The Voynich Manuscript, also known as "the most mysterious medieval manuscript," contains a description of the flora and fauna of the New World and is at least partially written in one of the Aztec languages.
This conclusion was reached by the American botanist Arthur O. Tucker from the University of Delaware and IT specialist Rexford H. Talbert, their research was published in the journal HerbalGram.
The conclusions of the researchers are based on a comparison of plant drawings in the Voynich manuscript with drawings in several floristic codes of the New World, created in the middle of the 16th and early 17th centuries. Scientists were able, for example, to match the drawing of a plant with a flat rhizome, which is found on page 1v of the Voynich manuscript, with the drawing on page 9r of the Cruz-Badianus code (the oldest medical document from the New World, created in 1552).
The drawings show a similarly styled plant that resembles the bindweed Ipomoea murucoides, both showing a rhizome with claw-like processes and white flowers with a tubular corolla.
Probably the same from the Voynich manuscript page
One of the first in the manuscript was able to find a drawing, which, according to the authors, "undoubtedly depicts a leaf or a fruit of a cactus, most likely Opuntia ficus-indica." The caption under the picture is "fairly easily transliterated" in "nashtli", a variant of the word "nochtli" from the Aztec Nahuatl language.
Promotional video:
Photo: Arthur O. Tucker, PhD, and Rexford H. Talbert
In total, scientists were able to identify 37 of the 303 plants represented in the manuscript, six animals and one mineral (pain). According to them, the origin of these objects from such remote places as Texas, California and Nicaragua indicates that the manuscript contains a description of a certain "botanical garden in central Mexico."
The manuscript, discovered in 1912 by the Polish second-hand bookseller Wilfred Voynich, has not yet been deciphered. It is written in a special alphabet and contains a large number of illustrations. The earliest reliable evidence of the existence of the Voynich manuscript dates back to the mid to late 16th century, but some researchers suggest an earlier origin.
Voynich fish
Scientists have identified them as Atractosteus spatula. Mississippi carapace is one of the species of large fish of the carapace family, common in North and Central America.
Previously, researchers put forward hypotheses according to which the text of the manuscript was obtained by algorithmic means, and the document itself is a hoax. However, recently, coding specialist Marcello Montemurro, based on statistical analysis, showed that the text of a document contains an information structure that is characteristic of natural languages, that is, it is neither nonsense, nor a product of coding.
In an interview, Montemurro stated that "the explanation for the [statistical] features of the text is that the manuscript does indeed contain a message."
