For a century, many researchers have tried to decipher the ancient texts of the Voynich manuscript. The document is still considered the most mysterious medieval text in the world.
It is replete with illustrations of exotic plants, star diagrams and images of men and women, and is also filled with strange text that cannot be deciphered.
British historian Nicholas Gibbs decided to put an end to attempts to unravel the meaning of the manuscript. He claims that the document is a medieval medical reference, where the designations of diseases and plants were replaced by abbreviations. The decoding of this “Newspeak” was placed in a special “alphabetical index” that was attached to the manuscript. Unfortunately, it has been irretrievably lost.
The manuscript is not only "not complete", but also some of the pages in it are in the wrong order, so its decoding will constantly come to a standstill, reports The Daily Mail.
Gibbs came to this conclusion after learning that the manuscript was based on the works of antiquity and the late Middle Ages, known as Trotula, Herbarium Apuleius Platonicus and De Balneis Puteolanis.
While studying the ligature and morphology of words in the manuscript, Gibbs noticed that almost every element of the syntax is an abbreviated version. Comparing the discovery with the texts of antiquity, the historian discovered that the “reference books” have much in common.
In addition, many of the images in the Voynich manuscript were "copied" from other medical treatises (in particular, from the works of Hippocrates and Pliny the Elder). The author of the Voynich manuscript was well versed in medieval and ancient medicine, Gibbs writes in a supplement to the British newspaper Times.
In April this year, Russian scientists announced that they were close to deciphering the mysterious manuscript. They found out that the text was written in two mixed languages with the exception of vowels.
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The Voynich Manuscript is an illustrated codex written between 1404 and 1438 by an unknown author in an unknown language using an unknown alphabet. Until now, no one has been able to decipher the manuscript, or even determine exactly whether its text is meaningful.
See the original Voynich manuscript here