The Radio-Carbon Dating of the Voynich MS | Hacker News Reader

The Radio-Carbon Dating of the Voynich MS

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47 pointsHooke27 comments

I think it's a shame that the Voynich Manuscript has received so much more attention than Nova N 176[1]. It's almost certain that Nova N 176 isn't a hoax, which IMO makes it much more interesting, both from linguistic and historical perspectives.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_N_176

How is Voynich a hoax when dated to 1400?

Just because it's old doesn't mean the text is meaningful.

Possibly. But I would assume that paper was somewhat expensive in the 1400's and so it's unlikely to be a notepad of doodles.

For all we know some ne'er-do-well made it, or commissioned it, to use it to defraud someone with far more wealth by one means or another "hey I've got this manuscript of this far off land, it is rich with treasure and fine goods, give me money to go there!" or "hey look at this awesome alchemical text, you know you want the prestige of owning this!" or some such.

It could even just be "hey, I'm your patron, make me something really weird to show my kid". I've always suspected it was just some odd art piece... I mean... comic books and science fiction don't have to be unique to modern times.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find all of the “maybe it’s just a _____” explanations are still really fascinating each in their own way.

No I feel the same, if this was just some random art commission or something it would still be an incredibly interesting piece (and story).

The material it is written on is from 1400. That is very different than saying was written in 1400. It is common for hoaxers to use old materials. It could easily be from 1500, only written on a bit of 1400 pig found or cut from another work. Even a test of the ink could be inconclusive as the ink too could incorporate older material (charcoal from an older building).

This stretches Occams Razor somewhat. It could be, but it becomes less likely, as century-old stores of vellum would be required.

Particularly as back then, nobody would have been anticipating carbon dating.

Not carbon dating per se, but hoaxers would have an understanding of old v. new materials. Materials then were also not cheap. It would not have been unusual for someone to use an old bit of found blank parchment. They certainly would not have thrown it away unused.

From my understanding material like vellum could be scarce and and as such someone could have reused a piece of vellum simply out of necessity with no motive to deceive.

Sure, they could have - it was not cheap or easy to come by, but until there's a particular reason to think that happened in this case, it seems to be speculation.

Everything about the voynicn manuscript is speculation. That is what makes it so fascinating for people.

While that's true "It was a hoax because <vanishingly unlikely thing>" kinda kills the fascination aspect for me. It's a bit of a downer.

It seems like a whole lot of material, all of which came from the same time period. Would have been a lucky find to find essentially a whole book's worth of the stuff in one place.

This is true, but scholars can tell if a manuscript is a palimpsest, and they seem to be agreed that Voynich is not one.

It's a hoax that dates to circa 1400? We can assume that hoaxers, charlatans or con-artists existed in 1400.

Amazing that the GP said Nova N 176 is almost certainly not a hoax, and you take this to mean Voynich is definitely a hoax.

If "A Is almost certainly not a hoax, Therefore it is much more important than B."

"Why is B a hoax?" doesn't seem to me an unreasonable response.

One theory is that it's a 15th century hoax. That fits the timeline reasonably well.

That strikes me as being more plausible than the idea that it was a later hoax. Depending on how much of the provenance you believe, that would place its creation sometime between the early 17th and late 19th centuries. That does stretch credibility a bit. The hoaxer wouldn't just have to find some old calfskins; they would have to find an entire book's worth of unused (I believe it's been confirmed that the book is not a palimpsest) calfskins that all date to around the same time. And then they'd need to get all the other materials right, which is something that, depending on where in the timeline you are, may have required knowledge that was not available at the time.

The main problem that I'm aware of with it being a 15th century hoax is that it's hard to imagine why someone would do such a thing. But this was around about the renaissance, where there was a revival in interest in obscure and ancient texts, and rich people who weren't monks were starting to get interested in books. So perhaps there was something of an underground market for these sorts of things, which would at least permit a financial motive.

But doesn't the text have language-like statistical properties that are hard to generate by chance?

I suppose that any sufficiently convoluted random/hoax process could result in a text which had the necessary properties, but it seems unlikely that the hoaxer just happened to have picked a process which was able to convince not just their target market but also generations of statisticians who had not yet been born.

On the other hand, I understand that some of the statistical properties (at the line or page level?) are quite unlike those that are found in known languages, which might be the fingerprint of a process which doesn't preserve meaning, and therefore suggests a hoax.

It's not consistent with someone scribbling at random. (See the Codex Seraphinianus for an example of what that looks like.) But some researchers have demonstrated formulaic ways of generating nonsense text with the same kind of characteristics, using methods that were known in the 16th century.

Adding support to that hypothesis is that there is no evidence of any corrections anywhere in the book. If it were real text, you would expect mistakes and corrections. If it were meant to be nonsense, there would also be mistakes, but there would be no particular need to correct them.

OT: I've wondered about faking old things, although nothing that old.

Suppose that in the early 1960s I had bought the same kind of printing press that was used by Marvel to print their comic books. Suppose also that I bought a large supply of the same paper they used, and the same ink, and the same staples. Suppose I had then carefully stored all this away.

Could I then, in 2020, print some copies of say Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962) (first appearance of Spider-Man) on my 60 year old paper with my 60 year old ink using my 60 year old printing press and staple them with my 60 year old staples, and get something I could successfully pass off as a remarkably well preserved mint 1962 comic?

Near mint copies of Amazing Fantasy #15 have sold for around $500k. If this worked, two or three of those, a few copies of Journey into Mystery #83 (1962) (first appearance of Thor, and has sold for around $200k), and some of the other Marvel books that introduced now icon Marvel heroes in the '60s (Fantastic Four #1 in 1961, The Incredible Hulk #1 in 1962), and that would be some pretty good money.

I'd be surprised if the ink didn't change at all when it's drying on a page for decades, vs liquid in a bottle.

I think a large potion of the attention might be for aesthetic reasons - Nova N 176 is interesting, but the artwork throughout Voynich makes it much more interesting to look through for people "just looking."

Nova isn't ugly, but for a non-linguist, there's less to see.

The actual text of the Voynich is also much more beguiling to a Western audience. Nova N 176 may be written in an undeciphered language, but, to someone who cannot read any scripts from the Chinese family, it looks completely indistinguishable from any other old Chinese/Korean/Japanese/Mongolian/Vietnamese/etc text, all of which are also completely indistinguishable from each other.

In Voynich, on the other hand, a speaker of an Indo-European language sees a script that is indecipherable, but also looks hauntingly familiar. There's a lot more intrigue in that.

On the other hand, Nova N 176 is written in a known (albeit mostly lost) language and there's relatively little indication of the content. Whereas Voynich is written in a mysterious unknown language/cipher and has fascinating illustrations that inspire curiosity. Voynich also has the "advantage" of resembling a European language, which makes studying it much more accessible to scholars and amateurs who lack the necessary training in non-European languages. (In other words, the problem is not that people are choosing to study one vs. the other, it's more that the set of people who have the necessary training to study Nova is either smaller, or doesn't have as many people interested in this sort of puzzle.)

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