The plants depicted in the Voynich manuscript look quite real, but such flowers do not exist in nature.
He had never seen anything like it. But he, Wilfrid Voynich, an antique dealer and second-hand bookseller, had seen many ancient manuscripts, scrolls and folios in his lifetime. All two hundred and thirty-five pages of the book before him were filled with handwritten text and scruffy drawings, astrological charts, unknown plants and naked women. The illustrations alone would be enough to surprise an experienced bibliophile. But they could not be compared with the text. The book was clearly encrypted or written in an unknown language …
Strange language
The text is definitely written from left to right, with a slightly "ragged" right margin. Long sections are divided into paragraphs, sometimes with a paragraph start mark in the left margin. There is no usual punctuation in the manuscript. The handwriting is stable and clear, as if the alphabet was familiar to the scribe, and he understood what he was writing.
The book contains over 170,000 characters, usually separated from each other by narrow spaces. Most characters are written with one or two simple pen strokes. The entire text can be written in an alphabet of 20-30 letters of the manuscript. The exception is several dozen special characters, each of which appears 1-2 times in the book.
Wider spaces divide the text into approximately 35,000 "words" of varying length. They seem to obey some phonetic or spelling rules. Some characters have to appear in every word (like vowels in English), some characters never follow others, some may double in a word (like two n in a long word), some don't.
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Statistical analysis of the text revealed its structure characteristic of natural languages. For example, word repetition follows Zipf's law, and vocabulary entropy (about ten bits per word) is the same as in Latin and English. Some words appear only in certain sections of the book, or only on a few pages; some words are repeated throughout the text. There are very few repetitions among about a hundred captions for illustrations. In the "Botanical" section, the first word of each page appears only on this page and is possibly the name of a plant.
On the other hand, the language of the Voynich manuscript is in some ways quite different from existing European languages. For example, in a book there are almost no words longer than ten "letters" and almost no one- and two-letter words. Inside the word, the letters are also distributed in a peculiar way: some characters appear only at the beginning of the word, others only at the end, and some always in the middle - the arrangement is inherent in the Arabic script (compare also the variants of the Greek letter sigma), but not in the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet.
The text looks more monotonous (in a mathematical sense) compared to the text in European language. There are some examples when the same word is repeated three times in a row. Words that differ by only one letter are also unusually common. The entire "lexicon" of the Voynich manuscript is smaller than the "normal" word set of an ordinary book should be.
When Voynich showed the book to the monks - librarians of the Jesuit College in the vicinity of Rome - they were very surprised and puzzled. The Holy Fathers clearly did not know what they were dealing with: neither the language of the mysterious manuscript, nor its author were known to them. The second-hand bookseller expressed a desire to buy a book - they went to meet him. So in 1912, the Voynich manuscript - and it was under this name that the mysterious manuscript soon became known throughout the world - came to America.
The enterprising Wilfrid made copies of the book and sent it to all cities and towns - what if there is a book reader who can make out the mysterious notes? Experienced cryptographers began to decipher and … achieved nothing. Photos of all the pages of the manuscript were obtained by the largest specialists in cryptography. However, few people responded - probably all failed.
The text could not be deciphered. But there was a contender for the authorship of the book …
BACON
It turned out that the Voynich manuscript had made a long journey before being locked in the Jesuit library.
The first mention of this amazing book dates back to 1586. It was then that Rudolph II bought it - the Holy Roman Emperor and the King of Bohemia - one of the most eccentric rulers in history. Occultism was his passion. A big fan of astrology and alchemy, he collected a huge library, which was considered the best in Europe at that time. For the labors of the alchemists, the emperor was ready to pay with hard currency. So he gave 600 gold ducats for the Voynich manuscript - $ 50,000 in modern money. Who exactly helped out such a round sum is unknown: history has not preserved the name of the seller. But something is known about the personality of the author of the manuscript. In the letter enclosed
to the book, it was said that it was the work of the famous Englishman Roger Bacon (XIII century). This alchemist firmly believed in the existence of the philosopher's stone and tirelessly searched for it.
As a result, he opened gunpowder, although he himself claimed to have learned this secret from the "Chinese sages". Bacon owns the aphorism: "Whoever writes about secrets in a language accessible to everyone is a dangerous madman." Actually, this statement convinced everyone of his authorship. Say, considering that the content of the book is especially important, he encrypted it … Alas, this beautiful hypothesis was not confirmed: having studied the rich illustrative series of the Voynich manuscript, experts dated it to the 15th-17th centuries. That is, it was written when its alleged creator had been sleeping forever for at least 200 years!
The journey CONTINUES
Be that as it may, during the reign of Rudolph II, Bacon's authorship was not in doubt. All the alchemical army of the emperor tried to decipher the manuscript - but the "nut of knowledge" was solid. Perhaps that is why Rudolph II presented the mysterious book to Jacob de Tepenes, the director of the imperial gardens. He donated it to someone else, etc., etc. As a result, in 1666, the manuscript ended up with Johann Marki, rector of the University of Prague. Having twisted it this way and that, the scholar retired and sent the book to Rome - Anastasia Kircher, so that he, in turn, tried to understand what exactly Roger Bacon encrypted …
In Rome, traces of the manuscript were lost. They remembered about the mysterious book two and a half centuries later - thanks to Voynich …
By the way, half a century later, in 1961, the manuscript changed its owner again. Bibliophile Henry Kraus purchased the book for $ 24,500. An enterprising New Yorker wanted to resell it, but the asking price - 160,000 - was too high. I had to patronize: in 1969, Kraus solemnly presented the manuscript as a gift to Yale University. There she has been for the last forty years - in the library of rare books and manuscripts … She is waiting for a person to appear who can read it.
YUSTAS - ALEX
In the meantime, the content of the Voynich manuscript remains a secret sealed with seven seals. The alphabet used to write the book is so complex that scientists cannot even decide how many letters it consists of: either 19 or 28.
Among the theories put forward over the ninety-five years of research on the Voynich manuscript, there are quite original ones.
For example, in 1921, a professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, William Roman Newbold, concluded that the letters themselves do not mean anything. The main thing is the technique of their writing, dashes and other signs invisible to the naked eye.
Using this system, Newbold deciphered several fragments from which it followed … that the author of the manuscript knew the structure of the cell and the process of formation of an embryo from a sperm and an egg.
But a later careful analysis put an end to all of the professor's research: Newbold's "lines" were actually cracks in the ink that appeared from time to time.
Prescott Courier, a great expert on Japanese ciphers, assumed that the Voynich manuscript was written by at least two authors in two different languages. But what exactly is written there, what goals were pursued by its authors - Courier could not answer these questions.
The amateur philologist John Stoyko also suffered a fiasco, claiming in 1978 that the book was written in Ukrainian, but without vowels. The famous French cryptographer Jacques Guy was also unlucky, convinced that the Voynich manuscript is just an attempt to convey some kind of oriental language - Chinese or Vietnamese - in the form of an artificial alphabet.
In the end, scientists got tired of looking like fools, and they seriously suspected that they were dealing with a fake …
FAKE?
He was the first to voice this thought in the air in the 70s. XX century Robert Brumbach. He quite categorically stated that this was either a medieval treatise on the elixir of youth, or a fake of the 16th century.
Another unlucky secretary, Michael Barlow, went even further: he accused Wilfrid Voynich of creating a fake. But Barlow was not believed.
The version that the author of the forgery was the English adventurer Edward Kelly sounds much more convincing. Someone, and he had a very extensive experience in the preparation of forgeries. In his youth, he was accused of forging merchants and other documents. The court ordered to cut off Kelly's ears, which was done.
But this loss did not stop Edward: he compiled a dictionary of the language … of angels, which, of course, turned out to be a collection of meaningless words.
An aggravating circumstance is the fact that in 1584 Kelly came to Prague and was presented at the imperial court. A year later, Rudolph II bought the mysterious book.
Gordon Rugg, a lecturer at the British University of Keele, is sure that Kelly decided to capitalize on the emperor's love for everything mysterious and unusual - that's why he made a "mysterious alchemical manuscript."
And he did it so subtly that he conducted not only Rudolph, but also very venerable scientists of the 20th century …
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