Following on from last weeks article regarding the mysteries of The Antikythera Mechanism, this week we will focus on a document named The Voynich Manuscript. Named after the Polish-American book dealer Wilfrid Voynich, who purchased the book in 1912 from the Collegio Romano in Italy, the book has since been determined to originate from the early 1400’s. It contains around 200 pages of text and illustrations and is currently owned by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University in the USA.
Nothing out of the ordinary yet, you may be saying to yourself, but the true mystery of the book comes from the fact that in the in the full history of the manuscript no one has ever been able to decipher what the book means. The text in the book is made up of some kind of cipher which, to this date, has yet to be deciphered into a modern language. Many professional and amateur code-breakers, including code-breakers from both World Wars, has attempted to crack the hidden meaning of the text but have yet to be successful.
Surely this means its some kind of joke? Well apparently not. Professionals have determined that the flow if the writing means that whoever penned the document was both fluent and practiced in writing in the text. This being said, the document is still a mystery as the cipher is unlike any known language or script previously known to mankind.
Almost every page (apart from the last section) contains an illustration. The illustrations in the book determine that the book is split into six sections. The sections are herbal, astronomical, biological, cosmological, pharmaceutical and recipes. Whilst the illustrations make it relatively clear that the book is split into these distinct sections, they offer little help in finding the true nature of the manuscript.
So, professional war-time code-breakers couldn’t crack it; neither could the National Security Agency (NSA) in the US; or any number of amateur code-breakers from all over the world. The document is widely available in the internet, so access to it is not hard, but still it remains one of the unexplained discoveries of modern science. And the ultimate question still remains; Is the Voynich Manuscript a genuine document, written is a yet o be re-discovered language, or is it one of histories largest hoaxes?
Further reading:
The Voynich Manuscript on Wikipedia
The Voynich Manuscript on World-Mysteries.com
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
The Voynich Manuscript: Will we ever be able to read this book? (telegraph.co.uk)