Voynich Manuscript: The Most Mysterious Book In The World
The Voynich manuscript was first brought to the public's attention in 1912, when antique book dealer Wilfrid Voynich found it among a collection of illuminated manuscripts in an Italian monastery. How he came across the manuscript is best told in Voynich's own words, "While examining the manuscripts, with a view to the acquisition of at least a part of the collection, my attention was especially drawn by one volume. It was such an ugly duckling compared with the other manuscripts, with their rich decorations in gold and colors, that my interest was aroused at once. I found that it was written entirely in cipher."
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What has become known as the Voynich manuscript was a lost book that has been dated to the early 1400s. It had been lost since the 1600s, when it was gifted to a Italian Jesuit scientist Athanasius Kircher by Prague doctor and scientist Johannes Marcus Marci in 1665, just before his death. It was hoped that Kircher would be able to decipher this strange manuscript. Neither he, nor any of the experts that have tried since its rediscovery almost 400 years later have been able to decode the meaning of the manuscript. Experts from a range of fields have tried their hardest to make sense of it. Cryptographers have tried to crack its code, linguists have tried to decipher its base language. Botanists have identified the plants sketched within its aged pages and attempted to cross-reference their ancient and modern names.
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Voynich initially took the manuscript to London, and then to the United States, showing it to a variety of experts. No-one could make sense of it, despite some claiming they had cracked the code, who were later disproved. In 1961 the book was bought by a New York book antiquarian H. P. Kraus for $24,500. He tried to sell it on, but found no buyers. Finally, in 1969 he donated it to Yale University, where it remains to this day, at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
The manuscript is parchment bound in a vellum cover, and give no clue to it author (or authors), or to its origins. It is heavily illustrated and filled with a text, in what appears to be a language of sorts, yet no-one has ever been able to decode it. Therefore going by the illustrations the best that anyone can say about it is that it appears to be some kind of natural encyclopaedia, grouped into sections. The sections are, a herbal section (although the plants haven't been identified), an astronomical section, the weird so-called biological section, sometimes known as the balneological or bath section, a cosmological section, a pharmaceutical section, and a recipes section. But these are all only guesses. |
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The illustrations in the "bath section" are some of the most intriguing. It contains drawings of so-called nymphs (unclothed female figures) sitting in "baths" or coming out of a convoluted arrangements of pipes or vessels. Some have suggested that the arrangements may represent a configuration of bodily organs. Several experts have, pointed out a resemblance of these illustrations in the manuscript to that of the "Balneis Puteolanis", a description of some medicinal baths written in the 13th Century. Thus the belief that the illustrations represent balneotherapy.
Ten years ago news reports appeared suggesting the document was a hoax, written 100 years after its carbon-dated vellum suggests. It might have come from Mexico. Or it could've been a philosophical experiment, or a work of art or, according to theoretical physicist Andreas Schinner, put together by an "an autistic monk, who subconsciously followed a strange mathematical algorithm in his head." Or its even been suggested that aliens wrote it. |
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In early 2014, Stephen Bax, Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Bedfordshire became the first linguist to crack the code of the Voynich manuscript using an analytical approach, to examine the manuscript letter by letter. He attempted to decode proper names. "I hit on the idea of identifying proper names in the text, following historic approaches which successfully deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs and other mystery scripts, and I then used those names to work out part of the script," explained Professor Bax. He claims that so far he has identified 10 words and 14 sounds using a methodology similar to that used by Jean-François Champollion and Thomas Young, who were the first to decode Egyptian hieroglyphics. These include "taurus", "coriander", "juniper" and "cotton". Although an expert on decoding ancient documents, Nick Pelling, blasts Bax's methodology is "just ridiculous". And Arthur Tucker, from the Delaware State University Department of Agriculture, agrees, saying that Bax's plant identifications were "naïve and mostly wrong." So it would seem that the mystery remains as to the meaning of the Voynich manuscript, still the most mysterious book in the world.
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