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The Book That Can't Be Read

2012-11-29T06:03:44.714Z

The mysterious and centuries-old Voynich Manuscript was written by an unknown author, illustrated with bizarre, puzzling pictures and composed in a language that even the best cryptographers can’t decode. Now, Naked Science follows new leads in the hunt for the author’s identity.

The Voynich manuscript is described as “the world’s most mysterious manuscript”. A book dealer named Wilfrid M. Voynich discovered the manuscript outside of Rome in 1912, and it has been in the news because of the work of scientists at the University of Arizona. Using a technique called radiocarbon dating, the team of researchers concluded that the book was probably composed between 1404 and 1438 – earlier than previously thought. The detailed illustrations of specific dress, hairstyles and landscapes as well as the “letter-based cipher” theory help to identify the region of origin as European. The manuscript is written on vellum (animal skin); this enabled scientists to accurately date the manuscript.

Some pages are missing, but the current version comprises about 240 vellum pages. The text within the manuscript consists of over 170,000 glyphs, some resembling Latin text. These pictographs or characters, written with one or two simple pen strokes, outline six sections: Herbal, Astronomical, Biological, Cosmological, Pharmaceutical and Recipes. Each section contains an illustration depicting the subject and within each section there seems to be an alphabet consisting of 20-30 distinct glyphs that repeat. However, there are about twenty-four isolated characters that occur only once or twice throughout the manuscript.

Many scientists and historians believe that the manuscript was meant to act as a pharmacopoeia – a handbook for early modern medicine. If this is true, perhaps once accurately deciphered, the manuscript will help navigate scientists toward uncharted medical territory.

Some theorize the text is idioglossia, a private language that only one or two people could ever decipher. The oddness of the characters suggests at the very least an argot, “a specialized idiomatic vocabulary peculiar to a particular class or group of people, devised for private communication.”

Possibly some form of encrypted cipher text, the Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II.

As yet, it has defied all decipherment attempts, becoming a cause célèbre of historical cryptology. The mystery surrounding it has excited the popular imagination, making the manuscript a subject of both fanciful theories and novels. None of the many speculative solutions proposed over the last hundred years has yet been independently verified.

The Voynich manuscript was donated to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in 1969, where it is catalogued under call number MS 408 and called a “Cipher Manuscript”.

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The Book That Can't Be Read