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Voynich Manuscript Partially Decoded?
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It has apparently inspired more than a few novels.
Interesting.Has Dan Brown answered his call yet? LOL
Wouldn't it be fun to be the person who wrote a load of nonsense, illustrated it and then left it to baffle academics for centuries to come? Some spirit is working that Ouija board with glee.
The voynich manuscript can be downloaded free as a PDF online. If anyone wishes to take a try at decoding it.If we are thinking about anomalous documents though, I think the piri Reis map is quite interesting though -- shows coastlines in the Western Hemisphere that were unknown in Europe, or supposedly.
The Piri Reis isn't nearly as anomalous as certain people claim, and indeed, some of the recent popular presentations of it have actually presented in such a way with missing details to bolster their claims that it was anomalous. I'm not going to speculate too much about the motives of certain authors, such as Menzes, who have done that, but, at the minimum, it makes their analysis questionable.Oddly enough, some of the obvious errors from European holes in knowledge are what some people have tried to use to prove that it is more than it what it is.
Indeed, the various errors and holes seem pretty consistent with the extent of European voyages, existing cartographical resources, and assumptions of the period. Certain other assumptions about the map bandied about by certain people are actually contradicted by the map itself (e.g., notes on the actual map that contradict what people are claiming about areas on the map).
Well, there are plenty of people out there who profit by creating false mysteries for TV and other media to use to fool the rubes. So my bad.
The only reason I know about that map in particular is that I had a period where I spent some time digging into he 1421-related claims of the author Gavin Menizes when his book 1421 first came out (interesting theory, alas, totally not supported by the actual real evidence).
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J.A. wrote: "The only reason I know about that map in particular is that I had a period where I spent some time digging into he 1421-related claims of the author Gavin Menizes when his book 1421 first came out ..."Okay, so I won't feel bad about not reading that book yet, just bad that I picked it up off a sale table at B&N a few years ago. Maybe I'll just make a habit of coming to Robust first before I buy anything in non-fiction.
If anything, it makes for some fertile alternative history ideas...
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I read a very interesting book called "1491" about pre-Columbian America.I really enjoyed this look at what things were really like. Didn't like the knowledge that smallpox wiped out more than half of the population.
K.A.,I have that book in my to-read list, but have yet to get to it. I'll have to check it out. Yeah, one wonders, even with tech, how things would have been different without disease hollowing out the continents somewhat.
Andre Jute wrote: "Harry Turtledove. Haven't read him, but he seems to make a specialty of alternative history."
He's good on details and ideas, but perhaps unsurprisingly, his details and ideas swallow a lot of the other aspects of the writing. That said, one of the charms of alt history is the details and ideas, so I'm not going to cite him too much for that, as, most of the major alt history I've read tends to be that way.
I haven't read all of his stuff, though I found his early stuff a bit more interesting. As his somewhat more recent stuff seems to just basically be taking "alternative history" that ends up a lot like real history just elsewhere (e.g., a World War II in the continental US that plays a lot like the normal European Theater in 'our' timeline, even with some similar sociological dynamics).
Even his sci-fi alt history tends to lean that way. Something really big happens (e.g. Alien invasion in World War II), but things end up far less wacky and a lot more analogous to real-world stuff than you'd think (in the WWII alien invasion, the multi-book series basically just casts the aliens as the Americans in Vietnam and humans as the Viet Cong, and spends a lot of time explaining why this starfaring race is culturally and technologically only mildly better than humans).
Though to be fair, I can't complain too much about him doing that considering I effectively did the same thing in a book I wrote with alt histoy elements.
I haven't had a chance to read some of his ancient world stuff.
He's definitely the king though, and unlike a lot of the other authors I know of who write a lot of alt history, he overall has more of a range, even if he's more known for his alt-Civil War and 'Colonization War' stuff (i.e., series like Eric Flint's 1632 are a bit more fun and engaging than Turtledove's stuff, but are a lot more narrow in scope).
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Andre,Have you ever read Fatherland by Robert Harris? If so, what did you think of it?
I thought it had some interesting ideas, but was kind of the opposite of what you're describing in that the character work was a bit weak.
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Did you know that I met Otto Skorzeny, who rescued Mussolini from the partisans? A right asshole, he reported me to my chairman for "lack of respect in not wearing a necktie" when I turned up for a meeting with both my arms and legs in plaster after a powerboat racing incident. He was a mickey mouse client of some obscure branch of our network and I only went to meet him in the hope of hearing a good story... Clearly, I was disappointed!
Maybe I should re-read it. It's been 15 years or so.As for Skorzeny...well, are/were they are a lot of former SS officers who weren't right assholes? Didn't he run some sort of little fascist mercenary group for a few decades after the war too?
Or were you hoping for more the facade of gentility type deal?
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I suppose that's a point; with such a history and background, it would be surprising if he weren't an asshole. Skorzeny wasn't a mercenary; he was a perfectly respectable businessman.
But you know, in later years I had quite a reputation for getting good interviews out of difficult subjects, and hope springs eternal in the bosom of a novelist that everyone he runs into will tell him something striking that he can use in a novel.
Katie wrote: "Wouldn't it be fun to be the person who wrote a load of nonsense, illustrated it and then left it to baffle academics for centuries to come? Some spirit is working that Ouija board with glee."That would be fun, perhaps we should assemble a collaborative of Robusters...
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And the next thing that will happen is that impeccable "authorities" proclaim it high art...
J. A. - One of the more interesting aspects is the authors hints that the native people burned scrub and planted trees to make their gathering lifestyle easier.It almost sounds like the new world was a cultivated Eden...and the Europeans spoiled it.
Bummer.
Sure, archaeological evidence indicate ssome groups did that, but that doesn't translate into the New World being a cultivated Eden.Yes, the New World wasn't some "untamed wilderness" waiting for helpful Europeans to 'tame' it, but nor was it a 'cultivated Eden'. It was two huge continents with a lot of diversity, just like well, the Old World at the time.
As much as I despise say Cortes and his ilk for their bloodthirsty greed, I'd note as an example that the main reason the Aztecs managed to get taken out isn't so much "bad-ass advanced European weaponry" (it certainly helped) or the whole "oh, well, they thought Cortes was Quezecotl so stalled too much" but rather the fact that the Aztecs were a brutal expansionist empire and the Spanish managed to recruit thousands upon thousands of locals to help take them out, basically, they facilitated a civil war/revolution against a relatively brutal imperial group that other local conquered populations didn't even like.
I remember in linguistics when we were discussing another group that for many decades people had assumed were peaceful stargazers, but when they finally decoded some of their monuments what they found were all about the glories of imperial conquest and kicking the ass of other local civilizations, and subsequent archaeological evidence indicated that, yeah, those people weren't all that nice.
Another good example is the Incans. Again, Spanish were good at kicking ass, but the conquest only really worked because they'd acquired a large group of local allies who didn't like being under the thumb of the Incan Empire (who had just finished up a civil war themselves when Pizzaro happened onto the scene).
The Incans (and Aztecs for that matter) also had a number of issues with, well, pollution and large-scale urban impacts on the environment, including nasty somewhat "industrial"-level pollution like pollution of the water table and rivers from large-scale mining, et cetera.
Given the relative size of the Empire, that kind of makes sense, but it's just another example that underscores that a lot of Native groups had large impacts on the local environment.
Many of the larger societies/civilizations had a lot of trouble with environment issues and impact, both in North and South America.
You look all around at the evidence regarding North and South America and what you don't really have is some "cultivated Eden", but rather a huge number of diverse cultures and life styles and impacts on the environment, positive or negative. Much like well Europe, Asia, et cetera.
Some groups/tribes/nations/empires were living very peaceful and sustainable life styles, and some were bloodthirsty, expansionist, and horrid for the environment in the long-term (indeed, in some cases, this seems to be reason why certain civilizations/societies collapsed long before there was the hint of Euros showing up).
None of that justifies anything the awful things many Europeans did, much of which was facilitated with the aforementioned badass tech and, for that matter, the diseases you mentioned above*, but I don't think replacing one myth of an implied sort of superiority with another implied sort of superiority best serves history or the way we think about this issues rather than acknowledging the complex diversity of cultures wherever they were.
In the end, I don't think we can really make any sweeping statements about the New World other than "there were a lot of people there who lived a lot of different ways, and it's unfortunate and a loss to humankind that disease and violence eliminated so many civilizations."
*I encourage people to read Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel if they haven't, which presents a very persuasive argument for why certain civilizations advanced in certain areas a lot for geographical and local ecological reasons. I don't agree with everything in the book, but I thought it was very well-argued and broad in scope, and it is much better than say, Collapse, which fixates a bit too much on outlier examples at times, weakening the central argument.
Of course, there's a long history of people claiming they know what's up with the manuscript. Still, this sounds a bit more plausible than some of the other recent things I've heard in years.
During my first stab at university, I was actually focused on linguistics, so things like the Voynich Manuscript continue to fascinate me.
If you've never heard of it, here's the Wiki summary:
"The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown writing system. The book has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438), and may have been composed in Northern Italy during the Italian Renaissance.[1][2] The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912.[3]
The pages of the codex are vellum. Some of the pages are missing, but about 240 remain. The text is written from left to right, and most of the pages have illustrations or diagrams.
The Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II.[4] No one has yet succeeded in deciphering the text, and it has become a famous case in the history of cryptography. The mystery of the meaning and origin of the manuscript has excited the popular imagination, making the manuscript the subject of novels and speculation. None of the many hypotheses proposed over the last hundred years has yet been independently verified.[5] Many people have speculated that the writing might be nonsense."