Baresch

[Diane]

Koen,
What JKP says is certainly valid, and is one way that historians could evaluate Baresch's comment  -  just as some think more weight, or less, should be given Marci's account of some distant memory of what he thought Mnishovsky said decades before.  (I find it interesting, btw, that Marci had evidently never thought to say this to Kircher before, though there had been a three-way link between Baresch, Marci and Kircher for decades.  Nor does Marci suggest the former owner had said anything similar in the forty years they had known each other).  However, Baresch and Marci did seem to think the script and language were ones that only Kircher was likely to know. 

JKP is also quite right about people having automatically associated the manuscript with the latest  "buzz".  The same habit sees Wilfrid Voynich supposing it must be about Science and Roger Bacon and ciphers - all of which were hot topics in his time.

On the other hand, the evidence has been given less weight than it should have been, objectively speaking.   Baresch is the first person undoubtedly to have owned it, though Horcicky very probably did - so as you say,  Baresch  is logically the last person in a position to know where it came from.

I've always been intrigued by the fact that Baresch only asked Kircher to identify the script; it seems to suggest that he believed he would be able to read it, so long as the 'ancient' script was identified. 

This is all the more interesting given that recent claim that the language has been identified as Old Czech, and the content announced as the "Book of Life".  I'm not sure which text of that title is meant, but one of them is Egyptian, and it's other name is the "Book of Gates". I don't do more than note the fact that one translation of the michiton.. inscription interprets it as: 'to me thou hast given many gates'.

And all that aside, there's no reason whatever that the thing couldn't have come from Egypt, whether or not from ancient Egyptian sources.  Throughout much of the medieval period, Egypt was a thriving, multicultural centre, a major entrepot, where Venetians, Genoese and others had their own warehouses, to and from which people travelled regularly until the 'shut-down' not too long before our manuscript was made.

 So I guess it's not the facts, but the idea of the text as ancient rather than, say, Hellenistic Egyptian which is difficult to imagine. WE have inherited a fair number of bits and pieces from Alexandria.