Voynich Manuscript - The most mysterious manuscript in the world

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The collection of the Yale University Library (USA) contains a unique rarity, the so-called Voynich Manuscript. On the Internet, many sites are devoted to this document; it is often called the most mysterious esoteric manuscript in the world.

The manuscript is named after its former owner, the American bookseller W. Voynich, the husband of the famous writer Ethel Lilian Voynich (author of the novel The Gadfly). The manuscript was purchased in 1912 from one of the Italian monasteries. It is known that in the 1580s. the owner of the manuscript was the then German emperor Rudolph II. The encrypted manuscript with numerous color illustrations was sold to Rudolph II by the famous English astrologer, geographer and researcher John Dee, who was very interested in getting the opportunity to freely leave Prague for his homeland, England. Therefore, Dee is said to have exaggerated the antiquity of the manuscript. According to the characteristics of paper and ink, it belongs to the 16th century. However, all attempts to decipher the text over the past 80 years have been in vain.

This book, measuring 22.5x16 cm, contains encoded text, in a language that has not yet been identified. It originally consisted of 116 sheets of parchment, fourteen of which are currently considered lost. Written in fluent calligraphic handwriting using a quill pen and ink in five colors: green, brown, yellow, blue and red. Some letters are similar to Greek or Latin, but are mostly hieroglyphs that have not been found in any other book.

Almost every page contains drawings, based on which the text of the manuscript can be divided into five sections: botanical, astronomical, biological, astrological and medical. The first, by the way, the largest section, includes more than a hundred illustrations of various plants and herbs, most of which are unidentifiable or even phantasmagoric. And the accompanying text is carefully divided into equal paragraphs. The second, astronomical section is similarly designed. It contains about two dozen concentric diagrams with images of the Sun, Moon and all kinds of constellations. A large number of human figures, mostly female, adorn the so-called biological section. It seems that it explains the processes of human life and the secrets of the interaction of the human soul and body. The astrological section is replete with images of magical medallions, zodiacal symbols and stars. And in the medical part, there are probably recipes for the treatment of various diseases and magic advice.

Among the illustrations are more than 400 plants that have no direct analogues in botany, as well as numerous figures of women, spirals from stars. Experienced cryptographers, in their attempts to decipher text written in unusual letters, most often acted as was customary in the 20th century - they carried out a frequency analysis of the occurrence of various symbols, choosing the appropriate language. However, neither Latin, nor many Western European languages, nor Arabic came up. The search continued. We checked Chinese, Ukrainian and Turkish … In vain!

The short words of the manuscript are reminiscent of some of the languages of Polynesia, but nothing came of it. Hypotheses about the extraterrestrial origin of the text have appeared, especially since the plants are not similar to those we know (although very carefully drawn), and spirals from stars in the XX century reminded many of the spiral arms of the Galaxy. It remained completely unclear what was said in the text of the manuscript. John Dee himself was also suspected of a hoax - he allegedly composed not just an artificial alphabet (there really was one in Dee's works, but has nothing to do with the one used in the manuscript), but also created a meaningless text on it. In general, research has reached a dead end.

History of the manuscript.

Since the alphabet of the manuscript has no visual similarity with any known writing system and the text has not yet been deciphered, the only "clue" for determining the age of the book and its origin is illustrations. In particular, the clothes and attire of women, as well as a couple of locks in the diagrams. All the details are characteristic of Europe between the years 1450 and 1520, so that the manuscript most often dates from this period. This is indirectly confirmed by other signs.

The earliest known owner of the book was Georg Baresch, an alchemist who lived in Prague in the early 17th century. Baresh, apparently, was also puzzled by the mystery of this book from his library. Upon learning that Athanasius Kircher, a renowned Jesuit scholar from the Collegio Romano, had published a Coptic dictionary and deciphered (then believed) Egyptian hieroglyphs, he copied part of the manuscript and sent this sample to Kircher in Rome (twice), asking help decipher it. Baresch's 1639 letter to Kircher, discovered in our time by Rene Zandbergen, is the earliest known reference to the Manuscript.

It remains unclear whether Kircher responded to Baresh's request, but it is known that he wanted to buy the book, but Baresh probably refused to sell it. After the death of Bares, the book passed to his friend, Johannes Marcus Marci, rector of the University of Prague. Marzi supposedly sent it off to Kircher, a longtime friend of his. His cover letter from 1666 is still attached to the Manuscript. Among other things, the letter claims that it was originally bought for 600 ducats by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, who believed the book to be the work of Roger Bacon.

The further 200 years of the fate of the Manuscript are unknown, but it is most likely that it was kept along with the rest of Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Collegium of Rome (now the Gregorian University). The book probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal State to the Italian Kingdom. The new Italian authorities decided to confiscate a large amount of property from the Church, including the library. According to research by Xavier Ceccaldi and others, many books from the university library had previously been hastily transferred to the libraries of the university staff, whose property was not confiscated, according to research by Xavier Ceccaldi. Kircher's correspondence was among these books, and apparently there was also a Voynich manuscript, as the book still bears the bookplate of Petrus Beckx, then the head of the Jesuit order and rector of the university.

The Bex library was moved to the Villa Borghese di Mondragone a Frascati - a large palace near Rome, acquired by the Jesuit society in 1866.

In 1912, the Collegium of Rome needed funds and decided to sell part of its property in the strictest confidence. Wilfried Voynich acquired 30 manuscripts, among other things, the one that now bears his name. In 1961, after Voynich's death, the book was sold by his widow Ethel Lilian Voynich (author of The Gadfly) to another bookseller, Hanse P. Kraus. Finding no buyer, Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University in 1969.

So, what do our contemporaries think of this manuscript?

For example, Sergei Gennadievich Krivenkov, a candidate of biological sciences, a specialist in the field of computer psychodiagnostics, and Klavdia Nikolaevna Nagornaya, a leading software engineer at the IHT of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation (St. apparently, formulations, in which, as is known, there are many special abbreviations, which provides short "words" in the text. Why encrypt? If these are the formulations of poisons, then the question disappears … Dee himself, for all his versatility, was not an expert on medicinal herbs, so he hardly compiled the text. But then the fundamental question is: what kind of mysterious "unearthly" plants are shown in the pictures? It turned out that they are … composite. For example, the flower of the well-known belladonna is connected to the leaf of a lesser-known, but equally poisonous plant called the clefthoof. And so - in many other cases. As you can see, aliens have nothing to do with it. Among the plants were found both rose hips and nettles. But also … ginseng.

From this it was concluded that the author of the text traveled to China. Since the vast majority of plants are still European, I traveled from Europe. Which influential European organization sent its mission to China in the second half of the 16th century? The answer from history is known - the order of the Jesuits. By the way, their closest major station to Prague was located in the 1580s. in Krakow, and John Dee, together with his partner, the alchemist Kelly, first worked also in Krakow, and then moved to Prague (where, by the way, the emperor was pressured through the papal nuncio in order to expel Dee). So the paths of a connoisseur of poisonous recipes, who first went on a mission to China, then sent back by courier (the mission itself remained in China for many years), and then worked in Krakow, could well intersect with the paths of John Dee. Competitors, in a word …

As soon as it became clear what many of the pictures of the “herbarium” meant, Sergei and Klavdia began to read the text. The assumption that it mainly consists of Latin and occasionally Greek abbreviations was confirmed. However, the main thing was to discover the unusual cipher used by the recipe writer. Here I had to recall the many differences in both the mentality of the people of that time, and the peculiarities of the then encryption systems.

In particular, at the end of the Middle Ages, they were not at all involved in creating purely digital keys to ciphers (then there were no computers), but they very often inserted numerous meaningless symbols ("blanks") into the text, which generally devalues the use of frequency analysis when decrypting a manuscript. But we managed to find out what is a "dummy" and what is not. "Black humor" was no stranger to the compiler of the formulation of poisons. So, he clearly did not want to be hanged as a poisoner, and the symbol with an element resembling a gallows is, of course, not readable. The techniques of numerology typical of that time were also used.

Ultimately, under the picture with a belladonna and a hoof, for example, it was possible to read the Latin names of these particular plants. And advice on the preparation of a deadly poison … Here, the abbreviations characteristic of recipes, and the name of the god of death in ancient mythology (Thanatos, brother of the god of sleep Hypnos) came in handy. Note that when decoding, it was possible to take into account even the very malicious nature of the alleged compiler of the recipes. So the study was carried out at the intersection of historical psychology and cryptography, and I also had to combine pictures from many reference books on medicinal plants. And the chest opened …

Of course, a complete reading of the entire text of the manuscript, and not of its individual pages, would require the efforts of a whole team of specialists. But the "salt" is not in the recipes, but in the disclosure of the historical riddle.

And the stellar spirals? It turned out that we are talking about the best time to collect herbs, and in one case - that mixing opiates with coffee, alas, is very unhealthy.

So it looks like galactic travelers are worth looking for, but not here …

And the scientist Gordon Rugg from Keely University (Great Britain) came to the conclusion that the texts of a strange book of the 16th century may well turn out to be gibberish. Is the Voynich Manuscript a sophisticated forgery?

A mysterious 16th-century book can be elegant nonsense, says the computer scientist. Rugg used Elizabethan-era espionage techniques to recreate the Voynich manuscript that has puzzled codebreakers and linguists for nearly a century.

With the help of spy technology from the time of Elizabeth the First, he was able to create a semblance of the famous Voynich manuscript, which has intrigued cryptographers and linguists for over a hundred years. “I believe a fake is a plausible explanation,” says Rugg. "Now it is the turn of those who believe in the meaningfulness of the text to give their explanation."The scientist suspects that the book was made for the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire Rudolph II by the English adventurer Edward Kelly. Other scientists believe this version is plausible, but not the only one.

“Critics of this hypothesis noted that the 'Voynich language' is too complicated for nonsense. How could a medieval swindler produce 200 pages of written text with so many subtle patterns in the structure and distribution of words? But it is possible to reproduce many of these remarkable characteristics of Voynichsky using a simple coding device that existed in the 16th century. The text generated by this method looks like "voynich", but it is pure nonsense, without any hidden meaning. This discovery does not prove that the Voynich manuscript is a hoax, but it does support the long-standing theory that the document may have been concocted by the English adventurer Edward Kelly to deceive Rudolph II."

In order to understand why it took so much time and efforts of qualified specialists to expose the manuscript, it is necessary to tell a little more about it. If we take a manuscript in an unknown language, then it will differ from a deliberate forgery by a complex organization, noticeable to the eye, and even more so during computer analysis. Without going into a detailed linguistic analysis, it can be noted that many letters in real languages are found only in certain places and in combination with certain other letters, and the same can be said about words. These and other features of the real language are indeed inherent in the Voynich manuscript. Scientifically speaking, it is characterized by low entropy, and it is almost impossible to forge a text with low entropy manually - and this is the 16th century.

No one has yet been able to show whether the language in which the text is written is cryptography, a modified version of some of the existing languages, or nonsense. Some features of the text are not found in any of the existing languages - for example, two or three repetitions of the most common words - which confirms the hypothesis of nonsense. On the other hand, the distribution of word lengths and the way letters and syllables are combined are very similar to those of real languages. Many people think that this text is too complicated to be a simple forgery - it would take some crazy alchemist many years to get this correctness.

However, as Rugg has shown, such a text is quite easy to create with the help of a cipher device invented around 1550 and called the Cardan lattice. This grid is a table of symbols, words from which are formed by moving a special stencil with holes. Empty table cells provide words of different lengths. Using the gridded syllable tables from the Voynich manuscript, Rugg compiled a language with many, though not all, of the manuscript's hallmarks. It took him only three months to create a book like a manuscript. However, in order to irrefutably prove the meaninglessness of the manuscript, a scientist needs to use such a technique to recreate a sufficiently large excerpt from it. Rugg hopes to achieve this through the manipulation of lattices and tables.

It seems that attempts to decipher the text fail because the author was aware of the peculiarities of the encodings and composed the book in such a way that the text looked plausible, but did not lend itself to analysis. As noted by NTR. Ru, the text contains at least the appearance of cross-references that cryptographers usually look for. The letters are written so variedly that scientists cannot establish how large the alphabet with which the text is written, and since all the people depicted in the book are naked, this makes it difficult to date the text by clothing.

In 1919, a reproduction of the Voynich manuscript came to the professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, Romain Newbould. Newbould, who recently turned 54, had broad interests, many with an element of mystery. In the hieroglyphs of the text of the manuscript, Newbould noticed microscopic signs of shorthand writing and proceeded to decipher them, translating them into letters of the Latin alphabet. The result is a secondary text using 17 different letters. Then Newbould doubled all letters in words except the first and the last, and subjected to a special replacement words containing one of the letters "a", "c", "m", "n", "o", "q", "t", "U". In the resulting text, Newbould replaced pairs of letters with one letter, following a rule he never made public.

In April 1921, Newbould announced the preliminary results of his work to an academic audience. These results characterized Roger Bacon as the greatest scientist of all time. According to Newbould, Bacon actually created a microscope with a telescope and with their help made many discoveries that anticipated the findings of scientists in the 20th century. Other statements from Newbold's publications deal with the "mystery of new stars."

“If the Voynich manuscript really contains the secrets of new stars and quasars, it is better for it to remain undeciphered, because the secret of an energy source that surpasses a hydrogen bomb and is so simple to use that a person of the 13th century could figure it out is precisely the secret which our civilization does not need to solve, - wrote the physicist Jacques Bergier about this. “We somehow survived, and even then only because we managed to contain the tests of the hydrogen bomb. If there is an opportunity to release even more energy, it is better for us not to know it or not yet. Otherwise, our planet will very soon disappear in a blinding supernova explosion."

Newbould's report caused a sensation. Many scientists, although they refused to express an opinion about the validity of the methods used by him for transforming the text of the manuscript, considering themselves incompetent in cryptanalysis, readily agreed with the results obtained. One famous physiologist even stated that some of the drawings in the manuscript probably depicted epithelial cells enlarged 75 times. The general public was fascinated. Whole Sunday supplements to reputable newspapers were dedicated to this event. One poor woman walked hundreds of kilometers to ask Newbould, using Bacon's formulas, to drive out the evil tempting spirits that possessed her.

There were also objections. Many did not understand Newbold's method: people were unable to use his method to compose new messages. After all, it is quite obvious that a cryptographic system must work in both directions. If you own a cipher, you can not only decrypt messages encrypted with it, but also encrypt new text. Newbold is becoming more and more obscure, less and less accessible. He died in 1926. His friend and colleague Roland Grubb Kent published his work in 1928 as The Roger Bacon Code. American and English historians who studied the Middle Ages were more than restrained in their attitude to it.

However, people have revealed much deeper secrets. Why hasn't anyone figured out this one?

According to one Manly, the reason is that “attempts at decryption so far have been made on the basis of false assumptions. We actually do not know when and where the manuscript was written, what language is the basis of encryption. When the correct hypotheses are worked out, the cipher, perhaps, will appear simple and easy ….

It is interesting, on the basis of which of the above version, they built the research methodology in the American National Security Agency. After all, even their specialists became interested in the problem of the mysterious book and in the early 80s worked on deciphering it. Frankly speaking, it is hard to believe that such a serious organization was engaged in the book purely out of sports interest. Perhaps they wanted to use the manuscript to develop one of the modern encryption algorithms for which this secret department is so famous. However, their efforts were also unsuccessful.

It remains to state the fact that in our era of global information and computer technologies, the medieval puzzle remains unsolved. And it is not known if scientists will ever be able to fill this gap and read the results of many years of work of one of the forerunners of modern science.

Now this one-of-a-kind creation is kept in the library of rare and rare books at Yale University and is estimated at $ 160,000. The manuscript is not given to anyone in the hands: everyone who wants to try their hand at deciphering can download high quality photocopies from the university website.

Download the Voynich Manuscript in full