![]() ![]() Since that particular short-stemmed and angular ‘4’ shape, as a numeral, appears earliest in that region and it was also in the south-western Mediterranean that Kabbalism flourished among sectors of the Jewish population, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it is not surprising that there might be in matter now in the Voynich manuscript, as Erwin Panofsky thought, ‘something of Kabbalah’. One thing to emerge so far, while tracking use of the simple ‘4’ shape as a numeral – and we haven’t yet begun to track its use as an alphabetic form – is that, before the Voynich manuscript’s date-range of 1404-1438, it has been found only among the commercial and working classes of the south-western Mediterranean, and chiefly in the Majorcan kingdom with its Jewish cartographers and residents of certain maritime and trading cities of Italy – Venice not being among the earliest to show it. Lest we forget that the patterns of human activity are chaotic, not linear, here’s a ‘4’ numeral cropping up in fifteenth-century Thames-side church in London. The business of history-writing is an effort to present a chaotic system in a linear narrative, much as drawing reduces a three-dimensional world to two dimensions. Also co-incidental, perhaps, is that this shape is another seen among the Voynich glyphs. Note that tis inverted form for ‘7’ makes it resemble a Greek ν (nu – ‘n’), which is perhaps co-incidental. ![]() These examples came chiefly from German-speaking regions. To illustrate both the range within which Hill sought his examples, and the limits which affected his study, including dependence on other informants, here’s another of his tables. I’d suggest any new study include a column for the 12thC. Below, minus her ’16thC’ column is d’Imperio’s table. Note that I’ve checked the manuscript Hill cites for his “4” in early 14thC Italy and think he’s in error, but it’s possible I missed the detail he means. Anyone interested in that work is welcome to it!. Otherwise, that very basic exercise – that is, discovering which, if any, among the Voynich glyphs might be meant for numerals – seems not to have been done in fifty years and d’Imperio’s Figure 16 which seems to have had no source save Hill (1915) presents so cursory a summary that the task really needs to done now as if from scratch. ![]() I had thought it was in Pelling’s ‘Curse of the Voynich’ (which does, btw, have an interesting discussion of what Pelling interprets as quire-numbers, reading the forms as a curious mix of Latin alphanumerics and Arabic numerals). I should like readers’ help in discovering which modern Voynich writer explained the importance of identifying numerals in text that is to be analysed and deciphered. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |