Mystery of The Voynich Manuscript

Unsolved mystery - Based on the evidence of the calligraphy, the drawings, the vellum, and the pigments, Wilfrid Voynich estimated that the Manuscript was created in the late 13th century. The manuscript is small, seven by ten inches, but thick, nearly 235 pages. It is written in an unknown script of which there is no known other instance in the world. 

The Voynich Manuscript is considered to be 'The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World'. To this day this medieval artifact resists all efforts at translation. It is either an ingenious hoax or an unbreakable cipher. The manuscript is named after its discoverer, the American antique book dealer and collector, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who discovered it in 1912, amongst a collection of ancient manuscripts kept in villa Mondragone in Frascati, near Rome, which had been by then turned into a Jesuit College (closed in 1953).

 

The Voynich Manuscript is a cipher manuscript, sometimes attributed to Roger Bacon.
Scientific text in an unidentified language, in cipher, possibly written in central Europe in the 15th century.

It is abundantly illustrated with awkward coloured drawings of::

• unidentified plants; 
• what seems to be herbal recipes; 
• tiny naked women frolicking in bathtubs connected by intricate plumbing looking more like anatomical parts than hydraulic contraptions; 
• mysterious charts in which some have seem astronomical objects seen through a telescope, some live cells seen through a microscope; 
• charts into which you may see a strange calendar of zodiacal signs, populated by tiny naked people in rubbish bins.

Detail from page 78r of Voynich Manuscript depicting the "biological" section

"Tiny naked women frolicking in bathtubs" - a fragment of page 70
Copyright: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale UniversityPage 70r  Image Source >>

No one really knows the origins of the manuscript. The experts believe it is European  They believe it was written between the 15th and 17th centuries.

From a piece of paper which was once attached to the Voynich manuscript, and which is now stored in one of the boxes belonging with the Voynich manuscript holdings of the Beinecke library, it is known that the manuscript once formed part of the private library of Petrus Beckx S.J., 22nd general of the Society of Jesus.

A sample of untranslatable text from the Voynich manuscript

There is no other example of the language in which the manual is written.
It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from nineteen to twenty-eight letters, none of which bear any relationship to any English or European letter system. The text has no apparent corrections. There is evidence for two different "languages" (investigated by Currier and D'Imperio) and more than one scribe, probably indicating an ambiguous coding scheme.

The VM is written in a language of which no other example is known to exist. It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from nineteen to twenty-eight letters, none of which bear any relationship to any English or European letter system. 

Apparently, Voynich wanted to have the mysterious manuscript deciphered and provided photographic copies to a number of experts. However, despite the efforts of many well known cryptologists and scholars, the book remains unread. There are some claims of decipherment, but to date, none of these can be substantiated with a complete translation. 

View Voynich photos

curtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University.

To see all images go to
http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/

and search for "Voynich Manuscript"

Few Examples:

Click on image to enlarge. Page 70r  Image Source >>
Copyright: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

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Copyright: Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University