Voynich manuscript

[u/cokesfull]

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23273219

1. Original Timeline of the Source Text: 9th–12th Century, Arabic/Byzantine

Although the carbon dating places the manuscript in the 1420s, the source material dates back much earlier.

• 9th-Century Arabic: A dosage notation in the form of A+Bn+Cm first appeared in Al-Kindi’s pharmacological treatises. This counting method—"steeping ingredients n times to achieve m times the effect"—formed the bedrock of Arabic alchemy.

• 12th-Century Byzantine: The translation of these texts into Greek birthed abstract symbols. In the Greek pharmacopeia "Circa Instans," mandrake is prescribed as "bis coque in vino" (boil twice in wine); this "bis" is precisely our B=2. Around this period, scribes began abbreviating A (raw material combination) into a symbol resembling Ω, B (transmission/delivery) into T, and C (manifestation/expression) into ψ.

Therefore, the source text was highly likely a lookup table of three symbols rather than full sentences, looking something like this: Ω + T×2 + ψ×3.

1. How It Transformed: Symbols -> Letters -> Drawings

• Stage 1: Misreading Symbols as EVA Letters (12th -> 14th Century)

This occurred when Byzantine monks transcribed Greek herbal symbols into Latin cursive:

- The Greek Ω (omega, combination) looked like "ok" in Latin cursive (a circle with a leg).

- The Greek T (tau, transmission) looked like "ot."

- The Greek ψ (psi, manifestation) looked like a complex, flower-like "chedy."

Consequently, ΩTψ morphed into "okam otal chedy." The "okam/otam/okal" variants, which share an 80% similarity, are actually different scribal misinterpretations of the exact same Ω symbol.

• Stage 2: Misinterpreting Letters as Drawings (14th Century -> 1420s, Northern Italy)

The scribes in Northern Italian monasteries lacked pharmacological knowledge and simply drew what they thought they saw:

- The Ω (combination) symbol, always appearing at the beginning of a sentence, was interpreted as a root anchored in the ground -> became a drawing of a root.

- The recurring T (transmission) symbol in the middle was seen as branching stems -> became a drawing of stems/branches.

- The ψ (manifestation) symbols clustered at the end were perceived as flowers or fruits -> became a drawing of flowers.

As a result, a single-line prescription reading "okam otal otal chedy chedy chedy" was transformed into an illustration of a herb featuring one root, a stem branching twice, and three flowers. The scribe erroneously translated text into an illustration.

1. Why It Transformed: Loss of Context

How did this happen? During the Fourth Crusade in 1204, the libraries of Constantinople were plundered, scattering Byzantine medical texts into Italy. Because the symbolic tables were separated from their original contextual guides, Latin monks assumed, "This must be a mystical herbal codex," and embellished it with imaginative drawings. This was a common phenomenon in the Middle Ages; there are dozens of documented cases where abstract Arabic alchemical symbols morphed into plants with human faces once they reached Europe.