One of the Spanish publishing houses received the exclusive rights to print almost nine hundred exact copies of a manuscript widely known in narrow circles called the Voynich manuscript, over the solution of which the best scientists have been racking their brains for many years.
Rugg's method
During the first official copying of a historical document, specially aged paper will be used, as much as possible repeating the structure of the original parchment, as well as unique fonts that have been produced by specialists for a whole decade.
As one of the Spanish businessmen who sponsored the project stated, it is possible that the manuscript was created by a brilliant sadist who set himself the goal of tormenting scientists of the coming centuries to his best.
And now, thanks to printed copies, each of which is estimated at 8 thousand euros, about the content of this literary puzzle, according to him, several hundred more scientists who have connected to the study will not have the slightest idea.
Today, by the way, almost all copies of the yet unpublished work have already been booked by the largest library collections in the world. True, British linguist Gordon Rugg is confident that new researchers involved in the process of solving the manuscript will waste their time. After 12 years of painstaking study of the "artifact", he came to the unequivocal conclusion that a historical document is in fact a completely meaningless set of symbols passed off as letters.
To prove this, Rugg selected and collected in one table all the supposedly available letters in the manuscript, having determined in advance what to consider the root of the word, and what to be a prefix or suffix, and using a special tool for encrypting texts, he created his own unique text, or rather, alphabetic verbal gibberish, which nevertheless was 100% like a continuation of the ancient manuscript.
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The results of the analysis showed that the "Rugg's test" fully complies with the linguistic law, which tracks a special regular relationship with the help of which words are distributed in a natural language.
According to the British researcher, the conclusions made by him indicate that the manuscript is simply a hoax of an unknown person who had excellent knowledge in the field of cryptography.
Leonardo da Vinci was not without
The Voynich manuscript is not translatable and presumably an ancient handwritten text. It consists of 170,000 letter-like characters, written in an unknown language by an unknown calligrapher on more than 200 parchment pages of standard book size.
At the same time, a number of gaps in the numbering, apparently, indicates that some sheets were lost over the years, and initially the manuscript had a much larger volume.
According to the story of the Polish antiquarian and second-hand bookseller Wilfried Voynich, the husband of the English writer Ethel Voynich, famous for his novel The Gadfly, he discovered the manuscript in 1912, delving into the contents of an old chest he bought at a sale in Rome with no less old books.
The old manuscript contained a note from which it followed that this work by an unknown author was acquired at the end of the 16th century by the monarch of Bohemia, Rudolf II, from an occultist.
For almost 2 decades, until his death, the antiquarian tried to find the key to deciphering the found text, but he could not, despite his extensive knowledge of history and bibliography, do this.
In the early 60s of the last century, the American book dealer Hans Kraus, who is one of the largest dealers in book antiquities, bought the manuscript from the Voynich heirs for 25 thousand dollars.
For the next 7 years, he himself tried to decipher it, while simultaneously advertising his research in the media, and then, also failing to achieve success, decided to resell it for 160 thousand dollars. However, no buyers were found, and the dealer donated the book to Yale University.
After that, dozens of famous researchers from all over the world in the field of mathematics, physics, linguistics and cryptography tried their hand at "breaking" the cipher of the manuscript, named after the Polish antiquarian by the Voynich manuscript.
However, despite the presence of individual letters in the text, reminiscent of Latin, the "Holy Grail of Cryptography" to this day successfully "resists" incessant attempts to decipher it.
The only thing that remains a mystery is the authorship of the manuscript. To whom they just did not attribute it! Among the famous names are Leonardo da Vinci, some of whose great inventions have been irretrievably lost, and no less legendary John Dee is a natural scientist and at the same time a court astrologer.
Aztecs helped
Perhaps a breakthrough is still ahead, and the secret of the manuscript will still someday be revealed. This is confirmed by at least the following fact. The results of radiocarbon analysis, which showed that the manuscript sheets were made at the very beginning of the 15th century, were obtained only 5 years ago, and before that, many speculated that the parchment was forged and fabricated in the 20th century.
An indirect proof of the antiquity of the manuscript, however, was one of the few realistic drawings in it - a fortified wall with battlements, which became widespread in Italian cities just at the beginning of the 15th century.
There are more problems with the ink used to write the text. Experts have determined that they match the color palette popular in the Middle Ages. But it is not possible to prove that they are also quite ancient, with the help of current technical means, since traces of carbon have practically "disappeared" from them.
And then, it is not at all necessary that this chemical element should be present in ink, since a number of them were made and are made from substances of inorganic origin.
The unknown author wrote the text with the help of a bird's feather, most likely a goose feather. Numerous color illustrations are also drawn in a rather careless manner. There are about 400 of them in total.
This is a whole series of, probably, astrological charts and astronomical charts, the image of some pharmaceutical vessels and naked women bathing in strangely shaped vats, and 300 different plants, none of which could be recognized for a long time due to poor drawing.
Only, again recently, botanists, taking as a basis the so-called Aztec herbalist, created in the middle of the 16th century, with great, great stretch identified 4 dozen plants depicted in the manuscript and growing in ancient times on the lands of Latin America.
Comparing all the available data, the experts came to the conclusion that we can talk about the work of alchemy. And since encryption in the past was often associated with rather mysterious alchemical experiments, the results of which had to be hidden from prying eyes, perhaps the recipe for creating a philosopher's stone is reliably hidden in the book!
A message from time immemorial
The mystical document is written in a language (assuming that it is a language at all), the existence of which in the past linguists know nothing about. At the same time, the author's handwriting is quite stable and clear. This suggests that before the manuscript, a mysterious person wrote in the same manner more than one hundred pages.
In addition, phonetic and spelling analysis shows that the text is subject to certain rules that are inherent in any language. In particular, in each word the signs alternate and if they are repeated, then no more than two times in a row (as, for example, two "s" in the adjective "cool").
According to the peculiarities of the syntax, the text is closest to the group of some languages common in the countries of East Asia. Frequency analysis showed that words in the manuscript are repeated with a regularity that is characteristic only for languages of natural origin, that is, for those that are spoken today or spoken in the past.
At the same time, numerous opponents of the supporters of the meaningful content of the ancient manuscript, including the aforementioned Gordon Rugg, do not cease to assert that the "manuscript" is just a genius hoax, perhaps, by the Voynich spouses themselves.
According to critics (not confirmed by any facts, though), Wilfried Voynich, by virtue of his profession, had the opportunity to collect the required number of blank sheets of parchment during his trips around the world. And his wife Ethel, with the help of her secret lover Sidney Reilly, a famous British spy and expert in all kinds of ciphers, invented a bizarre alphabet, with the help of which he composed a tricky text.
Why, however, it took a well-off second-hand bookseller and Ethel, who was at the peak of her literary popularity, to release a fake into the world that they were not going to sell, critics cannot explain. But serious researchers do not demand this from them, continuing in the quiet of their offices while unsuccessful attempts to get to the bottom of the essence hidden in a historical document that has not been amenable for more than a hundred years. In particular, the British theoretical physicist Marcelo Montemurro is sure that a completely meaningful text is encrypted in the manuscript. Moreover, he, as well as the drawings, contain a certain message to humanity. And who it is intended for, as well as what it contains, scientists will find out anyway. If not today, then tomorrow, when science will step forward.
See the original Voynich manuscript here.