Ancient Writing: Undeciphered Voynich Manuscript Dated to Early 15th Century

That's the early 1400's.  So very interesting - hasn't the Turin Shroud also been carbon-dated to about that same time period?  Two enigmatic survivors from a time we think we know about - and yet, what do we really know about then, or now, for that matter? 

University of Arizona experts determine age of book 'nobody can read'
10 Feb 2011
University of Arizona

While enthusiasts across the world pored over the Voynich manuscript, penned by an unknown author in a language no one understands, a research team at the University of Arizona solved one of its biggest mysteries: When was the book made?


[Excerpted] University of Arizona researchers have cracked one of the puzzles surrounding what has been called "the world's most mysterious manuscript" – the Voynich manuscript, a book filled with drawings and writings nobody has been able to make sense of to this day.

Using radiocarbon dating, a team led by Greg Hodgins in the UA's department of physics has found the manuscript's parchment pages date back to the early 15th century, making the book a century older than scholars had previously thought. ...

Currently owned by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University, the manuscript was discovered in the Villa Mondragone near Rome in 1912 by antique book dealer Wilfrid Voynich while sifting through a chest of books offered for sale by the Society of Jesus. Voynich dedicated the remainder of his life to unveiling the mystery of the book's origin and deciphering its meanings. He died 18 years later, without having wrestled any its secrets from the book.

"Is it a code, a cipher of some kind? People are doing statistical analysis of letter use and word use – the tools that have been used for code breaking. But they still haven't figured it out."

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The Voynich manuscript's unintelligible writings and strange illustrations have defied every attempt at understanding their meaning. Credit: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.  td>

Okay. Where have we seen this kind of pattern before? In board games, darlings! Think about it. Is this not a Nine Man's Morris gameboard?  I'm not saying about what's in the rest of the book - but this drawing - heh. 

Looks like the stuff one sees under one's very first microscope!  I got one when I was in seventh grade (I was 13) for Christmas, and I spent many happy hours in the attic over the next four years exploring the microscopic world of whatever it was I could find to put on a glass slide and put under the magnification lenses.  I'm sure it did not cost a lot of money.  My parents were poor and there were six children to provide for -- but that little microscope opened up a new universe to me.  I could see, up close, for the very first time, that there were, literally, worlds within worlds within worlds.  I didn't spent much time in that un-insultated attic during the winter, it was friggging cold up there, let me tell you!  But I had my own little world-fort up there, and NO ONE was allowed to cross the magic line, which was sometimes hung with a blanket-curtain, that constantly fell down.  When we moved to a house across the street that my parents bought the year I entered high school (1966 - an eon ago), that microscope moved too, and I set up a "lab" in the attic of the new house, which had three dormer windows and roomy bays!  It was a real change from the old house, but the floor still creaked and it was still dusty and mouldy and hot as hell in the summer and cold as hell in the winter.  I chose the west-facing bay to set up my new lab, and spent many hours crunched up with a blanket wrapped around in the cool days in Grandpa Newton's green leather club chair that we'd inherited after he passed. 

Well, I haven't thought about these things for a long long time, and it's making me very sad right now.

Why Deciphering Ancient Scripts Matters

How come dudes like Lord Mandelson never eliminate their own jobs???

From the guardian.co.uk
Writing off the UK's last palaeographer
The decision by a London university to axe the UK's only chair in palaeography has been met by outrage from the world's most eminent classicists. John Crace on why the study of ancient writings matters – and why history will be lost without it
John Crace The Guardian, Tuesday 9 February 2010

Dry, dusty and shortly to be dead. Palaeographers are used to making sense of fragments of ancient manuscripts, but King's College London couldn't have been plainer when it announced recently that it was to close the UK's only chair of palaeography. From ­September, the current holder of the chair, Professor David Ganz, will be out of a job, and the subject will no longer exist as a separate academic discipline in British universities. Its survival will now depend entirely on the whim of classicists and medievalists studying in other fields.

The decision took everyone by ­surprise. "It was only recently that Rick Trainor [the principal of King's] was calling the humanities department [to which palaeography is attached] the jewel in the university's crown," says Dr Mary Beard, professor of ­classics at Cambridge University. "There had been a complete overhaul of ­minority disciplines in the mid-1990s, so there was consensus that everything had been pared down to the bare minimum."

How things change. With Lord Mandelson – in his incarnation as secretary of state for business, industry and skills – now imposing a minimum 10% cut in spending throughout higher education, universities are looking to slash and burn departments. And esoteric subjects such as palaeography are easy targets; they attract comparatively few students and, most importantly, comparatively little in the way of research grants – the only way the past few governments have measured a subject's worth.

But if Trainor was hoping palaeography would do the decent thing, he badly misjudged the situation. Professor Ganz – the fourth person to have held the chair since it was endowed in 1949 – didn't roll over and die quietly. "On the assumption that this means the end of the chair of palaeography, I am having to fight for my subject," he says, "and I have been deeply moved by the level of support from friends, many of whom I have never met."

That's pretty much all Ganz is saying for now – but, having initially raised a very restrained, academic form of hell, others are now doing the talking for him. A Facebook page to save the chair has more than 4,000 members, and many of the world's most distinguished classicists have petitioned King's to ­reconsider its position. Even his ­students are stepping in to defend him. "Without a palaeography professor such as David Ganz, not only will King's be sorely deprived of a basis on which to teach almost every other university discipline," says Alexandra Maccarini, "but the study of humanities everywhere will suffer from the absence of a devoted specialist in the subject."

In its strictest sense, palaeography is the study of ancient manuscripts whereby scholars can read texts – often partial, as many exist only in fragments – and localise and date handwriting accurately. This may sound arcane, and to some extent it is. But it is also the building block of all classical and ­medieval scholarship. According to Ganz: "Anyone who goes into a ­university library will within a week find an ancient manuscript that no one has yet properly understood."

"It is academic forensic science," agrees Dr Irving Finkel, assistant keeper in the department of the ­Middle East at the British Museum. "Many of the printed texts we use today – be they the Bible, Livy's poems or Shakespeare's plays – do not come from a single text. They are a collation of various manuscripts that may have been altered by scribes over time. A palaeographer can help determine which is likely to be the most authentic.

"It's about understanding the codes, the signs and the ligatures [common abbreviations] that were in use at different periods of a language's evolution, so you can interpret words that may have been rubbed away and see what may have been added at a later date."

Academics, of course, enjoy a good squabble, so it's hard to get universal agreement on what does and doesn't fall within palaeography's reach. For some it includes major finds such as the Rosetta Stone, from which ­hieroglyphics were first decoded, and Linear B, the ancient Minoan script translated by Michael Ventris. ­Others insist that, as they were carved in stone, they fall within epigraphy. Some restrict ­palaeography to merely classical texts; others include medieval and Renaissance texts.
Either way, the point is much the same. It's not just that we wouldn't have a clue what the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Cyrus Cylinder (over which the British Museum and the Iranian government are currently locking horns) actually mean without palaeography; we wouldn't know how to evaluate their historical importance. Multiply this by every fragment and every hand-written folio, and the history of the world begins to be up for grabs.

"Palaeography is not simply an arcane auxiliary science," says Professor Jeffrey Hamburger, chair of medieval studies at Harvard University. "It is as basic to the training and practice of ­historians as mastery of Dos or Unix might be to a computer scientist.

Not that palaeography has the answer to everything. No one has still made head or tail of Linear A (dating back to around 1900BC), and the Indus ­Valley script of the third millennium BC is still a mystery. But just days before King's made the announcement, its sister London institution, University College, was boasting how two of Ganz's former students, Dr Simon ­Corcoran and Dr Benet Salway, had pieced together 17 fragments of parchment that form an important ­Roman law code – believed to be the only original evidence yet discovered of the Gregorian Codex (a collection of constitutions upon which a substantial part of most modern European civil law ­systems are built) that had been thought lost for ever.  [Image at top: both sides of the Phaistos Disk - still undeciphered.]


Giving up on palaeography is like giving up on art, history and culture. It's like deciding we know all we want to know about the past, so we're not going to bother to find out any more: "It's not as if we can come back to it in 15 years' time if we then decide there's enough money," says Beard. "Palaeography can't be taught in an online tutorial; it's a skill handed down from one academic to another. If King's does go through with its decision, it's the end of the subject in this country."

Reading the past: What palaeographers have done for us

Dead Sea Scrolls

A collection of about 900 documents on parchment and papyrus, ­written in Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, ­dating from about 150BC to AD70. Discovered between 1947 and 1956 in 11 caves on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea. The earliest surviving ­examples of Biblical texts.

Indus Valley Script

More than 600 symbols have been found – primarily on seals – belonging to the Indus Valley civilisation of 3,000BC. Most inscriptions are only four or five symbols in length. The longest is 26 symbols. Scholars have yet to decode them, though it hasn't stopped them arguing whether it does actually constitute a genuine language.

Rosetta Stone

Technically one for epigraphers, but many palaeographers claim it for themselves. The stone, discovered by the French in 1799, contained three parallel texts – hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek – and was the key that ­enabled scholars to decode ­hieroglyphics for the first time.

Beowulf

The most important work in Anglo-Saxon literature, the Old-English epic poem of 3,182 lines is known from a single manuscript that is estimated to date from AD1000. The manuscript has crumbled over time and scholars are still working on its preservation and revealing lost letters of the poem.

Oxyrhynchus Papyri

A collection of documents from the Ptolemaic and Roman eras excavated from the old rubbish mounds of Oxyrhynchus, an ancient Egyptian site thought so unimportant it was left almost untouched for centuries. Extracts from the plays of Menander and the Gospel of St Thomas are among the most important finds.

Lost Languages

Book review from The Times Online. The image is from the article, and I find it totally fascinating - notice the representations of "white," "brown," and "black" people, and the checkered game board with a little game piece on it - looks like a little dude waving his arms in the air - being carried by the white guy (he's got the gold links dangling from his elbow). From The Sunday Times March 8, 2009 Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered Scripts by Andrew Robinson The Sunday Times review by James McConnachie The writings left on tombs and tablets by the great civilisations of the ancient past have mostly now been read. This intriguing book on the strange art of “decipherment” focuses on those scripts that remain mysterious. It is a potent mix of academic esoterica, codecracking and controversy — the same giddy cocktail that made The Da Vinci Code such a success, but with much greater scholarship. (And splendid illustrations: the pages crawl with jaguar heads, ox’s feet and curlicues.) [Okay, quit dissing The Da Vinci Code - it got millions of people around the world reading, and wondering - quite a feat!] Andrew Robinson begins with the stories of the three great decipherments: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Linear B and the weird glyphs of the Maya. Hieroglyphs famously resisted decipherment for centuries, and were cracked only after a squad of Napoleon’s troops in 1799 came across the bilingual Greek/Egyptian Rosetta stone, set into an old wall in the Egyptian desert. Linear B was discovered in the 1900s, when clay tablets etched with scratchy letters started turning up on Minoan digs. It took 50 years, though, for the 3,500-year-old alphabet to fall to the logical assault of the architect Michael Ventris, who devised a brilliant system of frequency analysis to work out which letters occurred where, and what parts of speech they might represent. Even then, the final conquest only came when Ventris began guessing at ancient Cretan place names. This “leap in the dark” paid off when he realised the underlying language was none other than Greek. Linear B, unfortunately, turned out to do little more than list names and goods. This is the great peril of decipherment: you might spend years working out how to read a shopping list. The impact of the Mayan glyphs, Robinson shows, was very different. When they were cracked in the 1970s, they allowed a new world civilisation to speak for itself, rather than through the mouths of priests and conquistadors. The Mayan glyphs look impossibly outlandish: cartoon-like animal figures squashed into geometric shapes and piled up like totems. Their decipherment owes much to the 16th-century Franciscan friar Diego de Landa who, despite torturing Maya and immolating their “diabolical codices”, bothered to quiz a nobleman about his writing system and jotted down some phonetic equivalents in Spanish. The resulting key wasn’t entirely reliable — one transcription was revealed to be the Mayan phrase for “I don’t want to say” — but it would help unlock the script four centuries later. The decipherment of the Mayans’ glyphs meant that their civilisation could be studied as seriously as that of ancient Egypt or Greece. Such a potential reward explains the allure of other, still undeciphered scripts; Robinson devotes a chapter each to eight of the most significant. The Nubian or “Black Pharaohs” of Kush, for instance, ruled Egypt during the 7th century BC, but the language of their texts (dubbed Meroitic, after the place of discovery) is unknown. If a modern linguistic descendant could be traced, it might not only fill a gap in the history of Egypt but could help restore to black African history the dignity of serious antiquity. The intractability of Etruscan writings, similarly, is a matter of the unknown language, not the alphabet (the Etruscans used a variant of Greek characters). When bilingual Etruscan-Phoenician gold plaques were discovered in 1964, there was great excitement — among those who could read Phoenician, at any rate. But with awful bathos, Robinson confesses that only one identifiable Etruscan word emerged from the find: ci, meaning “three”. Yet with ingenuity, decipherers have put even this to use. With the help of a precious set of Etruscan ivory dice, whose numbers were written out in words rather than numerals, and with the knowledge that opposite faces on ancient dice add up to seven, this gave scholars the Etruscan words for one through to six. But reading the longest Etruscan texts — including one discovered, bizarrely, printed on the linen bandages of a mummy bought in Egypt by a 19th-century Croatian tourist — is still a long way off. To solve Etruscan or Meroitic (or Linear A or proto-Elamite) will probably require a new Rosetta stone. Lucky finds do happen, though. The hugely significant La Mojarra stela — one of only two important examples of the Isthmian script, which died out in Central America about AD500 — was stumbled upon by a group of barefoot Mexican fishermen laying log piles for a jetty. Before the new enthusiast for decipherment thinks of “having a go” him- or herself, Robinson’s analysis of expert attempts should serve as a warning. Decipherment requires not only a rare blend of flair and diligence but a deep understanding of frequency-analysis modelling and a firm grasp of, say, Middle Nilotic of central Africa or perhaps Mixe-Zoquean from Mexico. Not to mention an appreciation of the niceties of reverse boustrophedon. Robinson’s technical terms, his allographs and ligatures, only occasionally risk blending into a murky hieroglyphic soup, but this is surely the most recondite of terms. It is a technique used in the Rongorongo script of Easter Island — a script as baffling as the island’s better-known giant sculptures. For the record, boustrophedon means writing left-right and right-left on alternate lines, as if ploughing a field; reverse boustrophedon also requires the text to be flipped through 180 degrees after each line. Robinson closes his book with the notorious Phaistos disc, a rather lovely clay artefact that today lies in Crete’s Heraklion museum in lonely splendour, the only example of a language that is otherwise totally unknown. It makes an excellent coda, as an object that has drawn the most outrageous speculations as to its use and meaning yet remains maddeningly mute. Its very silence helps explain decipherment’s appeal. It is not just about puzzle-solving or history-making, but about the beauty of writing. Telling the story of Linear B, Robinson describes how the “mute signs” were suddenly “compelled to speak after more than three millenniums of silence”. He makes it sound as if Ventris’s solution were a spell — as if writing were some kind of magic. Which, this book elegantly reminds us, it is. Lost Languages: The Enigma of the World's Undeciphered ScriptsThames & Hudson £16.95 pp352 Available at the BooksFirst price of £15.26 (including p&p) on 0845 271 2135 ******************************************************************** [Not mentioned: The Indus script. Of course, there is dispute as to whether it is "writing" in the usual sense of the word! And there is that elusive Southwest Script I recently posted about - until I read that article I did not know it existed. What a fascinating subject. Perhaps when I retire I shall go back to school and pursue the study of linguistics.]

What Does This Mean?

Undeciphered languages - they fascinate me. There are, for instance, the mysterious symbols of the Indus Valley civilization which the ancient Sumerians called "Melluah"; there are the symbols on both sides of the Phaistos Disc; and then there is Linear A, the script of the ancient Minoans. (Image: Linear A Tablet, End of Late Minoan IB (ca. 1450 B.C.), clay, mended, Palace at Kato Zakros, Archive, Siteia Archaeological Museum)

What does it mean? What were they saying?

Last Days to See From the Land of the Labyrinth: Minoan Crete at Onassis Cultural Center

NEW YORK.- The exhibition "From the Land of the Labyrinth: Minoan Crete, 3000–1100 B.C." presents more than 280 artifacts and works of art from the ancient land of Crete, most of which have never been shown outside Greece. These fascinating objects seen together bring to life the story of Crete’s luminous Minoan culture, the first palatial civilization to establish itself on European soil.

The exhibition brings to light aspects of Minoan daily life during the second and third millennia B.C., including social structure, communications, bureaucratic organization, religion, and technology.

In eleven thematic sections, the exhibition maps chronologically the establishment and great achievements of Minoan culture. Here the viewer can explore the historical and cultural context of this celebrated society and gain insight into its mysteries, such as the legends surrounding the reign of King Minos of Knossos, who commissioned the fabled Labyrinth of Greek mythology.

Information gathered from the study of the Early, Middle, and Late Minoan periods—also known as the Prepalatial, Protopalatial, Neopalatial, and Postpalatial periods—is largely based on objects excavated from the island’s burial grounds and settlements. The exhibition pieces together the culture’s past by focusing on such objects as gold jewelry deposited in the rich tombs of the elite, inscribed clay tablets that reveal the basic elements of the Minoan economy, ceremonial vessels found in both palaces and tombs, and votive figures of clay, symbolic offerings to protective deities. All of these intriguing objects are on loan from the archaeological museums in Crete, in collaboration with the Hellenic Ministry of Culture.

The island of Crete is equidistant from the three continents of Africa, Asia, and the European mainland. As a result of this advantageous location, the Minoans experienced a period of active trade with the other civilizations around the Mediterranean basin and maintained control over the sea routes. They exported timber, foodstuffs, cloth, and olive oil and in turn imported tin, copper, silver, emery, precious stones, and some manufactured objects. For their basic needs, however, the Minoans were entirely self-sufficient.

Archaeological evidence from the Prepalatial period reveals the great changes that took place in the social structure of Early Minoan society. The rise of local elite populations, for instance, led them to commission and display different types of objects in order to convey and celebrate their social identity and rank. This kind of social differentiation gradually led to the formation of a palatial society during the Middle Minoan or Protopalatial period about 1900 B.C. Urbanization and increasing economic wealth brought about bureaucratic change, including the rise of powerful social classes and ruling groups. Major palaces were built at Knossos and Malia in northern Crete, at Phaistos in the south, and at Zakros in the east. These palaces were large building complexes that served as centers of religious, economic, and social life for their inhabitants. The architecture and the layout of the palaces communicated a dynastic message, enhanced by prestigious objects and symbolic expressions of the rulers’ power.

With the palaces came the development of writing, probably as a result of record-keeping demands of the palace economy. The Minoans used a hieroglyphic script most likely derived from Egypt and a linear script, Linear A, which may have evolved from the language of the eastern Mediterranean and has yet to be deciphered. In the section of the exhibition entitled Scripts and Weights, examples of this mysterious script will be displayed, exemplified by the Linear A Tablet shown here. This sun-dried clay slab dates from the end of the Late Minoan I period and exemplifies the administrative records that listed products, goods, and people. Inscriptions have also been found on various important objects, such as double-sided axes, pottery, seals, and stone vessels. The exhibition includes as well tablets in Linear B script, which was deciphered in the 1950s by M. Ventris and J. Chadwick. The symbols of this script reflect an early form of the Greek language that was spoken by the Myceneans, who had arrived in Crete by the second half of the fifteenth century B.C.