plant looked like - and if they did, illustrations had to be exclusively left to artistic interpretation.
The Medieval version of "Everybody so creative!"
There is an xkcd comic about exactly this
If that’s the case the language would be easily found, but there is no language in the book. It even lacks an alphabet of the necessary size.
Truly an astoshingly refreshing dive into the Voynich Manuscript. Instant sub. I look forward to updates on the locations regarding the handwriting analysis, that is so interesting!
Awesome, thank you! We do have some surprising insights in the locations. If all goes according to plan, we will report on the study in full in August.
Thanks very much for this Koen! To add my 2 cents to the "Fake" arguement from a purely common sense standpoint and why it never made very much sense to me.
One or more statements are usually true.
1. A fake is made to look older than it is
2. A fake is made to look like it was by someone famous
3. A fake pretends to offer special/secret knowledge
4. A fake pretends to be more valuable than it is, or immitate something very valuable
(3 and 4 are more modern ideas of "fake" but I'll leave them in)
Answers.
1. You covered this in detail.
2. The manuscript does not attribute itself to anyone.
3. No one can read it. Also this would mean every alchemy manuscript is "fake".
4. The manuscript was made using relatively inexpensive componants and the artwork is poorly done.
So, what are you peddling to Rudolph?
I think all considered the answer you are left with is point 3.. which essentially means you wrote an alchemy book to sell, which is hardly a grand conspiracy and not a "fake".
Yeah, exactly. Regarding encoding, I guess people would only call the text fake if it pretends to be an encoded text, while in fact it's nonsense. But like I said in the video, meaning and the author's intentions can only be speculated about right now.
Yeah, my linguistics professor thought it was best described as a hoax rather than a fake. Its encoding is nonsense and 98% of the text encodes nothing even if the remaining 2% contains easter eggs. It isn't however faking its age.
Hey I just wanted to say thanks I found this channel about a month ago and watched all the videos within a day or two. I really enjoy medieval literature so I had heard about the voynich manuscript but it was fascinating to go on such a deep dive. Glad to hear you plan to try to post around once a month I was you the best that you for the content!
Thanks!
I'm going to feed the algorithm before even watching this. A channel with 2k subs, tackling a well-covered and controversial subject, for 31minutes? I am impressed just by the ambition and initiative. The next 31minutes is your chance to win a sub.
Yep, this is something special. Focused script avoids rehashing the well-trodden narrative. Good (and real) voice. Detailed and thorough research. Superb production values. 10/10. you win a sub!
Thanks! I'd have ten times more views if I claimed to have solved it... But well, this is only my second video that got some more traction, so there is still room for growth :) To be honest I never even expected to reach anything close to 10k viewers.
Fantastic video! Recommended out of nowhere, and this is my first hearing about the manuscript, but I am now quite fascinated. I really appreciate your straightforward and measured delivery. Looking forward to more.
Thanks! I find clarity very important, so it's reassuring to hear that even people who hadn't heard about the manuscript before were able to follow.
I had no idea that hats and sleeves could so easily give away the date the manuscript was likely written! But it does make perfect sense: fashion between 1990 and now seems to have changed less than in 1390 to 1424, but I'd find it pretty easy to tell which decade a photo in a magazine was taken based on clothes alone.
The blossom hat doesn't lie...
yep! And it's not like it's something you can depend on by itself, an artist could always be depicting an older period, or just not up on the latest fashion, but when you combine it with other things that all point to the same narrow date range, it can form part of a very reliable dating
Thank you @Koen, there is hardly a better way to summarize the current evidence for determining the age of the VMS.
Ok fine, you got me, I wrote it
My issue with the theory of it being a fake has always been: why would you fake an ugly and unreadable book of herb-lore? A lot of effort and expense went into producing the manuscript, if it was a fake, made for profit, then why not make the subject matter something more appealing and valuable? The philosopher's stone, the holy grail, a cure for baldness, etc.?
This is a very good point. The vellum alone would probably have been more valuable. Such a big pile of unused pre-1450 vellum is extremely rare (I'm not sure if there is any known case. I do know of some later ones.)
My issue with this kind of stance (also often find in ufology) Is that humans will fake almost anything with any type of motivation. You literally cannot conclude that something is unlikely to be done by a human so it wasn't done by one. We have so many examples to the contrary
@@koengheuens I think it's not a good point actually. The obvious answer is that if it *is* a fake, then it was intended to be as mysterious as possible, because that's what would get a lot of attention. And if that's the case then it clearly worked - the manuscript is now extremely famous and people are still talking about it to this day.
@@patavinity1262 but in that case, it would not be a fake. It would just be itself.
@@koengheuens What do you mean? I'm pointing out that, if we entertain the hypothesis that it may have been created at a later date but was deliberately made to appear to be a mysterious manuscript of the 15th century (thus being a fake), then there is an obvious motive on the part of the creator to make it unreadable and strange.
I think it was written by a brilliant and talented, albeit severely mentally ill man. I think no deceit was intended.
Yeah. Kind of like the medieval Temple OS.
I don't think you need to be mentally ill to imagine things or put made up things on vellum.
@@vogonp4287 Medieval dementia.
@@vogonp4287 Definitely my favorite comparison.
There is some evidence that two different people wrote (or copied) the manuscript; apparently there are some subtle differences in the handwriting. Someone else may have done the illustrations.
This is some impressive research. Thanks for sharing it with those of us who only take a superficial interest in the subject.
I just want to say thanks for all your hard work managing all that info
Thanks, I really appreciate that. This video represents months of work, including the previous research. But most of it was fun ;)
@koengheuens, 👍 In my opinion, it's really science.
If it's a fake, then the person behind it went to great lengths, both personal and financial, to produce it in a time period where such materials were rare and highly expensive. It would have cost more to produce it than to sell it, defeating the purpose of being a scam.
Occam's razor says that the simplest answer is usually the most logical and closer to the truth, and with that in mind it makes far more sense that the text itself is authentic. However it was probably written in an invented language only the author(s) used. That's why nobody can "crack" it, because it's not a code. It's an invented language.
For what purpose? One can only speculate, but it clearly had a purpose to it. I personally hold the view that it was an early biology book of some sort, perhaps also tied with an Esoteric/Occult tradition based on the artistic depictions and alchemical symbols.
And other little things I discovered: There are a total of 104 two letter words possible in the Voynich script. There are 13 letters that can appear as a first letter, and 8 that can appear as a last letter. In English, that number is 26*26, so 676 possible two letter words. English has 127 two letter words, so about 18% of all possible combinations.
The Voynich script has 89 different two letter words. That's 85% of all possible two letter words. That doesn't make sense. Three letter words have similar problems.
The Voynich script does not make any sense as a directly written language. Perhaps the most confusing part is: The »words« get shorter from the beginning to the end of a line; and the same (but a little weaker) from the top lines to the bottom lines. And there are still some in-»word«-patterns, which are easily explained by different glyph forms on the start, in the middle and at the end of a word, until you notice how much the »alphabet« shrinks down to something, which simply can not be a direct represantation of phonemes of a language we know of.
That's the fascination of the Voynich manuscript: At a first glance, it looks easy and you don't unterstand, why it can be that hard to read it. And it seems to be written so incredible fluently, surely by a proficient hand. No trace of using elaborated cryptological calculations or tools. But the deeper one dives in it, the more the confusion gets overwhelming.
@goebelmasse I did some superficial checks on a transliteration. There's 29000 words. There are 6000 unique words. 4000 of them appears only once. That makes no sense.
Not fake in the sense of being a document not of the age it seems to be from. But fake in the sense of pretending to be, but not really being a document with decipherable text, we don't know.
exactly. it could just be a mentally ill person creating and using a script of their own design
I'm developmentally delayed, but i would do a similar system when I realized how similar pqbd was and WM symmetry was
this might just be some artistic and autistic teenager's system
we don't know what the hell it's saying.
but it's not fake as in, it's genuine artifact, and we don't know the intentions. it's just unknown.
it's like the concept of a crochet machine.
@@nxtvim2521 This was exactly my thought--that it was the work of a mentally ill person.
Very impressive analysis. You have the most well researched videos on the Voynich Manuscript.
Very impressive video. Also a great demonstration of the importance of digital humanities.
very convincing breakdown! and excellent video as well
Thanks!
I'm not an expert, but looking at the language they used it seems to me that it may in fact not contain any real information and the person who wrote it produced one or more books just to be decoration.
I'm no expert, and I'm not even a big Voynich follower! But language is always fascinating, so Voynich vids pop up in my recommends.
And one by this channel a while back mentioned the fact that the frequency analysis was out of whack, and that some characters seem to come up more often at the end of a page - nothing to do with the text, but the position on the page.
That convinced me that it was decoration.
I mentioned it in the comments on another Voynich channel, and the guy replied that he'd felt that way too, and discussed it at length elsewhere. I think our consensus would be; 'the pics have meaning, the text is gibberish'!
@@LittleNala But there was significant effort poured into producing said gibberish-it looks like a real script at first glance-which raises questions about the motives of the authors.
@@CjqNslXUcM Imitation. Could have been a mentally challenged person, autistic maybe. The person was able to "write" a book without being able to read, just by imitating what others do.
@@CjqNslXUcM
Absolutely! I would not deny for one second that it took a lot of work.
As Kobold666 below says, perhaps it was an autistic person (with access to funds, of course).
But have you seen the sort of things people do just for larks? They build the Notre Dame from matchsticks! The amount of time and cash I put into my own hobbies is embarrassing! ;-)
I honestly don't think the fact someone put a lot of effort into it is a deal breaker. People do all sorts of nutty stuff - always have.
Thank you for this. Can't wait to see what the marginalia suggests is the place of writing.
Thanks! The regional study should be ready for presentation by August. I'll make some other videos in the mean time though :)
Even if fake, it's still an incredible work of art.
A lot of fakes are.
Whoever the unknown individual able to create such convincing fake is they deserves a metal
And maybe if they put their genius into something more productive, we would be on Mars by now
Yeah exactly. This became increasingly clear to me as I was writing this video. If someone made this later, their expertise was so great that they literally became a medieval scribe. John Dee lived in a time where the subject of art history was virtually non-existent, and artists had the custom of adapting fashion to that of their own period. And Wilfrid Voynich was a trader, a businessman. Definitely not an art historian.
Just to play devils advocate a bit: would it be possible that the whole manuscript is legitimate and from the 1410-1425 period… but that the lettering was somehow altered to make the thing unintelligible for whatever reason? Or would ink analysis have picked up on that?
Love the fashion break down! Dates the document very firmly!
Impeccable analysis!
If there is no meaning in text, I wonder why somebody paid so much for the vellum unless there was a specific potential buyer.
First intelligent comment under this vid... 🙂
Maybe it was made with the intention of selling it to a specific wealthy buyer.
History is full of wealthy people spending fabulous sums on their insane projects without any intention of profiting.
Extremely well done video and thorough research, my hats off to you, sir.
Thanks!
Could the manuscript be some sort of accounting document? Maybe the symbols could be encoded numerals in a decimal or duodecimal system?
Great video on a very exciting subject - thanks a lot!
incredibly good video man, thanks for your work 👍
Amazing, and here I am writing like a toddler!
WOULD YOU please release that list of manuscripts... I would love to add and check for some of my own I have found throughout the years!!!
Which one do you mean? About the fashion or about the handwriting?
@@koengheuens the manuscripts list he teases about... I have to know, lol...
That's for Voynich Manuscript Day, 4 August :)
A video where you talk about what we can know about the author of the Voynich manuscript would be interesting. Like, is it fair to say he had a lot of disposable income?
That's a great idea! I will add it to my list of topics.
I enjoy Koen's deadpan humor.
Very good video. Thank you for uploading this
Glad you enjoyed it!
11:49 is there a reason you presume the vellum to be unused at the time of a possible forgery? could it not have been palimpsest?
It's been established by specialist that it's not a palimpsest. Indeed, if it were, we'd be looking at a completely different scenario.
Great video!
What a cool video! Good job on the research!
Thank you!
Having pinned down the date period of the manuscript might it be worth making a list of all known persons who lived then who had an deep interest in the type of material illustrated in the manuscript?
Yes. One issue is that many named figures we know of lived later. It's really only the big names that survive to this day. Who knows how many anonymous people with these kinds of interests were active in the first quarter of the 15th century?
Im more happy with this conclusion, someone will figure it out and that probably kills the mystery when it turns out to be the frst naughty cookbook XD
Great job! Wouldn't it also be useful to compare it to the dates of the herbal books that share the same plants illustrated by Voynich's scribes. Most interesting of all would be the dates of the books that share plants with Voynich that cannot be identified today.
That would be tricky. Herbal manuscripts are highly tradition-forming. The plants come in standard groups that are copied, recombined etc throughout the centuries. The Voynich is one of the very few known herbal manuscripts that absolutely does not adhere to any of these traditions... It's really hard to compare it to anything else.
@@koengheuens I have read that some of the plants that can't be identified are found in at least one other herbal manuscript. Maybe that's where we should focus, the plants that can't be identified. Do I take it that you don't agree with Elizabeth Sherwood's identifications?
@@GeraldM_inNC well, I can't say that she's wrong about everything. But let's say her list of identifications is definitely not my favorite :)
To be honest, my feelings about the plants have changed so often that I don't even know what to think anymore. If there is a connection, I'd probably say it's mostly to the Greek (i.e. Byzantine) traditions. See herculeaf.wordpress.com/2024/07/04/some-thoughts-on-dioscorides/
Terrific video.
thanks!
Over 50 years ago, during boring school classes, I used to cover my exercise books with long tracts of made up text. Sentences, paragraphs, punctuation, the lot. One time, a teacher walked past and said how creative it was, but that I really should be actually taking note of the lesson he was teaching! ;-)
So for personal reasons, I feel the Voynich script is something similar, No malice or cheating - just text made up to look attractive on the page. The whole manuscript is a work of art - it doesn't contain any hidden secrets.
It is art - that's all. A 'pastiche' of a contemporary (late Middle Age) scientific tract.
Asemic writing.
The book is not exactly a cheap, mass produced, notebook, though. Would anyone use high quality paper so frivously back then?
It's possible, though an objection would be that expensive and carefully prepared vellum is not exactly a notebook. They already had cheaper paper available to them in these days. I wouldn't be surprised if the VM turns out to be some kind of student's project though.
@@koengheuens
Oh no, that's not what I meant at all!
I can relate to it because I did it at school, but I think this was some wealthy person with an art background, indulging themselves with a little project to raise eyebrows.
Nothing to so with students or schoolkids. Sorry if I gave that impression - it never crossed my mind.
@@elio7610
I only said I could relate because I did it when I was a schoolkid.
I didn't think the person who produced the VM was also a schoolkid!
I think they were a wealthy person with creative tendencies, and leisure time, who did it as a form of art project.
Sorry - I didn't make clear that it never crossed my mind that the VM was made by a student for fun!
I think whoever did it had money, and time, and a creative itch.
very impressive!
I like the idea that one of the churches most important saints randomly created a book filled with gibberish for no reason.
Really Voynich manuscript day is on my birthday? This is a sign hahae.
Yeah we had the first one this year (2024). We picked the 4th of August (04/08 in international notation) because the shelf number of the manuscript is Beinecke MS 408 :)
@koengheuens That makes sense!
20:06 I need a tattoo of this
It's nice that some of the wonderful mysteries in the world aren't made up and sensationalized
11:19 -- Vellum can be "recycled". There are a handful of extant manuscripts where the original underlying text was erased (well, scraped off) and new text applied to the surface.
Yes, these are called palimpsests. We know from imaging of the MS that the Voynich is not one. And I don't even think anyone claims this. This is probably something I should have mentioned though!
Maybe it's an early example of schizophrenia or autism originated outsider art, a mediaeval equivalent of Henry Darger's The Story of the Vivian Girls or Louis Wain's Cat paintings. It is not fake, but meaningless or almost meaningless (though it contained great meaning to the author).
That's what I think too. There's a lot of pieces of art like that in the modern day that would undoubtedly confuse potential future archeologists and researchers.
I’ve done quite a bit of academic research on outsider art (and I’m autistic to boot) and while I’m not sure how much I believe that’s what it is, I can definitely see the connection. It’s fairly obvious that the artist isn’t formally trained (pretty much the absolute baseline of any definition of ‘outsider art’ and it’s many offshoots) when compared to more formal manuscript art created by monks and scribes from the time. The fictional language also reminds me quite a bit of James Hampton’s ‘Hamptonese’, another very well known outsider artist whose language we’ve yet to decipher. It makes me both deeply saddened and deeply inspired to think how many beautiful and creative pieces of outsider art we may have lost through the centuries because of people’s lack of love or care for them and their creators
> Maybe it's an early example of schizophrenia or autism originated outsider art
Maybe, or maybe the author had a stroke or a brain tumor; or literally any other pathology of the nervous system.
It's a very 'modern' thing to attribute everything unusual as being the result of autism in particular. It's not a particularly informative exercise to speculate on his/her neurological function, there's just no way of knowing. It's a profound waste of time and effort, and reeks of terminally online Americans and their obsession with autism specifically.
I say that as an aspie.
Everyone’s looking at what’s written and not the blank space!
I don't know why the northern Italian fashion makes me think the text is somehow related to Etruscan or is a Tyrsenian language. (I'm just an amateur linguist interested in Pre-PIE Europe) If it was so that would mean the language family survived into the 15th century when most related languages died in the 1st-2nd century. But if it was Etruscan-related, it still would not explain anything except give that extinct language family an almost unrealistic 14-hundred-year extra period.
I've never believed the manuscript was a fake, but it always struck me as pretty odd that if the author/scribe went to the trouble of inventing some super secure encryption in order to keep the contents secret, they'd then include so many images within the book, if those images bore any significance to whatever the text contained, it just wouldn't make any sense. But what do I know? I'm just a random idiot on the internet 🤔🤪😁
It's not uncommon for medieval images to also be "encoded" in a way. You don't even have to go to alchemy to find examples. A flute under a maiden's bed may mean that she's promiscuous. Stuff like that. They were used to non-literal imagery.
I'm aware it's common for scribes to include images on manuscripts, I think you misunderstood my point - why write down a secret in code, only to illustrate the exact meaning on the same manuscript? It'd be like the CIA including a handy key in plain text with every top secret message they sent to their field operatives. I'm not convinced the imagery is important to decyphering the text, unless it's also part of the code, forms some sort of public key perhaps, OR we are missing something significant entirely. Just a thought. There's a lot of nonsense on the internet about this manuscript, it's so nice to have something available to us from someone who actually knows what he's talking about by the way - thank you.
imagine if people are just trying to decode medieval lorem ipsum
Imagine trying to code break someone's illustrated fanfic
The Council of Constance brought many men of means, including prodigious book buyers like Poggio Bracciolini, to the Bodensee region for *four years*. I've always wondered if someone got to writing at this time, claiming to be able to present a unique Hermetic text.
This is definitely possible. The period of the council (1414-1418) and the years after it coincide well with my preferred narrower date range for the MS. This would still leave the question why and how they came up with this exact system though.
Really looks like those schizophrenic writings that you might see sometimes.
That it might have been created by someone that was illiterate or mentally ill is not entirely implausible.
I watched a random documentary about two guys who were able to decipher it. Apparently it was written by somebody who was illiterate, writing an ancient form of an old Turkish language. Maybe not illiterate, but not very good at spelling.
My guess is that it was just an art project to practice using the pen and drawing...
I have often theorized that it was put together by an illiterate scribe. Throughout history, people have been trained to imitate letters and to copy material without being able to read it. In the ancient world, it was a common practice. We assumed that everyone is literate because in the modern era people basically are, but the ability to read written language was not universal in the past. This manuscript often feels childlike to me, as if it was put together for visual impressions rather than for the content of the words.
You, claiming this was "common practice"...you know better, you're just a lying fucking troll. Illiterates cannot accurately copy text...try it, you seem illiterate enough. For that matter, try giving a quill to an illiterate, and see if they can figure out how to make letters with it....also not as easy as you "think". You're just another moron, opening your yap with nothing intelligent to say.
The text contains no meaning in any known European language, whether or not it was made in the early 1400's.
The monasteries would make a lot of the books by commission from various nobles and well to do citizens. It is not a stretch to think that at some point a monk cranked out nonsense for some illiterate that was buying a book as a status symbol.
But this is exactly what these Ai LLM's could solve by comparing word associations and lengths to all known languages in a matter of hours.
I'm having bacon for breakfast today. Thanks Koen! ;)
Enjoy! ;)
Agreed, it's genuine 15th century junk.
A lot of people claiming it could be a work of a mentally ill person or someone autistic or some example of outsider art in the comments.
But it feels the sheer cost of such an endeavor would eliminate that possibility, no?
Theories like these feel kind of weird to me, like a cop out. "Probably some crazy person did it". There is no way this could ever be demonstrated, especially within a society where religion and magical thinking are pervasive to begin with.
This video like almost all videos fails to explore the real issue with the manuscript. THE WRITING!!
A deep analysis of the writing needs to be done.
Medieval lorem ipsum perhaps?
What if it’s just a sketch book?
I've yet to hear any rebuttal to the linguistic analysis highly suggesting its just some algorithmically generated gibberish.
"you wouldnt call these paintings fake just because the text is made up" ummm yeah i would have but your intonation made it sound obvious not too so i wont i guess
We can actually conclude that the text contains no information through linguistic statistics. There's just isn't enough characters to represent a human language.
(Edit: See Koen Gheuens video a month ago).
What do you mean by characters? If you mean letter shapes (at least what seems to look like letter shapes) there are more than enough distinct shapes to convey a human language. For comparison, Hawaiian needs only 13 letters. Now if you mean distinct "words" (strings of characters with a space on either side) that's a different story.
@@Drabkikker There are massive problems with those distinct shapes, as some only appear at the start of words and other at ends, etc, which is not how languages generally work. But mainly the problem is the words, yes, the text is extremely repetitive.
@@RegebroRepairs Got it :) Yes, I agree.
Interesting tidbit. From an encryption perspective, maybe your observation could be interpreted as a "failed, undecipherable encryption" because the encryption actually destroyed linguistic information.
@@1Adamrpg It would be a very strange encryption, and also, I feel that if you make an encryption, you will test if it works. Unless you are slightly insane. But that would also explain the manuscript entirely free from encryption.
there’s no basis for pronouncing the V in Voynich as an F
Fantastic video, as usual. Thank you.
It is a product of someone’s colourful imagination.
The original troll
Some notes -
1. Good point that efforts to represent other scripts might be hopelessly inaccurate 'Pseudo-Kufic' - etc., doesn't imply dishonest intentions.
2. On the point of 'intention' - the term is commonly used in iconographic analysis, where it is near-synonymous with purpose. It bothers some amateurs, but as you rightly say when speaking about the painting by Mantegna, a person who has done their background research *can* discuss the maker's intentions - it's not to be called 'speculation' unless there's nothing more to it than guesswork.
3.The same goes for informed opinions about dating a manuscript. It all depends on how good the scholar is whose opinion is sought. Amateurs often forget that we have literally tens of thousands of medieval manuscripts, and still more paintings, all of which have been accurately dated by specialists - even as long ago as the 1800s without use of destructive tests such as radiocarbon dating. The radiocarbon dating was seriously flawed - biased by the patron's unconscious biases. Also affected tests of pigments - only a very small number were selected; the palette is still much larger and mostly still undefined.
4. About titanium. A big difference between titanium in black ink, and titanium white paint. It is said that titanium was found in ink from one of Gutenberg's Bibles. The amount of research needed to address this question is huge - natural deposits, comparative analytical studies of inks, investigation of imported materials, history of 'india ink' and much more. HUGE research topic before any opinion possible.
5. Pigments have to be assumed added at, or later than, the time the manuscript was made so the clothing argument is dubious. Beside that, the investigations only looked at a very narrow range of a very few regions in Europe, so affected by a substantial bias in the fashions sampling. Sorry.
6. It's important not to fall into the trap of conflating information about a manuscript's manufacture, and the origin or date of what it contains. Showing that a copy of the Bible was made in fifteenth-century Italy doesn't make the Bible a fifteenth-century Italian composition, does it? That's why, I think, Fagin Davis specifies "fifteenth-century *object*
7. Also, ,I dispute your claiming that the book-dealer and scholar who gave the ms to Yale is a greater specialist in medieval art than Erwin Panofsky, who had correctly dated it (1410-1420-1430) in 1932 when everyone else still believed the 'Bacon' story.
You seem to have misunderstood: Helmut Lehmann-Haupt is not a book dealer. He got his PhD in art history, worked at various museums and was one of the most respected bibliographers at the time.
I agree that I should have included Panofsky, but then explaining his turn towards the New World would have added 10 minutes to this video...
@@koengheuens Yes, I know that Helmut Lehmann-Haupt was a scholar, but he was working with/for Kraus as his assistant, and spoke as agent for the bookdealer who was had been trying to find a buyer for the Vms. I also understand why you didn't want to mention Panofsky. After 1939, Panofsky didn't feel like openly opposing persons such as Friedman or O'Neill, and with good reason in McCarthy's America. But Panofsky's name has massively more weight, to this day, and he still had the right of it about dating and was the first to do it. He was also insistent, directly to Friedman, that it was genuine. To keep the balance, an historian has to be careful about what is included and what is effectively 'blanked' - but I'm sure you know that.
is it a very old book, completed c1420? yes. is it total nonsense, presenting as found knowledge of a foreign culture to validate travel tales or generate fraudulent income? probably. A lot of effort to no conceivable purpose other than fraud. A person with a wealth of time and creativity would make it less venal, an art project, as it were. But still to be considered a fake from c1420, until a key to translate is determined.
[Copy/paste from my comment on the Ninja forum, part l]
Koen: You've made a very entertaining and well-produced video. You are really good at this... my attempts are fairly unpolished compared to yours!
But the problem is that in an attempt to make a case for your "genuine circa 1420" theory, you have had to cherry pick only those facts, observations and opinions which support it. Left out, or casually dismissed from your video are a huge number of facts and expert opinions which would give your viewers a far more accurate picture of the true nature of the Voynich, so that they could come to their own conclusions with open eyes.
The second major problem is that you misstate my own hypothesis and opinions, both by leaving important points out, and even re-writing core elements! You have created a Straw Man of my own ideas, and argued that, and not the actual hypothesis.
But even if my hypothesis were not the focus of your video, I would feel compelled to address your omissions and alterations to the actual Voynich knowledge base.
I'd also add that your rebuttal video, which, by necessity needs to ignore serious problems with the Voynich rather than address them, in order to seem to work, by doing so actually makes the case against your theory, and supports mine.
0:50 "This uncertainty... this 'not knowing"... has led some to question the authenticity of the manuscript".
I can't speak for others, but since I am the focus of your video I want to correct you: I did not come to believe the Voynich is a modern fake because of "not knowing" what it was. Your claim here is a common attempt at minimizing the actual reasons for suspecting this. Among the actual motivations for believing it may be a fake are the high level of anomalous and anachronistic content, style and construction, all seemingly derived from, or influenced by, a great many sources ranging from the 14th through early 20th centuries. In additions is the lacking, and even contra-indicative "provenance" presented in "support" of it.
7:44 "1910- Wilfrid Voynich forges the MS (SantaColoma)
Thank you for linking my blog in the description.
9:40 "Keep in mind that we know next to nothing about the exact origins of most manuscripts sitting in archives. So the fact that we can't trace it back to a specific Medieval scriptorium is what we would generally expect".
There are two problems with this: First, whether common or not, the Voynich still does not have any provenance, as you agree, and so... well, it still has no provenance. Secondly, the cases of most other works without provenance is entirely different, because they are STILL are identifiable to one or more of: an age, geographic and cultural origin, approximate purpose, meaning, and so on. So while it is true we don't know, in many cases, specific authorship nor have a trail of provenance, other works are nothing like the Voynich, for which none of this can be determined, at best, or multiple, widely disparate and contradictory explanations exist.
10:00 "Radiocarbon dating"- Yes, claimed is a "certainty of 95%" that the calves died about 1404-1438. And almost certainly the vellum is from ABOUT that time. I agree. But it is not as exact as the 95% "result" implies, as the dates of the individual samples gave ages as much as 60 or more years apart, and were then "combined" under the "assumption" that the manuscript was created in a shorter time than that... the "assumption" being "under ten years". This is a problem because it is a form of confirmation bias, in which actual, raw results were manipulated to conform to a pre-concieved, desired, result.
Well one might ask, "what difference does it make?", if one agrees, as I do, with those raw results? Because the actual results would be unusual in a book of that time. That is, it would not be normal to find a book made of sheets of vellum 60+ years apart in age. It is anomalous to a genuine book. To erase this problem, the dates were "combined" to give a more palatable result which fits "genuine" better. It is another case of "science done backwards", that is, letting preconceptions drive interpretation of raw data, when it should be the reverse: We should listen to the data, work with it, and figure out what it really tells us.
11:20 "You can just say that a forger found some old vellum lying around".
You must be aware, by now, of Wilfrid's purchase of the Libreria Franceshini in 1908, which contained a 40 year collection of over a half million items of all types. Yet you do not mention it.
11:24 "Keep in mind, though, that vellum wasn't cheap..."
Actually, various times in history, it was fairly cheap. In the comments under my blog post, here: proto57.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/but-who-would-use-vellum-anyway/
I use linked costs of vellum provided by Nick Pelling to calculate the cost of the vellum needed for "a" Voynich. Being conservative with the figures, it would come to only "... a couple of dozen shillings".
But on the flip side, playing the devil's advocate and hypothetically accepting the cost would have been higher than this, even much higher, we have to remember that in the case of a forgery for sale to Rudolf II would have netted 600 ducats, and that if forged by Wilfrid, he hoped to sell it for over $100,000 in his time. With inflation, that would be something like $1.4 million dollars today. In either case, the cost of vellum to a forger would have been a negligible investment for the intended return.
11:30 "Finding a stack of unused 15th century vellum is probably like finding an unused vintage car"
Actually, no, it is not the same. It is more akin to finding a vintage unused car PART. Whole cars, like unread books, would be less common than finding parts or blank leaves of vellum (a coincidental aside, I actually purchased the entire stock of unused antique car parts when I was 16 years old, for the staggering sum of $125, and became an Original Equipment Parts dealer for the next couple of years).
There are a great deal of sources for unused vellum, which I discovered and outlined in several blog posts years ago. And arguably, in 1910 such sources would have been even more prolific. But my demonstrations of possible and actual sources became somewhat moot when I learned of the Libreria purchase in 1908, which effectively provides a plausible source for the vellum needed in the Voynich...
proto57.wordpress.com/2011/02/26/something-sheepy-in-the-state-of-denmar/
... especially if the manuscript was cut down from one quire's worth of full sized (folio) vellum:
proto57.wordpress.com/2015/08/04/the-three-quire-theory/
13:20 "In 2009, McCrone took samples of ink and various paints from the Voynich manuscript."
13:45 "... the ink is compatible with 15th century ink, lacking any modern ingredients. The same goes for the pigments..."
14:17 (Text) "Voynich: Medieval ink and pigments, NOT suspicious"
This is incorrect, as it cherry picks from that McCrone report. Among the items were actually were anomalous were a "binder" that was not Gum Arabic, and not identified by McCrone as it was "not in [their] library" of binders. They called the finding of "copper and zinc" in the ink as "unusual", and only said it "could have" come from a brass inkwell. They found a "titanium compound" in some pigments, which they never explain. There is more than that in the report, and McCrone even suggested, more than once, that further testing was needed.
When I asked about these issues, I got no response. So they are still an open question, not explained nor ever further tested. For instance, was it "unusual" for copper and zinc to dissolve into ink from a brass inkwell? Or was it simply "unusual" to find copper and zinc in Medieval ink? Could it have come from a [much later] brass nib? What FORM was the "titanium compound" in? Anatase smooth crystals (ghosts of the Vinland Map fiasco!)? Which "compound" was it?
These questions are unresolved, yet very important. But by your leaving out these and other oddities from the report, you are clearly constructing an inaccurate and misleading picture, in support of your own conclusions.
[Part II]:
14:30 "Fashion trends" [as identifiers of age]
15:50 "It was [fashion] details like these which allowed early researchers to conclude, with confidence, that this style is compatible with 15th century Europe".
This is patently untrue. You are aware of our long discussion of early expert analysis, so you also know that only one early expert... Lehmann-Haupt... dated the content of the Voynich to the early 15th century. The overwhelming number of experts of the pre-radiocarbon dating era dated the illustrations and writing over a wide range of eras, from the 13th to the 17th centuries. It is only by rejecting and ignoring upward of 15 or so highly qualified experts that you could make such a claim.
Of course your (and others) comparisons to the crossbowman's outfit in the Devonshire Hunting Tapestries may be correct. It probably is correct. But it is again cherry picking, because the styles of dress and many other items in the Voynich have been favorably compared to those from many OTHER eras, too, but you leave those out.
17:10 "... these sleeves are sufficient to force a cut off point for the one tapestry that contains them?"
But, in addition the reality of overwhelming expert opinion NOT backing early 15th century, and the cherry picking of only those style examples which do match the C14 dating, it is simply possible for anyone to copy older styles in a newer forgery. This renders the use of comparative styles moot to determining the Voynich's age or authenticity. And, in essence, you admit this, earlier in your video, when you correctly point out that a written date (if hypothetically found) would NOT be proof of age, because anyone can add an old date. Well, they can add in any old content, too, as well as a date.
23:00 I now see that you do acknowledge my listing of the overwhelming majority of experts (you even show my chart! Thank you.) who did NOT believe the manuscript was from the date range of the eventual radiocarbon dating. Then how and why can you claim, as you did, that "... details like these which allowed early researchers to conclude, with confidence, that this style is compatible with 15th century Europe".
I mean, you admit it was only Lehmann-Haupt, so why do you use the plural "researchers"? As for eliminating the overwhelming majority of experts who disagreed with you (or would, if they were still alive), I also see you do give some reasoning here, in your next part, at:
23:35 You begin to pick off those experts who did not agree with Haupt, or early 15th century, with various rationalizations. Among them, the lack of radiocarbon dating! This is a tacit admission of something I have long argued, but has so far been strenuously denied: That the bias imposed by the radiocarbon dating has been improperly driving the interpretation of the content, and elimination of pre-C14 experts and their opinions. But this is science done backwards (again), for those opinions do, or should matter.
Then you further dismiss the opinions the contrary experts by stating that they were "all over the place" (well that is true!), but it was because of the "grainy, black and white copies of a few folios". But you have now left out the fact that a great many of the researchers on that list actually saw either the actual Voynich, in person, and/or the original photostats... which Wilfrid and Ethel kept in the NYPL, for permitted scholars to examine. I've seen these in person, and they are very high quality, and quite detailed:
proto57.wordpress.com/2012/08/15/the-first-voynich-photocopies/
They were in no way... not sure who was, if any, actually, hampered by those very bad illustrations published in newspapers, magazines, and even D'Imperio. We were also saddled with them up until the 2000's, in fact. You show one of THOSE in your video, not what the listed experts actually had at their disposal, which was quite good.
25:00 Here you elevate the ONE expert who happened to hit the eventual C14 dating range, Hellmut Lehmann-Haupt. I agree he was a capable scholar. But you have here demonstrated exactly the effect which is so obvious to me, and which I have pointed out many times: That the obvious problem to "genuine @1420" is the overwhelming number of scholars who told us that the content of the Voynich was all over the map and the centuries long calendar, and that all but one did NOT match the eventual C14 dating. So the "solution" to this dilemma is to pick the ONE person who happened to hit the C14 date, and simply discard the rest who didn't.
And later, in your conclusions, at 28:47, you've declared Haupt "... the most qualified professional to comment on the manuscript's age".
I absolutely disagree. Summarily dismissed by you is the expert input of Charles Singer, far more versed in the history of the herbal than Haupt. Also removed is the opinion of Panofsky, whose opinion was recently cited to me as the reason that person believed the Voynich was from the 15th century... until I pointed out that Panofsky actually changed his mind to circa 1510 on his further and more complete examination. And Steele, and O'Neil, so on, for all of them. They are all at worst, the equivalent of Haupt, at best, far more qualified for the task at hand. And Brumbaugh, whom you mention in passing? Yes, he believed it could have been created by Dee, an authorship we pretty much all agree is incorrect. But the important question is "why?" Brumbaugh would have seen "Dee like" elements in the Voynich. He was skilled, experienced and knowledgeable. So rather than dismiss his input as incorrect, I think one should explain it. I do have an explanation that fits my hypothesis, I do not need to ignore his informed input.
proto57.wordpress.com/2024/03/17/i-do-listen-to-the-experts-do-you/
No, it is clear to me that no matter where in that list of experts the eventual carbon date landed, the person it landed on would be cited as the "best" expert, and the rest, discarded... along with Haupt.
27:43 Lisa Fagin Davis, "... there is absolutely nothing suspicious about the VMS."
But in actuality, Lisa raised some important, and I would say, "suspicious" points about the VMS, in her recent lecture at Wellesley college. In that talk, Lisa calls the Rosettes foldout pages, “Completely inexplicable”. They are, foldouts like that have been said, even by the Yale examiners, "highly unusual for the age". She describes the quires, folio numbers, stitching, and such, and over and over, and says how “odd” many things are: The order, the reorder, and so on, and then she said, "You're not supposed to go back and forth by nested bifolia… that’s just STRANGE” It’s WRONG. It’s not how it’s supposed to work”.
And in the Q&A after the talk:
Q: “How unusual is it to have no punctuation?”
A: “It’s extremely unusual. We would expect to see punctuation. To see capital letters- in a Western language, certainly, um, and so it’s not clear whether the lack of punctuation is… if it’s encoded, part of the coding process. The same for the quote-unquote “capital letters”: Is that part of the encoding? Is that part of the way that the language has been recorded? Maybe. I don’t know. But you would absolutely expect, in this period, to have punctuation and capital letters. It is a very unusual feature”.
And so on, the lecture is here: ruclips.net/video/5VlSRZy0D_Y/видео.html
The thing is... and I've seen this same effect over and over for over 15 years, and even in much content that came long before that, and it goes like this: A person insists that everything they see in the Voynich is perfectly fine, and not suspicious or out of the ordinary. But then, as the same time, when describing the manuscript they unavoidably point out the great many things that are anomalous, anachronistic, totally inexplicable and unexplainable. They honestly admit and describe these things, but then say they see nothing "suspicious". But, they do, they did, because they told us they did. We hear them tell us, and read when they write about them. The Yale book is another perfect example of this: Page after page of anomalies, anachronisms, and the inexplicable that does not match anything they've seen from the 15th century. And the conclusion? It's genuine, and from the 15th century. Go figure.
[Part III]:
28:15 "The best we can do, is consider the evidence".
Well, I agree… but we have to consider ALL the evidence, and omit nothing.
29:11 In the following segment, you first of all use a straw man argument, in part, as you do not accurately describe my Modern Forgery hypothesis.
- Yes, I do contend he "found a large stack of unused" vellum, but you leave out the fact he bought a mountain of materials when he bought the Libreria Franceshini. This is key, and very important, for it gives a very plausible source of vellum for a forged Voynich.
- "Then, he decided to make a fake, 1420's manuscript". No, this is entirely incorrect. I do not believe he wanted to do that, nor tried to do that. I believe he intended the Voynich as an early 17th century manuscript, to look as though it came from the Court of Rudolf II. I do think he removed pages sometime after making it, and changed his desired authorship to Roger Bacon.
- "Predict future technologies" No, again, this is a straw man, I do not believe he predicted anything of the kind: My actual contention is that the huge disparity between the early expert opinion and the later C14 dating is exactly because he could not predict such future technologies. He picked the wrong age vellum for his forgery BECAUSE he could not know. And in addition to that, the forger used vellum pages with a 60+ year spread, and not the narrow range derived from the raw data, commonly reported. This is further evidence the forger could not “predict future” C14, because if they could have, they would not have chosen vellum with this spread, either.
- "Perfectly replicate Medieval inks and pigments, without leaving any trace of modern materials" As I pointed out, McCrone actually found an unknown binder, "unusual" copper and zinc, and an unexplained "titanium compound". You also leave out the well known fact that Wilfred's associate, Sidney Reilly (the "Ace of Spies), took out a book on making medieval inks. That being said, it is not inconceivable, and is possible, to make medieval inks, at any time, with no "modern materials". But, I don't think it was accomplished here, as per the McCrone tests. This ink has unexplained problems.
- "... known of a short lived Medieval 'sleeve trend' relevant only to the exact period when the vellum was made". This cherry picks, again, one feature from the manuscript which fits your opinion. And of course any older "thing" could have been drawn in the Voynich at any time from it's first use in history, up until about 1911. The age of any item only gives an "earliest possible" date, not a latest possible.
- "Fool specialists and science, leave no trace" Well I don't think, first of all, that any of the many people who believe this is a forgery by Wilfrid HAVE been fooled. I think he failed with some, and succeeded with many others. And I think the science does not say what you claim it does. The raw data, when examined critically, does not say what you think, either. And as for “no trace”, that is not true... and that is not my opinion, but what is actually found in the Yale book, the original carbon dating report, the McCrone report, and in many of the honest and well meant original finding of the experts. Many “traces” have been found, and they are there to be either rejected or accepted. My hypothesis needs to reject nothing to survive, while any genuine argument is like Swiss cheese.
Koen, I would argue that in this video, you actually make my case for me. In order to support your own views, you have needed to cherry pick a very small subset of all the data and observations available, and discard the huge... overwhelming?... corpus of evidence and expert opinion contrary to your own. And further, you have needed to misstate my own views, findings and hypothesis, in order to create a false version of it, which you have found is more easily debated.
I really do look forward to any eventual arguments which do include and address all the problems inherent in the Voynich and its backstory, but I have not yet seen anything close to that. If your video presentation was able to do that, I would have been very interested to hear it. I was and am still completely ready and willing to hang up my hat on the matter, and move forward with the "Genuine 1420 European Cipher Herbal" with you and many others. It just has not happened yet, if it ever will.
Rich.
It seems probable that it is an elaborately produced fake. Making it indecipherable would make it an instant mystery, and object of fascination which would increase its value, compared with a conventional herbal, cosmogony, etc. Magical texts with invented angelic scripts, seals and sigils were produced in the same period. The older and more mysterious / 'esoteric' a manuscript was, the more value it would have. Including the idea of divine revelation which would give greater authority & value to it.
Personally, I agree that the Voynichese script could be related with magic or mysticism. After all, this was the case with invented scripts like Hildegard's Lingua Ignota, Giovanni Fontana's cipher or Dee and Kelley's Enochian.
But I don't understand what you mean by "fake" with reference to "angelic scripts, seals and sigils". In the middle ages, many people believed in magic and almost everybody believed in angels, devils, exorcisms, miracles etc. These believes are not compatible with modern science, but I don't think that's enough to say they are fakes.
@@marcoponzi5398 By fake I mean intentionally fraudulent. It is certainly also possible that it was produced for personal use by someone who believed in revelation. Though the use of such expensive vellum seems at odds with a document intended for personal use, given no other person would ever be able to read it.
It may also have been some combination of true believer and charlatan, as is generally thought to have been the case with Kelley & Dee. It was Kelley who was the scryer, who claimed to have visions of and receive dictation (often letter by letter or phrase by phrase) from angelic beings. As long as there have been believers, there have also been those (Joseph Smith comes to mind) intent on exploiting them.
zipf's law
But what does it say?!
Naw jp
Happy 600th birthday, Voynich manuscript. I may be a little late, sorry.
ads every TWO MINUTES.
Better make sure you got paid for all that.
That sounds awful, thanks for letting me know. To be honest I'm new to all of this and I'm just rolling with RUclips's presets. I will find the setting to change this manually.
It's interesting you mention Bacon, because the Bacon/Shakespeare conspiracy is, like this appears to be, a theory that attracts huge amounts of really clever people. Some of the smartest people around believe that theory. That there are codes hidden in Shakespeare's writing showing that Bacon was behind it all. So it says nothing about the validity of that theory, or this one, but it does show that clever people also can believe far out theories.
Different Bacon. Roger, not Francis.
Look into some of the Codex from the Spanish after they came in context with the Mayan. To me... The paint... Art style and script looks like a perfect match. It was one of the codex saved and Ancient Americas has a video that displays videos from the manuscript. Its close enough I would guess its literally the same author and I wonder if he created it to preserve Mayan or middle eastern knowledge.
The Voynich manuscript likely predates any European contact with the Mayans by at least a century.
Isn't some of the plants look like New World species? That doesn't fit into the 1400-1430 dating
Looking like something doesn't mean that it is that thing.
Yeah, this is another reason why many people were confused in the earlier 20th century. A botanist named Hugh O'Neill claimed that one of the plants was a sunflower, and everyone went with it because he was a botanist. Turns out the plant has very little in common with a sunflower. Now that we have instant access to good scans of the manuscript, we can see this for ourselves.
i'd like to beloieve it's genuine but the decipher code caught fire before they could be added hence why there is missing pages in the manuscript
Yeah, that would be cool. But it's not. It can't be a letter by letter cipher, there's not enough letters, and it can't be a word cypher, there are over 6000 different words.
It’s fake as in it’s not actually a translatable document.
That only makes it "fake" if the author intended for people to think there was meaning that isn't actually there. That would require knowing the motivations of someone that's long dead whose name we don't even know. In other words, pure speculation with no evidence.
Now if you want to claim it's likely meaningless, at least in the text, that's not entirely implausible. Seems like a lot of effort, but someone could have done that. Then the mystery isn't what the book says, but who made it and why.
My estimation of the likelihood of a later forgery is far below that of my fellow Voynich casuals, but so is my estimation of the likelihood that it's the Da Vinci Code.
Could in be a fake created in the early 1400s, Was there a market for such a book then?
It probably would have cost more to make than one could realistically sell it for back then, as anyone willing to pay the amount of money such a thing would cost would want it to be something useful and/or comprehensible.
Nope. And speaking about market, no one did bother to buy this shit from Voynich or Kraus. The reason is simple : it was highly suspicious.
What ever happened to the hypothesis that the language was Turkish, was that debunked?
All such attempts at translating the Voynich Cipher through simple substitution are doomed to fail, as the entropy and number of characters in the text are too low. Watch his last video where he debunked these methods of cracking the Manuscript.
Perhaps it was written by a medieval Tolkien/lord Dunsany perhaps?
Aliens 👽?
I'd like to think I'm skeptical but open-minded; I'm willing to believe almost anything with enough compelling evidence, but as the saying goes, extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence. Got any proof 15th century aliens existed and made this, I'm willing to look at it.
Its alphabet isn’t complex enough to contain information and the pictures make no sense. It clearly contains no information. It might have been created as art, but it is fake in so far that there is no secret hidden and the idea of hidden secrets made it famous.
Na dude, those are micro-organisms. You can easily match the images up with many common yeast and bacteria. Why I never see more people discuss this is beyond me.
Because it's conspiracy theory level nonsense.