and today there are a lot of encrypted mysteries of the past in the world. The Voynich manuscript is one of them, and is described in this article.
This strange book, written by an unknown author, which is supposedly 5 centuries old, was named after Wilfried Mikhail Voynich, a famous antiquarian and part-time husband of the famous writer Ethel Lilian Voynich, who revealed this mysterious manuscript to the world. The manuscript came to him in 1912. It looked like an ancient parchment book and was 240 pages long. The pages were numbered, but after research it was found that it was done much later than the book was written. Several pages, title page and table of contents were missing. The whole book was illustrated in sufficient detail and colorfully, depicting plants unknown to science, drawings of the sky and stars, human figures, signs of the Zodiac. The manuscript is divided into several sections, or rather, into six. Pharmaceutical, biological,astronomical, cosmological, herbalist and prescription. The text is written in an incomprehensible language or cipher, which they still cannot figure out. It was established that the author of the manuscript knew this language or cipher thoroughly - he wrote quickly and accurately had an idea of what he was writing about. The book passed from hand to hand over the centuries and was very valuable for the owners.
At first, Voynich tried to decipher the book with the help of contacts and acquaintances, but together with the highest professionals of that time he reached a dead end. In 1919, the manuscript was sent to William Newbold, a cryptologist at the University of Pennsylvania. And he seemed to have solved the code, but checking his results - each time he decrypted the text in a different way. Then, in different years of the 20th century, several more attempts were made to unravel the strange code, but they were unsuccessful. Scientists who were able to unravel the military codes and ciphers of the Second World War were unable to decipher the old manuscript. Linguists who know many languages, including ancient ones, do not know what language it is written in.
The illustrations in the book are clearly full of meaning, but what they symbolize was also not possible to figure out. Bizarre interweaving of streams, pipes, symbols, women in crowns, diagrams, vessels, constellations - it seems that the solution is close - but more and more questions appear than answers. Also, not a single plant depicted in the illustrations in the book has been identified from all that ever existed.
It also proved problematic to clarify the author's name. The accompanying letter that came with the book indicates that the author is a certain Roger Bacon, a Franciscan monk. The authorship is even credited to Leonardo da Vinci, who lived around the time the book was written. Some do not exclude the possibility of creating a fake by Voynich himself to get fabulous profits from the "sensational find".
But for a fake or someone's joke, the book, as established by scientists, really has a century history. And in the Middle Ages, parchment paper was worth its weight in gold - no one would have thought of forging a manuscript. And writing by hand is not a typewriter. It is very laborious and very long - the books have been written for years!
The version that the author of the book was mentally ill was also considered. But again - the text of the manuscript and illustrations to it are very coherent, and a mentally disabled person could not come up with such a tricky code.
To date, the manuscript is at Yale University and due to the high interest in it - scans of pages can be easily found on the Internet. This is also calculated on the fact that perhaps someone will still be able to unravel the mystery of this mysterious manuscript, the roots of which are lost somewhere in Europe.
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