The reading room

Read the working translation

The complete earlier draft, now in English.

Every one of the draft’s 793 passages has been translated into English here. Choose a folio below to read it directly. The two pages with no running-text passage remain listed as gaps, not as translated pages.

Where the translation comes from

The manuscript
Drawings and transcribed groups provide the starting material. You can inspect the exact text behind each passage.
The working interpretation
The project’s earlier German draft assigns meanings to recurring forms and supplies context from the pictures. Those assignments are hypotheses; later research withdrew parts of its method.
The English reading
The text here translates that German draft in full. Its actions, repetitions, and unknown identities are preserved. It is not a newly verified decipherment of the manuscript.

Choose a page

Illustrated introductions to fourteen pages

Short English introductions with manuscript images and an explanation of the earlier interpretation.

Inspect the manuscript transcription

These four pages show the script represented in Latin letters. They are source transcriptions, not translations.