The famous "Voynich manuscript" of the 15th century is considered the most mysterious text ever found, which for over a century has resisted any attempt to decipher itself.
In addition to countless decoding attempts, there have been over 25 attempts to analyze the text by the best minds on the planet, which also failed. This has led some to conclude that the manuscript may be just an elaborate hoax.
However, new research, published in the journal Plos One, suggests that the manuscript does contain some message and may have been written precisely to hide important information.
The 240-page book, which is written in an unknown language, and has many illustrations depicting astronomical, biological, cosmological, botanical and pharmaceutical themes, was discovered in 1912 by the American Pole Wilfrid M. Voynich.
Numerous studies have shown that the unknown language of the manuscript has similarities to existing languages, and recent results support the hypothesis that the text does contain meaningful words and messages.
The theoretical physicist Marcelo Montemarro of the University of Manchester, Britain, has spent many years analyzing the linguistic patterns of the manuscript and is confident that he is close to unraveling its secrets. Using computer statistical techniques to investigate word patterns, Dr. Mantemarro and colleagues found evidence that meaningful words occur in clusters of text where they are needed as part of a written message.
More or less, the constructed semantic network shows that related words have common structural properties - and this is a pattern that is observed in known languages.
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According to Dr. Montemarro, these patterns confirm that the Voynich manuscript is not a hoax. "Now the manuscript is not as easily dismissive as a meaningless collection of words, as it exhibits significant linguistic structure," he says. It is unlikely that these patterns were deliberately included in the text as part of the rally, since knowledge of such linguistic structures did not exist at the time of the creation of the manuscript.
As for the meaning of the text, it still remains unrevealed. According to Craig Bauer, author of The Secret History: A History of Cryptology, the manuscript may contain some important message.
Initially, Dr. Bauer believed the Voynich manuscript to be a hoax, but recent findings forced him to change his point of view, and now he and Dr. Montemarro are similar in their position: "There is really a story behind the manuscript that we may never know."