The Voynich Manuscript
The Most Mysterious Book in the World
What is the Voynich Manuscript?
The Voynich Manuscript is an illustrated codex handwritten in an otherwise unknown writing system, referred to as “Voynichese”. The manuscript has been suspected to be composed during the early 15th century (1404–1438), and the style from which it is made was indicated it may have been created during the Italian Renaissance.
The Manuscript currently consists of around 240 pages, but there is evidence that some pages are missing. The pages vary in size, some are foldable to better view all manners of things.
Illustrations include fictitious plants, astrological symbols, and people among other unusual things.
The text is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who first acquired it in 1912. Since 1969, it’s been kept on Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
What makes it so mysterious?
The Voynich Manuscript has been studied by numerous cryptographers, amateurs and professionals alike. This includes American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II, including Alan Turing — Yup, that Alan Turing.
The codex has never been demonstrably deciphered, and none of the many speculation and hypotheses for the past century have been firmly verified. The sheer cluelessness of seasoned professionals captivated the eye of the world for many years.
What do we know about the Manuscript?
Back in 2009, University of Arizona researchers sampled and performed a procedure known as “radio-carbon dating” from various parts of the manuscript in 2019. The result was conclusive enough to state that the parchment used was from between 1404 and 1438. It was made from calfskin and multispectral analysis showed it was unwritten before the codex was created. The entire manuscript was from at least fourteen entire calfskins.
The original binding and cover were hypothesized to be made from wood, due to the insect holes present from the historical record of Collegio Romano, a previous owner of the book. The binding was later replaced by goatskin.
Texts permeated throughout the manuscript, mostly in unidentified language and format but the book is dotted by Latin scripts. The bulk of the text in the 240-page manuscript is written running from left to right and most of them are written with one or two pen strokes.
There is some dispute whether there are distinct characters, but a script of 20–25 characters would account for virtually all of the text, with the exceptions of a few dozen that rarely occur throughout the manuscript. There are no obvious punctuations.
How do whether it’s a real book or just gibberish by some crazy author back in the day?
The statistical pattern of the text follows phonological or orthographic laws of some sort; for example, a certain character must appear in each word (like the English Vowels), some characters never follow another, or some may be doubled or tripled, but others may not.
The placement of other characters is commented to only occur at the beginning or the end of the word, much like the Greek language.
Many researchers commented on the highly understandable and regular structure of the text. Professor Gonzalo Rubio, an expert on ancient language at Pennsylvania State University, stated:
The text consists of over 170,000 characters, with spaces dividing the text into about 35,000 groups of varying length, usually referred to as “words” or “word tokens” (37,919); 8,114 of those words are considered unique “word types. The structure of these words seems to follow phonological or orthographic laws of some sort; for example, certain characters must appear in each word (like English vowels), some characters never follow others, or some may be doubled or tripled, but others may not. The distribution of letters within words is also rather peculiar: Some characters occur only at the beginning of a word, some only at the end (like Greek ς), and some always in the middle section.
While other professionals, like Stephan Vonfelt who studied statistical property distribution of letters and their correlations, stated that the Voynichese is more similar to the Mandarin Chinese Pinyin text than to the text of works from the European language.
In 2014, a team led by Diego Amancio of the University of São Paulo published a study about the relationship of the words in the text using statistical methods. Rather than deciphering the word’s meaning, they looked for connections and clusters of words.
By measuring the frequency and intermittence of words they produced a three-dimensional model of the text’s structure. The team concluded that the Voynich Manuscript is similar to 90% of other known books written in an actual language and not just some gibberish.
What about the weird illustrations on the manuscript?
The Codex is divided into six sections. Since the text can’t be deciphered, the illustrations are used to categorize the manuscript. The following types of illustrations are:
Herbal (21 folios): Each page dedicates a portion for one or two plants and a few paragraphs of text. This format is typical of European herbal books of the time. Some parts of the drawings are larger or cleaner copies of the other sections. None of the plants in the codex is identifiable.
Astronomical (21 folios): This section contains circular diagrams that are reminiscent of astronomical or astrological bodies. Some of them with suns, moons, and stars. A series of diagrams depict a historical equivalent of zodiacal constellations. Two fish for Pisces, a bull for Taurus, a hunter with a crossbow for Sagittarius, etc. Each illustration has 30 female figures that are arranged in concentric circles, partly nude and each holds what seems like a star.
Balneological (20 folios): A dense and continuous section comprising of drawings of small and mostly nude women. Depicting then in a scene wearing crowns, bathing in pools or tubes connected by an elaborate network of pipes.
Cosmological (13 Folios): More circular diagram but unlike of those we know of today. This section also has foldouts that span multiple pages. A folio contains a map or diagram with nine “islands” or “rosettes” connected by some kind of causeway. Castles and volcanos are also depicted in the scenes.
Pharmaceutical (34 Folios): Illustrations of unknown plants detailing their parts (roots, leaves, etc.), objects such as apothecary jars. Some styles were mundane and some are fantastical.
Recipes (22 Folios): Full pages of unbroken text each marked with a star in the left margin.
Hoax and fabrication of the Voynich Manuscript
Some theorize the whole thing is a plot of Voynich himself to gain fame and fortune. As an antique book dealer, he had the necessary means and knowledge to fabricate such a thing. A lost book by a well-known author by the name of Roger Bacon was a fortunate and rare find.
Letters had been found that open a way for the suspicion but most historians and aficionados firmly disagree with this theory.
Since the manuscript defied decipherment even with more modern and extensive methods, some propose that the codex may not contain meaningful content at all.
In 2002, a computer scientist by the name of Gorgon Rugg showed that similar text can be produced by using a table of word prefixes, stems, and suffixes, which would have been selected and combined by a device call Cardan grille; which was available at the time of the codex’s believed conception.
Other scholars claimed that the text appears too sophisticated to be a hoax. In 2013, a theoretical physicist from the University of Manchester named Marcelo Montemurro published a finding that semantic networks exist in the text of the manuscript. That some words often appear in a clustered fashion, or new words are used in a topic shift.
Even today the World’s most mysterious book leaves the most acute of senses in the dark. The manuscript is unlikely to be fully realized in our lifetime or even in the next. Is the Voynich Manuscript the most elaborate hoax history has ever produced or is it an invaluable source of higher or even divine knowledge? Leave a comment on whether you think that the book is just a hoax or something that we should delve deeper into.
