Chronological Path Stability/Uncertainty Analysis

[Jorge_Stolfi]

In a sense, time is a trivial variable. We can take it for granted that different pages of the manuscript were written at different times and this implies a temporal sequence in the composition of the pages/bifolios.

I disagree: in the case of the VMS, "time" is a very problematic variable.

In the case of the Rohonc Codex, I believe that the book was created "Brain to Paper".  Specifically, I imagine the author being told a story from the Bible, and writing it down on that (already bound) physical book either while it was being told, or just after that.

So, I do believe that for each RC page there was a well defined time (at least a date) when that page was written.  And the order of those times coincides with the order of the pages in the bound book.

But I hope we have abandoned the "Brain to Vellum" assumption for the VMS, yes?  

Then for each VMS page we have at least two distinct times: tD when the draft of that page was written by the Author, and tV when it was copied to vellum by the Scribe. 

But those two times need not have been close together.  In fact, the order of the tD could be different from the order of the tV.  And, needless to say, neither order is expected to match the order of the pages in the bound book. 

Indeed, it seems likely that the Author drafted a batch of several pages, perhaps a whole section, and then gave those drafts all at once to the Scribe.   Who may have copied them in some complicated order, like the expected reading order assuming that the bifolios were nested in quires of 4.  Or he may have copied the four pages of each bifolio in sequence, before going to the next bifolio, oblivious to the nesting plan.   In the Zodiac section, in particular, I see strong signs that Pisces was copied after Taurus-1 and maybe after Taurus-2.

More importantly, the Author mat have written the pages of the draft in a complicated order too, sometimes amending or rewriting previously written pages, and maybe reordering the pages a few times.   Maybe he held back some pages of a section because he could not finish them right away, and gave them to the Scribe later, together with the drafts of some other section.  

Maybe the Author was dissatisfied with how some page came out on the vellum, so, six months later, he told the Scribe to wash off the ink and draw that page again.  

Maybe the Scribe ran out of vellum while copying Herbal, and the Author told him to use the blank pages at the end of the Pharma quire. 

And, in particular, maybe halfway through the drafting of Bio the Author concluded that there was no reason to spell the left mid-palatal retroflex aspirated nasal voiced click as eody, and decided that it should be just edy.  Then surely he went back and crossed out the o in every eody on the Bio pages that he had already drafted.

And this is one of the reasons why I think it is very unlikely that we can recover the writing order by looking for a gradient in the page statistics...

Moreover, if (as I believe) each section is a transcription/translation/adaptation of some pre-existing ur-book, we would have two additional times for each page: tT, when the Author prepared a first rough draft of the page (say, by writing down a the text in shorthand as it was being dictated by someone else), and tU, the time when that page of the ur-book was written by its ur-Author.  Which may have been centuries before tT, and tT may have been decades before the final draft time tD.

So, when we say "chronological order" -- which "chrono" are we talking about?

All the best, --stolfi