For many years the best cryptologists in the world have been fighting over the secret of the "Voynich manuscript" - a mysterious medieval manuscript written in an unknown language and, perhaps, contains facts unknown to science. It is surprising that this strange artifact has not yet been filmed any "Voynich Code". But the plot is more than tempting: a medieval manuscript that emerged from oblivion at the beginning of the 20th century, at the sight of which the best cipher ciphers of the world shrugged their shoulders …
The mysterious Voynich manuscript is a book with a format of 24.5 × 17 cm and about 3 cm in thickness. The manuscript has 246 parchment pages (presumably 28 pages missing). There are no inscriptions or drawings on the cover itself. The text is written in an unknown language, and not only is it a secret, but also color illustrations - drawings of unknown plants, constellations, mechanisms only add oddities. The most remarkable thing is that drawings with similar plants or constellations are no longer found in any other book in the world.
In accordance with the themes of these drawings, the book is usually divided into several parts: "botanical" - with drawings of plants, for the most part unknown to science; "Astronomical", illustrated with images of the Sun, Moon, stars and signs of the Zodiac; "Biological", which contains drawings of naked women who are inside strange vessels filled with liquid; "Cosmological", with circular patterns of incomprehensible content; and "pharmaceutical", with painted containers, near which are pictures of various plants and a short text, presumably, recipes.
It all started with the fact that in 1912, in a Jesuit college near Rome, collector Wilfried Voynich discovered a manuscript, which, according to some details, could be dated to 1450-1500. Since that time, the mysterious find began to be called the "Voynich manuscript", and to this day the world's best experts are struggling to decipher the texts.
Wilfried Michael was an antiquarian bookseller, and in this capacity he gained world fame, largely thanks to the old tome he had. The document contained a letter from which it followed that the book was acquired in 1586 by Emperor Rudolph II. During the 17th century, scientists twice tried to read the mysterious text, after which it disappeared for 250 years.
Voynich photographed several pages of this manuscript and sent it to familiar cryptologists with a request to decipher the text. And although Voynich attracted the most famous specialists of his time to decipher the ancient book, their efforts were in vain.
The pages of the manuscript in 1919 came to the professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania William Nyoborn, who at that time was officially recognized as the number one cryptologist in the world. During the First World War, Newbourne worked for the American government, decrypting military codes, and there was no code that he could not crack. However, it was in his work with the Voynich manuscript that he failed.
1921 - After two years of labors, Newborn published the results of his labors. In his opinion, this book - Opus Magnum - was written in the 13th century by the Franciscan monk and alchemist Roger Bacon, who possessed secret knowledge that was several centuries ahead of its time. The text described the structure of human internal organs, cells, sperm, as well as the eclipse of the Sun and the structure of the Andromeda nebula. However, at the end of his lecture, Newbourne himself admitted that his method contains many assumptions and assumptions, and each time, decoding the same piece of text, he came to a new result.
Promotional video:
The message of the scientist made a real sensation in the world of cryptology, scientists organized an informal "Voynich society". Since that time, the Voynich manuscript has been officially recognized as the most mysterious book in the world. Cryptologists of various countries have been struggling to decipher the medieval tome for almost a hundred years, but the code has remained unsolved.
Now the manuscript itself is in the Yale University library, where it was transferred by the heirs of Voynich. At the university, the manuscript was copied and even posted its pages on a special Internet site so that anyone could try their hand. However, no light is visible at the end of the tunnel yet.
For a long time, it was believed that the manuscript discovered in 1912 was written using a cryptic code, although perhaps no code exists, and we are dealing with a chaotic set of graphic symbols. But many of the researchers believe that a work of 230 pages, in the writing of which certain patterns can be traced, cannot be nonsense.
Well, skeptics believe that it is quite possible to create something similar using a coding system that was known back in the XIV century. Supporters of this version suggested that the manuscript could have been sold to Rudolph II by the famous adventurer Edward Kelly for 600 ducats, which would be $ 50,000 today.
We have already mentioned the first attempt to solve the mystery of the Voynich manuscript by Professor William Newborn. It ended in failure.
The next attempt was made in 1940. Two amateur cryptographers - Joseph Fili and Leonelle Strong - replaced the characters in the manuscript with letters of the Latin alphabet, but they also failed to read the ancient manuscript. At the end of World War II, a group of military cryptographers, who became famous for breaking the cipher of the Japanese army, in their free time amused themselves by deciphering ancient manuscripts. Under their onslaught, all the ciphers fell - and only the Voynich manuscript remained undefeated.
Amateur philologist John Stoyko in 1978 suggested that the document was written in the Ukrainian language. According to Stoyko, vowels were simply removed from words. But the sentence, translated by him as: "The look of the little god is looking for emptiness", is in no way connected either with illustrations or with Ukrainian history.
1987 - Leo Levitov, a physicist by training, declared that the document was created by heretics - Cathars who lived in medieval France, and is a collection of words from different languages. Unfortunately, the translation he made had nothing to do with the beliefs of the Cathars and did not resemble any of the Qatari texts that have come down to our time.
The peculiar internal structure of the "words" of the Voynich manuscript led two researchers - William Friedman and John Tiltman, independently of each other - to the conclusion that the unencrypted text could be written not in a living, but in an artificial language - in a special "philosophical language." In languages of this type, the vocabulary is organized according to a system of categories so that the general meaning of a word can be determined by analyzing the sequence of letters.
For example, in the modern synthetic language Ro (Ro), the prefix "bofo-" is a category of color, and each word that begins with bofo- is a color name: red is bofoc and yellow is bofof. Very roughly, but it can be compared with the book classification system used by many libraries (at least in the West), for example, the letter "P" can be responsible for the section of languages and literature, "RA" - for the Greek and Latin subsections, "RS "- for romance languages, etc.
This concept is quite old, as evidenced by the book "The Philosophical Language" of the scientist John Wilkins, which was published in 1668. In most known examples of such languages, a particular subject may have many associated words with a repeated prefix. For example, all plant names begin with the same letters or syllables, the same can be said, for example, about all diseases, etc. This is how it would be possible to explain the monotony of the folio text.
But no one can sufficiently convincingly explain the meaning of one or another suffix or prefix in the text of the Voynich manuscript. In addition, all known examples of philosophical languages date from a much later period - to the 17th century.
It may, of course, be that the Voynich manuscript is either a clever forgery, created in order to make money, or the creation of a mad scholastic. But this version is rejected by the strict linguistic construction of the text. For example, the syllable “do”, widely used in the text of the manuscript, can be found only at the beginning of a word. The syllable "chek" can also be in front, but if it is used in the same word as "qo", then in this case "qo" always comes before "chek". Another widely used syllable "dy" is most often found at the end and beginning of a word, but never occurs in the middle. Accordingly, it cannot be argued that text is a chaotic set of symbols.
In any case, whether the Voynich manuscript was created using an unknown code or language, or is a set of symbols, researchers have not yet been able to decipher it. Several years ago, Gordon Rugg and Joan Hyde, teachers at the University of Keele in England, specialists in information processing and analysis, having studied all the methods of their predecessors, tried to uncover the secret of the tome, developing new tactics that allowed solving extraordinary scientific problems.
Their conclusion that the text does not contain elements of human language was made on the basis of linguistic expertise. This point of view was quite convincing, and they began to consider the version according to which the manuscript is a forgery, although most researchers hold a different opinion. But experts came to the conclusion that such an assessment is based more on emotion than on facts - scientists have never had to deal with such manuscripts before.
Today, these researchers believe that the text is based on a random set of symbols, but the scholastic of the Middle Ages could have a different view of randomness and patterns. Perhaps an ancient cipher machine was used?
Developing the version that the Voynich manuscript is a fake, they tried to create something similar. But first it was necessary to determine when the tome was written, and, already based on this, guess which system was applied. The illustrations, made in the style typical of the late 15th century, suggested that the text was written before 1500. Although it cannot be ruled out that the painters, wishing to "age" the document, could reproduce illustrations of previous eras.
Of the encryption techniques used in 1470–1608, the most promising technique was the Cardano grid, which was created in 1550 by the Italian mathematician Gerolamo Cardano. Using a grid with three holes, it is possible to create a pattern according to which prepositions, roots, and suffixes were added to words. For the entire time of this work, we received about two thousand words.
After doing quite a lot of operations with 10 variants of the Cardano grid, the researchers made the assumption that the lattice method could be used when writing the Voynich manuscript. It would take a person familiar with this technology two to three months to create the text and decorate it with illustrations.
The main question remains to be resolved: does the document contain any information?
Gordon Rugg and Joan Hyde showed that if the author of the text used the Cardano grid, he, most likely, set himself the goal not to create a cipher text, but to write beautiful nonsense. The probabilities were calculated many times, and the analysis showed that a text that has puzzled codebreakers and linguists for almost 100 years can turn out to be elegant nonsense and gibberish.
A similar version is confirmed in those historical events that took place many centuries ago. 1580 John Dee and Edward Kelly, subjects of Queen Elizabeth, visit the court of Rudolph II. Kelly was a famous hoaxer and knew how to use the Cardano net. Some experts call him the author of the mysterious manuscript.
Edward Kelly was a self-taught alchemist who claimed to be able to turn copper into gold using some secret powder. He also said that he could summon angels with the help of a magic crystal and converse with them (John Dee wrote about this in detail in his diary).
The language of the angels was called Enoch, after the name of Enoch, the biblical father of Methuselah, who, according to legend, was taken on a journey to heaven by the angels and later wrote a book about what he saw there. Scholars have suggested that just as Kelly invented the Enoch language to fool John Dee, he could also fabricate the Voynich manuscript to fool the emperor (who paid Kelly for his supposed alchemical talents).
In general, many people are suspected of the authorship of the Voynich manuscript. Here are some of the most common guesses.
Roger Bacon put his hand to the tome. Marzi's cover letter to Kircher in 1665 states that, according to his deceased friend Rafael Mniszowski, the book was purchased by Emperor Rudolph II for 600 ducats, who believed that the author of the book was the famous and versatile Franciscan monk Roger Bacon (1214– 1294).
But researchers who studied the Voynich manuscript and are familiar with Bacon's work strongly deny this possibility. It should also be noted that Raphael Mniszowski died in 1644, and the deal had to take place before the abdication of Rudolf II in 1611 - at least 55 years before the letter to Marci.
Many suspect Voynich himself of having fabricated the manuscript. As a seller of old books, he could have the necessary knowledge and skills, and Bacon's “lost book” promised a lot of money. But recent research makes it possible to reject this hypothesis, or at least make it highly controversial.
Johann Marcus Marzi was also suspected. Some of the researchers believed that he forged the Voynich manuscript in order to discredit the Jesuit Kircher, who was "famous" not for his genius achievements, but for obvious mistakes in working with ancient (and sometimes forged) documents.
The next to be suspected was Marci's friend, Rafael Mniszowski, as he was a cryptographer and around 1618 invented a cipher that he considered unbreakable. He allegedly needed the manuscript for a practical demonstration of his cipher. Well, if this version is true, then Mniszowski was a genius coder - the manuscript has not yet been deciphered.
Renowned cryptologist Professor Rene Zandbergen of the European Space Agency also believes the Voynich manuscript is a hoax. “It may have been written by a strange-minded person with no intention of deceiving anyone. For me, this is the only explanation why the manuscript has not yet been deciphered."
Although, the professor put forward another version: two languages are closely intertwined in the folio. “If you look at the letters of the manuscript under a microscope or a powerful magnifying glass, it turns out that each letter actually consists of two signs, as if superimposed on one another. That is, the manuscript contains two texts written in two different handwritings and in two different languages. True, both of these languages are also unknown to science."
Further analysis of the structure of the parchment sheets showed that many of the drawings and letters were retouched several decades after the book was written. It cannot be ruled out that during the work of the retoucher, part of the text was distorted, so now the researchers refuse to work until they restore the original form of the manuscript with the help of a computer.
People revealed much deeper secrets. Why has no one figured out this one to this day? According to one of the authorities of modern cryptology J. Manley, the reason lies in the fact that “attempts at decryption have so far been made on the basis of false assumptions. We actually don't know when and where the monuscript was written, what language is the basis of encryption. When the correct hypotheses are worked out, the cipher, perhaps, will turn out to be simple and easy …"
The US NSA has also attempted to unravel the mystery of the Voynich manuscript. Their specialists became interested in the problem of the mysterious book and in the early 80s of the XX century, invented methods for its decryption. In truth, it is hard to believe that such a serious organization was engaged in the book out of purely sporting interests. Maybe they wanted to use the manuscript to develop one of the modern encryption algorithms for which this secret department is so famous. But their efforts were also unsuccessful.
It remains to admit that in our era of global information and computer technologies, the medieval puzzle remains unsolved. And it is unknown if scientists will ever be able to read the Voynich manuscript.
M. Zgurskaya