Known as the most mysterious book in the world, the Voynich Manuscript has remained a mystery for 500 years. Written by an unknown author in an incomprehensible language, it is replete with inexplicable symbols and strange illustrations. The book is named after Wilfried Mikhail Voynich, a Polish-American book dealer who accidentally discovered it in 1912 in the collection of ancient documents of a Jesuit college in Frascati, near Rome.
The non-standard nature of the Voynich manuscript is that it was written in a unique alphabetic script, unlike any other alphabetic system. This work baffled the greatest cryptographers of the 20th century, to this day it remains a mystery. Having bought the book in 1912, Wilfried Voynich made a photocopy of it and gave it to cryptographers, specialists in ancient languages, astronomers and botanists, who could not decipher the mysterious language of the manuscript. Dr. William Romain Newbold of Pennsylvania State University, a specialist in medieval philosophy and science (and also a cryptographer), in 1919 decided that he had figured out the code. However, his hypothesis was later refuted. During World War II, British and American decryptors began to study the manuscript, but they could not read a word either.
The history of the Voynich manuscript is no less mysterious and unusual. Its first owner was the eccentric Emperor Rudolph II of Bohemia (1552-1612), who probably bought it around 1586 for 600 gold ducats (now a little over $ 60,000) from an unknown merchant. Some believe that it was John Dee, the occultist and astrologer of Queen Elizabeth I of England. The only thing that is known for certain is that the signature on the folio belongs to the botanist, alchemist and court physician Rudolf Jacob Horczycki, who died in 1622. The next owner of the book, who was identified was an alchemist named Gheorghe Bares. He could not translate the text of the manuscript and for its mysteriousness called the book a Sphinx. Just before his death, on the eve of 1662, he left a library and a manuscript, including to his friend Johann Marcus Marzi,formerly rector of Charles University in Prague.
The manuscript preserved a letter written in Latin in 1666. Its author was Marzi, and he addressed a letter to the German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher in Rome, proposing to decipher the manuscript that once belonged to Emperor Rudolph II. Further, Marzi suggested that the author of the manuscript is believed to be an Englishman, a Franciscan monk, philosopher Roger Bacon, who lived in 1214-1294. However, from the text it could be concluded that Marci himself did not share this belief. The manuscript became the property of the Kircher Institute - the Jesuit University of Rome (Collegium of Rome), in the library of which it was probably kept until, in 1870, King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy seized the papal state. The book was transported to the Jesuit college at Villa Mondragon, where Voynich discovered it in 1912. He died in 1930,and the manuscript was inherited by his wife, the writer Ethel Lillian Voynich, and after her death in 1960, the book was inherited by her friend, Miss Anne Neill. In 1961, Hank P. Kraus, a New York-based antiques dealer, reported that he had bought the manuscript for $ 24,500. The book was later valued at $ 160,000, but Kraus did not sell it. He donated the manuscript to Yale University, where it is kept to this day in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.where it is kept to this day in the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.where it is kept to this day in the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library.
The manuscript measures 6 inches by 9 inches and contains about 240 parchment pages, although it is believed that there were once 270 pages. The cipher text is handwritten with a pen, which also roughly sketches the drawings, which were later painted. The illustrations, colored in red, blue, brown, yellow and green, indicate the division of the book into five sections, each devoted to a specific subject. The first, the largest chapter, takes up almost half of the volume and is known as the botanical section. Each page of this part contains one, rarely two drawings with plants and is accompanied by text, divided into several paragraphs. It is not always possible to determine which plant is depicted, which means that some of them may turn out to be an incredible discovery. The next part contains, among other things, images of the sun, moon and stars. It is considered the astronomical or astrological section. Next is the so-called biological section, which contains drawings from the field of anatomy: channels and tubes resembling blood vessels, as well as a miniature image of a naked woman. The fourth section is called pharmaceutical, because it depicts the roots, leaves and other parts of plants, as well as containers with inscriptions, which may have been pharmacy vessels. The fifth and final section - the recipe section - contains several short paragraphs, each marked with an asterisk in the margin. This chapter can also be a calendar. The book ends with a page with answers.which contains drawings from the field of anatomy: channels and tubes resembling blood vessels, as well as a miniature image of a nude woman. The fourth section is called pharmaceutical, because it depicts the roots, leaves and other parts of plants, as well as containers with inscriptions, which may have been pharmacy vessels. The fifth and final section - the recipe section - contains several short paragraphs, each marked with an asterisk in the margin. This chapter can also be a calendar. The book ends with a page with answers.which contains drawings from the field of anatomy: channels and tubes resembling blood vessels, as well as a miniature image of a nude woman. The fourth section is called pharmaceutical, because it depicts the roots, leaves and other parts of plants, as well as containers with inscriptions, which may have been pharmacy vessels. The fifth and final section - the recipe section - contains several short paragraphs, each marked with an asterisk in the margin. This chapter can also be a calendar. The book ends with a page with answers.the last part, the recipe section, contains several short paragraphs, each marked with an asterisk in the margin. This chapter can also be a calendar. The book ends with a page with answers.the last part, the recipe section, contains several short paragraphs, each marked with an asterisk in the margin. This chapter can also be a calendar. The book ends with a page with answers.
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In 1944, a Benedictine monk and botanist at the Catholic University of Hough O'Neill identified some of the plants in the book, in particular American species such as sunflowers and paprika. This meant that the manuscript must be dated no earlier than 1493, when Columbus brought the seeds to Europe. However, the illustrations in the manuscript are rather vague and cast doubt on O'Neill's conclusions. An interesting suggestion has to do with the name of Captain Prescott Carier, a cryptanalyst for the United States Navy. Based on statistical data when analyzing the text, he found that the manuscript was written in two styles, named by him in different languages, and designated them A and B. In his conclusion, he noted that the manuscript was created by at least two people, although it is possible, it was written by one person, but at different times.
Many theories have been put forward regarding the language of the manuscript, its origin and the purpose of creation. The name most often mentioned in connection with this is Roger Bacon. This man was constantly persecuted for his work and scientific discoveries, so he spoke out in favor of encoding for the safety of data. The statement by Marci, who mentioned Bacon as a possible author of the manuscript, impressed Wilfried Voynich. He was almost certain that it was Bacon who was the real author, and did a lot of historical research, trying to verify and prove this. He established that Dr. John Dee had a large collection of Bacon's work and that the scientist supposedly visited Rudolph during the creation of the manuscript. The hypothesis that the page numbers on the manuscript were put down by Dee is rejected by most researchers of his life and work. However,not only in this connection Dee with the manuscript is not supported by direct evidence: he did not mention a word about the book in his rather detailed diaries. Nevertheless, Voynich's ideas had a great influence on further research and attempts to decipher the manuscript. In 1943, New York lawyer Joseph Martin Feely published Roger Bacon's Cipher: The Real Key Found, in which he stated that Bacon wrote the text using abbreviations from medieval Latin. Nobody took this assumption seriously. Specialists in the work of Bacon, having studied the Voynich manuscript, rejected its authorship. New York lawyer Joseph Martin Feely published Roger Bacon's Cipher: The Real Key Found, in which he stated that Bacon wrote the text using abbreviations of medieval Latin words. Nobody took this assumption seriously. Specialists in the work of Bacon, having studied the Voynich manuscript, rejected its authorship. New York lawyer Joseph Martin Feely published Roger Bacon's Cipher: The Real Key Found, in which he stated that Bacon wrote the text using abbreviations of medieval Latin words. Nobody took this assumption seriously. Specialists in the work of Bacon, having studied the Voynich manuscript, rejected its authorship.
Dr. Leo Levitov - author of the book "The Solution to the Voynich Manuscript: A Liturgical Guide for the Endur Rite of the Cathar Heresy, the Cult of Isis" (1987) stated that he had deciphered the manuscript. He established that this is a liturgical guide to the Qatari religious communities of the XII-XIV centuries. However, this assumption became the subject of debate due to obvious discrepancies with the customs of the Cathars of southern France known today. James Finn in his book "Pandora's Hope", published in 2004, expressed a version that the manuscript may be a cipher text in Hebrew. According to this theory, rather peculiar, the cipher text consists of words that are periodically repeated in the text in various forms, for example, "ain" (meaning "eye" in translation from Hebrew) occurs in the text as aiin "or" aiiin ". Thus, words that were previously considered differentactually turned out to be variants of the same word. Then you can understand why the scientist cryptographers could not decrypt. However, Finn's explanation means that the text can have an infinite variety of interpretations, and it is very likely that the real meaning will be misunderstood or lost. Apparently, this was not part of the plans of the author of the manuscript.
Repeated attempts to find a plausible solution to the voynich manuscript's agadka have enveloped the manuscript with an aura of incomprehensible mystery, which, perhaps, he deserves. The inability to decipher the book and other strange features, such as a large number of repeated words and phantasmagoric illustrations, caused some scholars to doubt its authenticity and even suspect that the manuscript is a clever forgery, possibly created by Wilfried Voynich himself. However, the latter point of view can be ignored: there is written evidence of the existence of the manuscript before Voynich bought it. The latest speculation regarding the way Voynich was forged was made in 2003 by Dr. Gordon Rugg, senior lecturer in computer science at Keele University in England. He suggested that the text,similar in characteristics to the Voynich manuscript, it may be a gibberish, created using such a device as the Cardano lattice, invented to encrypt texts around 1550. There is a version that the medium Edward Kelly, who worked with John Dee, was involved in forging the manuscript. He did this in order to sell the book to Emperor Rudolf II, who is known to be interested in rare and outlandish things. However, as mentioned above, today there is no direct evidence linking Dee to the manuscript, and the name Kelly was named only because, together with Dee, they allegedly invented the Enochian language, which the angels told Kelly about. However, the study of this occult language showed that it had nothing to do with the content of the Voynich manuscript. Gordon Rugg's theory and the assumption that the Voynich manuscript is a forgery,face a common problem: the results of statistical analysis of the book have shown that the samples are similar to some kind of language. For example, the book is written according to the so-called Zipf's law, which is associated with words periodically repeated in the text. It is unlikely that the author of the forgery, creating gibberish in the 16th century, could somehow take into account the basic foundations of the language.
So, the manuscript turned out to be the original. But this conclusion did not bring us closer to unraveling the goals of its creation. The common point of view today is the theory that it may have been written in Central Europe in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. It has been suggested that the book talks about medieval medicinal herbs or is an astronomical or astrological treatise. However, the known examples of such works still do not resemble the Voynich manuscript. And no one would use such a complex text that cannot be deciphered if the information in it was not either very dangerous or particularly secret. If it is possible to establish the origin of the book - who brought it to the court of Rudolf II in Prague, it may be possible to get closer to answering the question about the purpose of creating the manuscript. In 2005, the book was first published in full:the facsimile edition of The Voynich Code was prepared by the French editor Jean-Claude Gavsevich. Today, hundreds of scholars and amateur enthusiasts are exchanging ideas and theories via the Internet on how to solve the mystery of the manuscript. There are now more people fighting the mystery than ever before. However, the secret of this unusual book has not yet been revealed. Perhaps the author of the Voynich manuscript really invented a code that cannot be cracked.
B. Houghton. "Great secrets and mysteries of history"
You can see the full version of the Voynich manuscript at this link.