Voynich manuscript
Encyclopedia
The Voynich manuscript, described as "the world's most mysterious manuscript", is a work which dates to the early 15th century, possibly from northern Italy. It is named after the book dealer Wilfrid Voynich
, who purchased it in 1912.
Some pages are missing, but the current version comprises about 240 vellum
pages, most with illustrations. Much of the manuscript resembles a herbal
of the time period, seeming to present illustrations and information about plants and their possible uses for medical purposes. However, most of the plants do not match known species, and the manuscript's script
and language
remain unknown and unreadable. Possibly some form of encrypted ciphertext
, the Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers
from both World War I
and World War II
. As yet, it has defied all decipherment attempts, becoming a cause célèbre
of historical cryptology
. The mystery surrounding it has excited the popular imagination, making the manuscript a subject of both fanciful theories and novels.
The Voynich manuscript was donated to Yale University
's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
in 1969: it is formally referred to as "Beinecke MS 408". In 2004 the entire manuscript was digitized and made available online .
s, some with unusual fold-out shapes, are numbered from 1 to 116, yielding a total of 240 vellum pages (the exact number of pages depends on how the fold-outs are counted). From the various numbering gaps, it seems likely that the manuscript originally had at least 272 pages, some of which were already missing when Voynich acquired the manuscript in 1912. A quill pen
was used for the text and figure outlines, and colored paint was applied (somewhat crudely) to the figures, possibly at a later date. There is strong evidence that many of the book's bifolios were reordered at various points in its history, and that the original page order may well have been quite different from what we see today.
The text was clearly written from left to right, with a slightly ragged right margin. Longer sections are broken into paragraphs, sometimes with star- or flower-like "bullets
" in the left margin. There is no obvious punctuation
, and no indications of any errors or corrections made at any place in the document. The ductus flows smoothly, giving the impression that the symbols were not enciphered
, as there is no delay between characters as would normally be expected in written encoded text. Whoever the scribe was was practiced in writing the script. However, such writing fluency could also be achieved by copying prepared coded text from some other source, such as a wax tablet or separate manuscript.
The text consists of over 170,000 discrete glyph
s, usually separated from each other by narrow gaps. Most of the glyphs are written with one or two simple pen strokes. While there is some dispute as to whether certain glyphs are distinct or not, an alphabet
with 20–30 glyphs would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen rarer characters that occur only once or twice each. Various transcription alphabets have been created, to equate the Voynich glyphs with Latin characters in order to help with cryptanalysis, such as the European Voynich Alphabet
. The first major one was created by cryptographer William F. Friedman
in the 1940s, where each line of the manuscript was transcribed to an IBM punch card
to make it machine-readable.
Wider gaps divide the text into about 35,000 "words" of varying length. These seem to follow phonological or orthographic
laws of some sort, e.g., certain characters must appear in each word (like English vowels), some characters never follow others, some may be doubled or tripled but others may not, etc.
Statistical analysis
of the text reveals patterns similar to those of natural language
s. For instance, the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English
or Latin
texts. Some words occur only in certain sections, or in only a few pages; others occur throughout the manuscript. There are very few repetitions among the thousand or so "labels" attached to the illustrations. In the herbal section, the first word on each page occurs only on that page and may possibly be the name of the plant.
On the other hand, the Voynich manuscript's "language" is quite unlike European languages in several aspects. There are practically no words comprising more than ten glyphs, yet there are also few one- or two-letter words. The distribution of letters within words is also rather peculiar: some characters occur only at the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle section. While Semitic alphabets have many letters that are written differently depending on whether they occur at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a word, letters of the Latin
, Cyrillic
, and Greek
alphabets are generally written the same way regardless of their position within a word (with the Greek letter sigma
and the medieval scribal 's' being notable exceptions).
The text seems to be more repetitive than typical European languages; there are instances where the same common word appears up to three times in a row. Words that differ by only one letter also repeat with unusual frequency, causing single-substitution alphabet decipherings to yield babble-like text. Elizebeth Friedman
in 1962 described such attempts as "doomed to utter frustration".
There are only a few words in the manuscript written in a seemingly Latin script. On the last page, there are four lines of writing written in rather distorted Latin letters, except for two words in the main script. The lettering resembles European alphabets of the late 14th and 15th centuries, but the words do not seem to make sense in any language. Also, a series of diagrams in the "astronomical" section has the names of ten of the months (from March to December) written in Latin script, with spelling suggestive of the medieval languages of France, northwest Italy or the Iberian Peninsula
. However, it is not known whether these bits of Latin script were part of the original text or were added later.
The illustrations of the manuscript shed little light on the precise nature of its text but imply that the book consists of six "sections", with different styles and subject matter. Except for the last section, which contains only text, almost every page contains at least one illustration. Following are the sections and their conventional names:
Herbal: Each page displays one plant (sometimes two) and a few paragraphs of text—a format typical of European herbal
s of the time. Some parts of these drawings are larger and cleaner copies of sketches seen in the "pharmaceutical" section. None of the plants depicted are unambiguously identifiable.
Astronomical: Contains circular diagrams, some of them with suns, moons, and stars, suggestive of astronomy
or astrology
. One series of 12 diagrams depicts conventional symbols for the zodiac
al constellations (two fish for Pisces
, a bull for Taurus
, a hunter with crossbow for Sagittarius
, etc.). Each of these has 30 female figures arranged in two or more concentric bands. Most of the females are at least partly naked, and each holds what appears to be a labeled star or is shown with the star attached by what could be a tether or cord of some kind to either arm. The last two pages of this section (Aquarius
and Capricornus
, roughly January and February) were lost, while Aries
and Taurus are split into four paired diagrams with 15 women and 15 stars each. Some of these diagrams are on fold-out pages.
Biological: A dense continuous text interspersed with figures, mostly showing small naked women, some wearing crowns, bathing in pools or tubs connected by an elaborate network of pipes, some of them strongly reminiscent of body organ
s.
Cosmological: More circular diagrams, but of an obscure nature. This section also has foldouts; one of them spans six pages and contains a map or diagram, with nine "islands" or "rosettes" connected by "causeway
s" and containing castles, as well as what may possibly be a volcano.
Pharmaceutical: Many labeled drawings of isolated plant parts (roots, leaves, etc.); objects resembling apothecary
jars, ranging in style from the mundane to the fantastical; and a few text paragraphs.
Recipes: Many short paragraphs, each marked with a flower- or star-like "bullet".
The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript is that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia
or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine
. However, the puzzling details of illustrations have fueled many theories about the book's origins, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended.
The first section of the book is almost certainly herbal
, but attempts to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with the stylized drawings of contemporary herbals, have largely failed. Few of the plant drawings (such as a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern
) can be identified with reasonable certainty. Those herbal pictures that match pharmacological sketches appear to be clean copies of these, except that missing parts were completed with improbable-looking details. In fact, many of the plant drawings in the herbal section seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third.
Brumbaugh believed that one illustration depicted a New World sunflower, which would help date the manuscript and open up intriguing possibilities for its origin. However, the resemblance is slight, especially when compared to the original wild species; and, since the scale of the drawing is not known, the plant could be many other members of the same family
, which includes the common daisy, chamomile
, and many other species from all over the world.
The basins and tubes in the "biological" section are sometimes interpreted as implying a connection to alchemy
, yet bear little obvious resemblance to the alchemical equipment of the period.
Astrological considerations frequently played a prominent role in herb gathering, bloodletting
and other medical procedures common during the likeliest dates of the manuscript. However, apart from the obvious Zodiac
symbols, and one diagram possibly showing the classical planets, no one has been able to interpret the illustrations within known astrological traditions (European or otherwise).
A circular drawing in the "astronomical" section depicts an irregularly shaped object with four curved arms, which, in 1928, antiquarian William Romaine Newbold interpreted as a picture of a galaxy
, which could only be obtained with a telescope
. Similarly, he interpreted other drawings as cells
seen through a microscope
. However, Newbold's analysis has since been dismissed as overly speculative.
In 2009, University of Arizona
researchers performed C14 dating on the manuscript's vellum, which they assert (with 95% confidence) was made between 1404 and 1438. In addition, it has been reported that the McCrone Research Institute
in Chicago
found that much of the ink was added not long afterwards, though this latter result has yet to be confirmed properly.
Based on a 1666 letter that accompanied the manuscript when it was being sent from Johannes Marcus
to Athanasius Kircher
, the book once belonged to Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612), who paid 600 gold ducats (approximately USD $80,000 in 2011) for it. The book was then given or loaned to Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz (died 1622), the head of Rudolf's botanical gardens. With modern ultraviolet lighting methods, Tepenecz's name can be seen faintly on the first page of the manuscript, and the handwriting is consistent with Tepenecz's name in other books that he owned.
The next confirmed owner is Georg Baresch, an obscure alchemist
in Prague
. Baresch apparently was just as puzzled as we are today about this "Sphynx
" that had been "taking up space uselessly in his library" for many years. On learning that Athanasius Kircher
, a Jesuit
scholar from the Collegio Romano, had published a Coptic
(Egyptian
) dictionary and "deciphered" the Egyptian hieroglyphs, Baresch sent a sample copy of the script to Kircher in Rome (twice), asking for clues. His 1639 letter to Kircher is the earliest confirmed mention of the manuscript that has been found so far.
It is not known whether Kircher answered the request, but apparently, he was interested enough to try to acquire the book, which Baresch refused to yield. Upon Baresch's death, the manuscript passed to his friend Jan Marek Marci
(1595–1667) (Johannes Marcus Marci), then rector
of Charles University in Prague, who a few years later sent the book to Kircher, his longtime friend and correspondent. Marci's 1666 cover letter (written in Latin) was still with the manuscript when Voynich purchased it:
There are no records of the book for the next 200 years, but in all likelihood it was stored with the rest of Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Collegio Romano (now the Pontifical Gregorian University
). It probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy
captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal States
. The new Italian government decided to confiscate many properties of the Church, including the library of the Collegio. According to investigations by Xavier Ceccaldi and others, just before this happened, many books of the University's library were hastily transferred to the personal libraries of its faculty, which were exempt from confiscation. Kircher's correspondence was among those books—and so apparently was the Voynich manuscript, as it still bears the ex libris
of Petrus Beckx, head of the Jesuit order and the University's Rector at the time.
Beckx's "private" library was moved to the Villa Mondragone
, Frascati
, a large country palace near Rome that had been bought by the Society of Jesus
in 1866 and housed the headquarters of the Jesuits' Ghislieri College
.
Around 1912, the Collegio Romano was short of money and decided to discreetly sell some of its holdings. Wilfrid Voynich acquired 30 manuscripts, among them the manuscript that now bears his name. In 1930, after his death, the manuscript was inherited by his widow, Ethel Lilian Voynich
(known as the author of the novel The Gadfly
and daughter of famous mathematician George Boole
). She died in 1960 and left the manuscript to her close friend, Miss Anne Nill. In 1961, Nill sold the book to another antique book dealer, Hans P. Kraus
. Unable to find a buyer, Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University in 1969.
Many people have been proposed as possible authors of the Voynich manuscript.
Marci's 1666 cover letter to Kircher says that, according to his late friend Raphael Mnishovsky
, the book had once been bought by Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor
and King of Bohemia
(1552–1612), for 600 ducat
s (66.42 troy ounce
actual gold weight
, around US$80,831.20 as of 2011). According to the letter, Mnishovsky (but not necessarily Rudolf) speculated that the author was the Franciscan
friar and polymath
Roger Bacon
(1214–94).
Even though Marci said that he was "suspending his judgment" about this claim, it was taken quite seriously by Wilfrid Voynich, who did his best to confirm it. His conviction strongly influenced most deciphering attempts for the next 80 years. Mnishovsky died in 1644, and the deal must have occurred before Rudolf's abdication in 1611—at least 55 years before Marci's letter.
The assumption that Roger Bacon was the author led Voynich to conclude that the person who sold the manuscript to Rudolf could only have been John Dee
(1527–1608), a mathematician and astrologer at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, known to have owned a large collection of Bacon's manuscripts. This theory is also conveyed by Voynich manuscript scholar Gordon Rugg
. Dee and his scrier
(mediumic assistant) Edward Kelley
lived in Bohemia for several years, where they had hoped to sell their services to the emperor. However, Dee's meticulously kept diaries do not mention that sale and make it seem quite unlikely. If the Voynich manuscript author is not Bacon, the connection to Dee may just disappear. It is possible that Dee himself may have written it and spread the rumour that it was originally a work of Bacon's in the hopes of later selling it.
Dee's companion in Prague, Edward Kelley
, was a self-styled alchemist who claimed to be able to turn copper into gold by means of a secret powder that he had dug out of a Bishop's tomb in Wales
. As Dee's scrier, he claimed to be able to invoke angels through a shewstone and had long conversations with them—which Dee dutifully noted down. The angel's language was called Enochian
, after Enoch
, the Biblical father of Methuselah
; according to legend, he had been taken on a tour of heaven by angels and had later written a book
about what he saw there. Several people have suggested that, Kelley could have fabricated the Voynich manuscript to swindle the emperor (who was already paying Kelley for his supposed alchemical expertise).
(1575–1622). He was a specialist in herbal medicine, Rudolph II's personal physician, and curator of his botanical gardens. Voynich, and many other people after him, concluded from this "signature" that Jacobus owned the Voynich manuscript before Baresch and saw in that a confirmation of Mnishovsky's story. Others have suggested that Jacobus himself could be the author.
However, that writing does not match Jacobus's signature, as found in a document located by Jan Hurych in 2003. It is possible that the writing on page f1r was added by a later owner or librarian and is only this person's guess as to the book's author. (In the Jesuit history books that were available to Kircher, Jesuit-educated Jacobus is the only alchemist or doctor from Rudolf's court who deserves a full-page entry, while, for example, Tycho Brahe
is barely mentioned.) Moreover, the chemicals applied by Voynich have so degraded the vellum that hardly a trace of the signature can be seen today; thus, there is also the suspicion that the signature was fabricated by Voynich in order to strengthen the Roger Bacon theory.
Jan Marek Marci
met Kircher when he led a delegation from Charles University to Rome in 1638, and over the next 27 years, the two scholars exchanged many letters on a variety of scientific subjects. Marci's trip was part of a continuing struggle by the secularist
side of the university to maintain their independence from the Jesuits, who ran the rival Clementinum
college in Prague. In spite of those efforts, the two universities were merged in 1654, under Jesuit control. It has therefore been speculated that political animosity against the Jesuits led Marci to fabricate Baresch's letters, and later the Voynich manuscript, in an attempt to expose and discredit their "star" Kircher.
Marci's personality and knowledge appear to have been adequate for this task; and Kircher was an easy target. Indeed, Baresch's letter bears some resemblance to a hoax that orientalist Andreas Mueller once played on Kircher. Mueller concocted an unintelligible manuscript and sent it to Kircher with a note explaining that it had come from Egypt. He asked Kircher for a translation, and Kircher, reportedly, produced one at once. The only proofs of Georg Baresch's existence are three letters sent to Kircher: one by Baresch (1639), and two by Marci (about a year later). It is also curious that the correspondence between Marci and Kircher ends in 1666, precisely with the Voynich manuscript "cover letter".
However, Marci's secret grudge against the Jesuits is pure conjecture: a faithful Catholic, he himself had studied to become a Jesuit, and, shortly before his death in 1667, he was granted honorary membership in their Order.
Raphael Mnishovsky
, the friend of Marci who was the reputed source of Bacon's story, was himself a cryptographer (among many other things) and apparently invented a cipher that he claimed was uncrackable (ca. 1618). This has led to the theory that he produced the Voynich manuscript as a practical demonstration of his cipher and made poor Baresch his unwitting test subject. After Kircher published his book on Coptic, Mnishovsky (so the theory goes) may have thought that stumping him would be a much better trophy than stumping Baresch and convinced the alchemist to ask the Jesuit's help. He would have invented the Roger Bacon story to motivate Baresch. Indeed, the disclaimer in the Voynich manuscript cover letter could mean that Marci suspected a lie. However, there is no definite evidence for this theory.
Leonell C. Strong, a cancer research scientist and amateur cryptographer, believed that the solution to the Voynich manuscript was a "peculiar double system of arithmetical progressions of a multiple alphabet". Strong claimed that the plaintext
revealed the Voynich manuscript to be written by the 16th-century English author Anthony Ascham, whose works include A Little Herbal, published in 1550. Although the Voynich manuscript does contain sections resembling A Little Herbal, the main argument against this theory is that it is unknown where Ascham would have obtained such literary and cryptographic knowledge.
In his 2006 book, Nick Pelling
proposed that the Voynich manuscript was written by Antonio Averlino (also known as "Filarete"), an Italian Renaissance architect. From a 1465 letter by Francesco Filelfo
, it is known that Averlino intended travelling to Constantinople
: yet not long before in September 1461, the Venetian border guards in Crete had sent Matteo di Andrea de' Pasti
back to Venice in chains for carrying a copy of Roberto Valturio
's De Re Militari on a similar journey East on behalf of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. Averlino (according to Pelling's hypothesis) therefore constructed the Voynich manuscript as a way of carrying his own books of engineering and military secrets with him to the Ottoman Empire
. Pelling, largely following John Tiltman's analysis, conjectures that the manuscript was enciphered using a broad set of simple cryptographic and steganographic
components appropriate to the mid-15th century: and that these were consciously arranged in a complicated system so as to produce ciphertext resembling a medieval document in an unknown language, complete with apparent consonant-vowel pairing of letters and fake page references. He also concludes that most of the marginalia were added by the original author, but that when later owners tried to physically restore the badly faded text, their incorrect guesses at what these had originally read caused them to become unreadable.
) and its lack of historical reference support the idea that the manuscript is a hoax. In other words, if no one is able to extract meaning from the book, perhaps this is because the document contains no meaningful content in the first place.
Between 1976 and 1978, Italian artist Luigi Serafini
proved that it is not hard to create a book like this, and created the Codex Seraphinianus
, which also contains pictures of imaginary plants, and a language that has been studied by linguists for decades.
The argument for authenticity, on the other hand, is that the manuscript appears too sophisticated to be a hoax. While hoaxes of the period tended to be quite crude, the Voynich manuscript exhibits many subtle characteristics which show up only after careful statistical analysis. These fine touches require much more work than would have been necessary for a simple forgery, and some of the complexities are only visible with modern tools. The question then arises: why would the author employ such a complex and laborious forging algorithm in the creation of a simplistic hoax, if no one in the expected audience (that is, the creator's contemporaries) could tell the difference?
Various hoax theories have been proposed over time:
In 2003, computer scientist Gordon Rugg
showed that text with characteristics similar to the Voynich manuscript could have been produced using a table of word prefixes, stems, and suffixes, which would have been selected and combined by means of a perforated paper overlay. The latter device, known as a Cardan grille
, was invented around 1550 as an encryption tool, more than 100 years after the estimated creation date of the Voynich manuscript. Some maintain that the similarity between the pseudo-texts generated in Gordon Rugg's experiments and the Voynich manuscript is superficial, and the grille method could be used to emulate any language to a certain degree.
In April 2007, a study by Austrian researcher Andreas Schinner published in Cryptologia
supported the hoax hypothesis. Schinner showed that the statistical properties of the manuscript's text were more consistent with meaningless gibberish produced using a quasi-stochastic
method such as the one described by Rugg, than with Latin and medieval German texts. However, this comparison is valid only for plain text in European languages, or text enciphered with a simple substitution cipher
, while analysis suggests a much more complex enciphering method and (or) non-European origin of the underlying text of the Voynich manuscript.
of some sort—an algorithm
that operated on individual letters.
This has been the working hypothesis for most deciphering attempts in the twentieth century, including an informal team of NSA cryptographers led by William F. Friedman
in the early 1950s. Simple monoalphabetic cipher
s can be excluded, because they are very easy to crack; so deciphering efforts have generally focused on polyalphabetic cipher
s, invented by Alberti
in the 1460s. This class includes the popular Vigenère cipher
, which could have been strengthened by the use of nulls and/or equivalent symbols, letter rearrangement, false word breaks and so on. Some people assumed that vowels had been deleted before encryption. There have been several claims of deciphering along these lines, but none has been widely accepted—chiefly because the proposed deciphering algorithms depended on so many guesses by the user that they could extract a meaningful text from any random string of symbols.
The main argument for this theory is that the use of a strange alphabet by a European author can hardly be explained except as an attempt to hide information. Indeed, Roger Bacon knew about ciphers, and the estimated date for the manuscript roughly coincides with the birth of cryptography
as a systematic discipline. Against this theory is the observation that a polyalphabetic cipher would normally destroy the "natural" statistical features that are seen in the Voynich manuscript. Also, although polyalphabetic ciphers were invented about 1467, variants only became popular in the 16th century, somewhat too late for the estimated date of the Voynich manuscript.
According to the "codebook cipher" theory, the Voynich manuscript "words" would actually be code
s to be looked up in a "dictionary" or codebook
. The main evidence for this theory is that the internal structure and length distribution of those words are similar to those of Roman numerals—which, at the time, would be a natural choice for the codes. However, book-based ciphers are viable only for short messages, because they are very cumbersome to write and to read.
. His singular hypothesis held that the visible text is meaningless itself, but that each apparent "letter" is in fact constructed of a series of tiny markings only discernible under magnification
. These markings were supposed to be based on ancient Greek
shorthand
, forming a second level of script that held the real content of the writing. Newbold claimed to have used this knowledge to work out entire paragraphs proving the authorship of Bacon and recording his use of a compound microscope four hundred years before Leeuwenhoek. However, John Matthews Manly of the University of Chicago
pointed out serious flaws in this theory. Each shorthand character was assumed to have multiple interpretations, with no reliable way to determine which was intended for any given case. Newbold's method also required rearranging letters at will until intelligible Latin was produced. These factors alone ensure the system enough flexibility that nearly anything at all could be discerned from the microscopic
markings. Although evidence of micrography
using the Hebrew language
can be traced as far back as the ninth century, it is nowhere near as compact or complex as the shapes Newbold made out. Close study of the manuscript revealed the markings to be artifacts caused by the way ink cracks as it dries on rough vellum. Perceiving significance in these artifacts can be attributed to pareidolia
. Thanks to Manly's thorough refutation, the micrography theory is now generally disregarded.
, is very old, and was described by Johannes Trithemius
in 1499. Though it has been suggested that the plain text was to be extracted by a Cardan grille
of some sort, this seems somewhat unlikely because the words and letters are not arranged on anything like a regular grid. Still, steganographic claims are hard to prove or disprove, since stegotexts can be arbitrarily hard to find. An argument against steganography is that having a cipher-like cover text highlights the very existence of the secret message, which would be self-defeating: yet because the cover text no less resembles an unknown natural language, this argument is not hugely persuasive.
It has been suggested that the meaningful text could be encoded in the length or shape of certain pen strokes. There are indeed examples of steganography from about that time that use letter shape (italic
vs. upright) to hide information. However, when examined at high magnification, the Voynich manuscript pen strokes seem quite natural, and substantially affected by the uneven surface of the vellum.
once suggested that the Voynich manuscript text could be some exotic natural language, written in the plain
with an invented alphabet. The word structure is similar to that of many language families of East and Central Asia, mainly Sino-Tibetan
(Chinese
, Tibetan
, and Burmese
), Austroasiatic (Vietnamese
, Khmer
, etc.) and possibly Tai
(Thai
, Lao
, etc.). In many of these languages, the "words" have only one syllable
; and syllables have a rather rich structure, including tonal patterns.
This theory has some historical plausibility. While those languages generally had native scripts, these were notoriously difficult for Western visitors. This difficulty motivated the invention of several phonetic scripts, mostly with Latin letters
but sometimes with invented alphabets. Although the known examples are much later than the Voynich manuscript, history records hundreds of explorers and missionaries who could have done it—even before Marco Polo
's thirteenth century journey, but especially after Vasco da Gama
sailed the sea route to the Orient in 1499. The Voynich manuscript author could also be a native of East Asia who lived in Europe, or who was educated at a European mission.
The main argument for this theory is that it is consistent with all statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript text which have been tested so far, including doubled and tripled words (which have been found to occur in Chinese and Vietnamese texts at roughly the same frequency as in the Voynich manuscript). It also explains the apparent lack of numerals and Western syntactic features (such as article
s and copulas), and the general inscrutability of the illustrations. Another possible hint is two large red symbols on the first page, which have been compared to a Chinese-style book title, inverted and badly copied. Also, the apparent division of the year into 360 degrees (rather than 365 days), in groups of 15 and starting with Pisces, are features of the Chinese agricultural calendar
(jie qi). The main argument against the theory is the fact that no one (including scholars at the Chinese Academy of Sciences
in Beijing
) has been able to find any clear examples of Asian symbolism or Asian science in the illustrations.
In 1976, James Child of the National Security Agency
proposed that the manuscript was written in a "hitherto unknown North Germanic dialect".
In late 2003, Zbigniew Banasik of Poland proposed that the manuscript is plaintext written in the Manchu language
and gave a proposed incomplete translation of the first page of the manuscript.
, channeling
or outsider art
.
If this is true, then the author felt compelled to write large amounts of text in a manner which somehow resembles stream of consciousness, either due to voices heard, or due to his own urge. While in glossolalia this often takes place in an invented language (usually made up of fragments of the author's own language), invented scripts for this purpose are rare. Kennedy and Churchill use Hildegard von Bingen's works to point out similarities between the illustrations she drew when she was suffering from severe bouts of migraine
—which can induce a trance-like state prone to glossolalia—and the Voynich manuscript. Prominent features found in both are abundant "streams of stars", and the repetitive nature of the "nymphs" in the biological section.
The theory is virtually impossible to prove or disprove, short of deciphering the text; Kennedy and Churchill are themselves not convinced of the hypothesis, but consider it plausible. (In the culminating chapter of their work, Kennedy states his belief that it is a hoax or forgery, whilst Churchill, acknowledging the possibility of a synthetic forgotten language, as advanced by Friedman, or forgery to be preeminent theories, concludes that if the manuscript is genuine, mental illness or delusion seems to have affected the author).
transcription of a "polyglot oral tongue". This he defined as "a literary language which would be understandable to people who did not understand Latin and to whom this language could be read". His proposed decryption has three Voynich letters making a syllable, to produce a series of syllables that form a mixture of Middle Dutch
with many borrowed Old French
and Old High German
words.
According to Levitov, the rite of Endura was the assisted suicide ritual for people already believed to be near death, famously associated with the Cathar
faith (although the reality of this ritual is also in question). He explains that the chimerical plants are not meant to represent any species of flora, but are secret symbols of the faith. The women in the basins with elaborate plumbing represent the suicide ritual itself, which he believed involved venesection: the cutting of a vein to allow the blood to drain into a warm bath. The constellations with no celestial analogue are representative of the stars in Isis's mantle.
This theory is questioned on several grounds. First, the Cathar
faith is widely understood to have been a Christian gnosticism
, and not in any way associated with Isis
. Second, this theory places the book's origins in the twelfth or thirteenth century, which is several centuries earlier than most experts believe based on internal evidence. Third, the Endura ritual involved fasting, not venesection. Levitov offered no evidence beyond his translation for this theory.
Jim Child, a linguist of Indo-European languages, asserts that he has identified in the manuscript a "skeletal syntax several elements of which are reminiscent of certain Germanic languages", while the content itself is expressed using "a great deal of obscurity".
to conjecture that the text could be a constructed language
. In 1950, Friedman asked the British army officer John Tiltman to analyze a few pages of the text, but Tiltman did not share this conclusion. In a paper in 1967, General Tiltman said, "After reading my report, Mr. Friedman disclosed to me his belief that the basis of the script was a very primitive form of synthetic universal language such as was developed in the form of a philosophical classification of ideas by Bishop Wilkins
in 1667 and Dalgarno a little later. It was clear that the productions of these two men were much too systematic, and anything of the kind would have been almost instantly recognisable. My analysis seemed to me to reveal a cumbersome mixture of different kinds of substitution".
The concept of an artificial language is quite old, as attested by John Wilkins
's Philosophical Language
(1668), but still postdates the generally accepted origin of the Voynich manuscript by two centuries. In most known examples, categories are subdivided by adding suffix
es; as a consequence, a text in a particular subject would have many words with similar prefixes—for example, all plant names would begin with the similar letters, and likewise for all diseases, etc. This feature could then explain the repetitious nature of the Voynich text. However, no one has been able yet to assign a plausible meaning to any prefix or suffix in the Voynich manuscript.
edition was published in 2005, Le Code Voynich: the whole manuscript published with a short presentation in French
. Because of heavy image cropping this does not quite constitute a proper facsimile edition.
The manuscript has also inspired several works of fiction.
Wilfrid Michael Voynich
Wilfrid Michael Voynich , born Michał Habdank-Wojnicz, was a Polish revolutionary, British and American antiquarian and bibliophile, and the eponym of the Voynich manuscript.- Biography :...
, who purchased it in 1912.
Some pages are missing, but the current version comprises about 240 vellum
Vellum
Vellum is mammal skin prepared for writing or printing on, to produce single pages, scrolls, codices or books. It is generally smooth and durable, although there are great variations depending on preparation, the quality of the skin and the type of animal used...
pages, most with illustrations. Much of the manuscript resembles a herbal
Herbal
AThe use of a or an depends on whether or not herbal is pronounced with a silent h. herbal is "a collection of descriptions of plants put together for medicinal purposes." Expressed more elaborately — it is a book containing the names and descriptions of plants, usually with information on their...
of the time period, seeming to present illustrations and information about plants and their possible uses for medical purposes. However, most of the plants do not match known species, and the manuscript's script
Writing system
A writing system is a symbolic system used to represent elements or statements expressible in language.-General properties:Writing systems are distinguished from other possible symbolic communication systems in that the reader must usually understand something of the associated spoken language to...
and language
Language
Language may refer either to the specifically human capacity for acquiring and using complex systems of communication, or to a specific instance of such a system of complex communication...
remain unknown and unreadable. Possibly some form of encrypted ciphertext
Ciphertext
In cryptography, ciphertext is the result of encryption performed on plaintext using an algorithm, called a cipher. Ciphertext is also known as encrypted or encoded information because it contains a form of the original plaintext that is unreadable by a human or computer without the proper cipher...
, the Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers
Cryptanalysis
Cryptanalysis is the study of methods for obtaining the meaning of encrypted information, without access to the secret information that is normally required to do so. Typically, this involves knowing how the system works and finding a secret key...
from both World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
and World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
. As yet, it has defied all decipherment attempts, becoming a cause célèbre
Cause célèbre
A is an issue or incident arousing widespread controversy, outside campaigning and heated public debate. The term is particularly used in connection with celebrated legal cases. It is a French phrase in common English use...
of historical cryptology
History of cryptography
The history of cryptography begins thousands of years ago. Until recent decades, it has been the story of what might be called classic cryptography — that is, of methods of encryption that use pen and paper, or perhaps simple mechanical aids...
. The mystery surrounding it has excited the popular imagination, making the manuscript a subject of both fanciful theories and novels.
The Voynich manuscript was donated to Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library was a 1963 gift of the Beinecke family. The building was designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft of the firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and is the largest building in the world reserved exclusively for the preservation of rare books...
in 1969: it is formally referred to as "Beinecke MS 408". In 2004 the entire manuscript was digitized and made available online .
Text
The manuscript's quires are numbered from 1 to 20. Its folioFolio
Folio may refer to:* Folio , a book size* A particular edition of a book printed on folio pages, such as the First Folio of William Shakespeare's plays* A leaf of a book: see Recto and verso* Folio , a sans-serif typeface...
s, some with unusual fold-out shapes, are numbered from 1 to 116, yielding a total of 240 vellum pages (the exact number of pages depends on how the fold-outs are counted). From the various numbering gaps, it seems likely that the manuscript originally had at least 272 pages, some of which were already missing when Voynich acquired the manuscript in 1912. A quill pen
Quill
A quill pen is a writing implement made from a flight feather of a large bird. Quills were used for writing with ink before the invention of the dip pen, metal-nibbed pens, the fountain pen, and, eventually, the ballpoint pen...
was used for the text and figure outlines, and colored paint was applied (somewhat crudely) to the figures, possibly at a later date. There is strong evidence that many of the book's bifolios were reordered at various points in its history, and that the original page order may well have been quite different from what we see today.
The text was clearly written from left to right, with a slightly ragged right margin. Longer sections are broken into paragraphs, sometimes with star- or flower-like "bullets
Bullet (typography)
In typography, a bullet is a typographical symbol or glyph used to introduce items in a list. For example:*Item 1*Item 2*Item 3...
" in the left margin. There is no obvious punctuation
Punctuation
Punctuation marks are symbols that indicate the structure and organization of written language, as well as intonation and pauses to be observed when reading aloud.In written English, punctuation is vital to disambiguate the meaning of sentences...
, and no indications of any errors or corrections made at any place in the document. The ductus flows smoothly, giving the impression that the symbols were not enciphered
Cipher
In cryptography, a cipher is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption — a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is encipherment. In non-technical usage, a “cipher” is the same thing as a “code”; however, the concepts...
, as there is no delay between characters as would normally be expected in written encoded text. Whoever the scribe was was practiced in writing the script. However, such writing fluency could also be achieved by copying prepared coded text from some other source, such as a wax tablet or separate manuscript.
The text consists of over 170,000 discrete glyph
Glyph
A glyph is an element of writing: an individual mark on a written medium that contributes to the meaning of what is written. A glyph is made up of one or more graphemes....
s, usually separated from each other by narrow gaps. Most of the glyphs are written with one or two simple pen strokes. While there is some dispute as to whether certain glyphs are distinct or not, an alphabet
Alphabet
An alphabet is a standard set of letters—basic written symbols or graphemes—each of which represents a phoneme in a spoken language, either as it exists now or as it was in the past. There are other systems, such as logographies, in which each character represents a word, morpheme, or semantic...
with 20–30 glyphs would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen rarer characters that occur only once or twice each. Various transcription alphabets have been created, to equate the Voynich glyphs with Latin characters in order to help with cryptanalysis, such as the European Voynich Alphabet
European Voynich Alphabet
The European Voynich Alphabet, or EVA was created by René Zandbergen and Gabriel Landini in 1998 as a system to transcribe the various graphemes which make up the text of the Voynich manuscript into Roman characters....
. The first major one was created by cryptographer William F. Friedman
William F. Friedman
William Frederick Friedman was a US Army cryptographer who ran the research division of the Army's Signals Intelligence Service in the 1930s, and parts of its follow-on services into the 1950s...
in the 1940s, where each line of the manuscript was transcribed to an IBM punch card
Punched card
A punched card, punch card, IBM card, or Hollerith card is a piece of stiff paper that contains digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions...
to make it machine-readable.
Wider gaps divide the text into about 35,000 "words" of varying length. These seem to follow phonological or orthographic
Orthography
The orthography of a language specifies a standardized way of using a specific writing system to write the language. Where more than one writing system is used for a language, for example Kurdish, Uyghur, Serbian or Inuktitut, there can be more than one orthography...
laws of some sort, e.g., certain characters must appear in each word (like English vowels), some characters never follow others, some may be doubled or tripled but others may not, etc.
Statistical analysis
Statistics
Statistics is the study of the collection, organization, analysis, and interpretation of data. It deals with all aspects of this, including the planning of data collection in terms of the design of surveys and experiments....
of the text reveals patterns similar to those of natural language
Natural language
In the philosophy of language, a natural language is any language which arises in an unpremeditated fashion as the result of the innate facility for language possessed by the human intellect. A natural language is typically used for communication, and may be spoken, signed, or written...
s. For instance, the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
or Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
texts. Some words occur only in certain sections, or in only a few pages; others occur throughout the manuscript. There are very few repetitions among the thousand or so "labels" attached to the illustrations. In the herbal section, the first word on each page occurs only on that page and may possibly be the name of the plant.
On the other hand, the Voynich manuscript's "language" is quite unlike European languages in several aspects. There are practically no words comprising more than ten glyphs, yet there are also few one- or two-letter words. The distribution of letters within words is also rather peculiar: some characters occur only at the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle section. While Semitic alphabets have many letters that are written differently depending on whether they occur at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of a word, letters of the Latin
Latin alphabet
The Latin alphabet, also called the Roman alphabet, is the most recognized alphabet used in the world today. It evolved from a western variety of the Greek alphabet called the Cumaean alphabet, which was adopted and modified by the Etruscans who ruled early Rome...
, Cyrillic
Cyrillic alphabet
The Cyrillic script or azbuka is an alphabetic writing system developed in the First Bulgarian Empire during the 10th century AD at the Preslav Literary School...
, and Greek
Greek alphabet
The Greek alphabet is the script that has been used to write the Greek language since at least 730 BC . The alphabet in its classical and modern form consists of 24 letters ordered in sequence from alpha to omega...
alphabets are generally written the same way regardless of their position within a word (with the Greek letter sigma
Sigma
Sigma is the eighteenth letter of the Greek alphabet, and carries the 'S' sound. In the system of Greek numerals it has a value of 200. When used at the end of a word, and the word is not all upper case, the final form is used, e.g...
and the medieval scribal 's' being notable exceptions).
The text seems to be more repetitive than typical European languages; there are instances where the same common word appears up to three times in a row. Words that differ by only one letter also repeat with unusual frequency, causing single-substitution alphabet decipherings to yield babble-like text. Elizebeth Friedman
Elizebeth Friedman
Elizebeth Smith Friedman was a cryptanalyst and author, and a pioneer in U.S. cryptography. The special spelling of her name is attributed to her mother, who disliked the prospect of Elizebeth ever being called "Eliza." She has been dubbed "America's first female cryptanalyst".Although she is...
in 1962 described such attempts as "doomed to utter frustration".
There are only a few words in the manuscript written in a seemingly Latin script. On the last page, there are four lines of writing written in rather distorted Latin letters, except for two words in the main script. The lettering resembles European alphabets of the late 14th and 15th centuries, but the words do not seem to make sense in any language. Also, a series of diagrams in the "astronomical" section has the names of ten of the months (from March to December) written in Latin script, with spelling suggestive of the medieval languages of France, northwest Italy or the Iberian Peninsula
Iberian Peninsula
The Iberian Peninsula , sometimes called Iberia, is located in the extreme southwest of Europe and includes the modern-day sovereign states of Spain, Portugal and Andorra, as well as the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar...
. However, it is not known whether these bits of Latin script were part of the original text or were added later.
Illustrations
Herbal: Each page displays one plant (sometimes two) and a few paragraphs of text—a format typical of European herbal
Herbal
AThe use of a or an depends on whether or not herbal is pronounced with a silent h. herbal is "a collection of descriptions of plants put together for medicinal purposes." Expressed more elaborately — it is a book containing the names and descriptions of plants, usually with information on their...
s of the time. Some parts of these drawings are larger and cleaner copies of sketches seen in the "pharmaceutical" section. None of the plants depicted are unambiguously identifiable.
Astronomical: Contains circular diagrams, some of them with suns, moons, and stars, suggestive of astronomy
Astronomy
Astronomy is a natural science that deals with the study of celestial objects and phenomena that originate outside the atmosphere of Earth...
or astrology
Astrology
Astrology consists of a number of belief systems which hold that there is a relationship between astronomical phenomena and events in the human world...
. One series of 12 diagrams depicts conventional symbols for the zodiac
Zodiac
In astronomy, the zodiac is a circle of twelve 30° divisions of celestial longitude which are centred upon the ecliptic: the apparent path of the Sun across the celestial sphere over the course of the year...
al constellations (two fish for Pisces
Pisces (constellation)
Pisces is a constellation of the zodiac. Its name is the Latin plural for fish, and its symbol is . It lies between Aquarius to the west and Aries to the east...
, a bull for Taurus
Taurus (constellation)
Taurus is one of the constellations of the zodiac. Its name is a Latin word meaning 'bull', and its astrological symbol is a stylized bull's head:...
, a hunter with crossbow for Sagittarius
Sagittarius (constellation)
Sagittarius is a constellation of the zodiac, the one containing the galactic center. Its name is Latin for the archer, and its symbol is , a stylized arrow. Sagittarius is commonly represented as a centaur drawing a bow...
, etc.). Each of these has 30 female figures arranged in two or more concentric bands. Most of the females are at least partly naked, and each holds what appears to be a labeled star or is shown with the star attached by what could be a tether or cord of some kind to either arm. The last two pages of this section (Aquarius
Aquarius (constellation)
Aquarius is a constellation of the zodiac, situated between Capricornus and Pisces. Its name is Latin for "water-bearer" or "cup-bearer", and its symbol is , a representation of water....
and Capricornus
Capricornus
Capricornus is one of the constellations of the zodiac; it is often called Capricorn, especially when referring to the corresponding astrological sign. Its name is Latin for "horned male goat" or "goat horn", and it is commonly represented in the form of a sea-goat: a mythical creature that is half...
, roughly January and February) were lost, while Aries
Aries (constellation)
Aries is one of the constellations of the zodiac, located between Pisces to the west and Taurus to the east. Its name is Latin for ram, and its symbol is , representing a ram's horns...
and Taurus are split into four paired diagrams with 15 women and 15 stars each. Some of these diagrams are on fold-out pages.
Biological: A dense continuous text interspersed with figures, mostly showing small naked women, some wearing crowns, bathing in pools or tubs connected by an elaborate network of pipes, some of them strongly reminiscent of body organ
Organ (anatomy)
In biology, an organ is a collection of tissues joined in structural unit to serve a common function. Usually there is a main tissue and sporadic tissues . The main tissue is the one that is unique for the specific organ. For example, main tissue in the heart is the myocardium, while sporadic are...
s.
Cosmological: More circular diagrams, but of an obscure nature. This section also has foldouts; one of them spans six pages and contains a map or diagram, with nine "islands" or "rosettes" connected by "causeway
Causeway
In modern usage, a causeway is a road or railway elevated, usually across a broad body of water or wetland.- Etymology :When first used, the word appeared in a form such as “causey way” making clear its derivation from the earlier form “causey”. This word seems to have come from the same source by...
s" and containing castles, as well as what may possibly be a volcano.
Pharmaceutical: Many labeled drawings of isolated plant parts (roots, leaves, etc.); objects resembling apothecary
Apothecary
Apothecary is a historical name for a medical professional who formulates and dispenses materia medica to physicians, surgeons and patients — a role now served by a pharmacist and some caregivers....
jars, ranging in style from the mundane to the fantastical; and a few text paragraphs.
Recipes: Many short paragraphs, each marked with a flower- or star-like "bullet".
Purpose
Pharmacopoeia
Pharmacopoeia, pharmacopeia, or pharmacopoea, , in its modern technical sense, is a book containing directions for the identification of samples and the preparation of compound medicines, and published by the authority of a government or a medical or pharmaceutical society.In a broader sense it is...
or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine
Medieval medicine
Medieval medicine in Western Europe was composed of a mixture of existing ideas from antiquity, spiritual influences and what Claude Lévi-Strauss identifies as the "shamanistic complex" and "social consensus." In this era, there was no tradition of scientific medicine, and observations went...
. However, the puzzling details of illustrations have fueled many theories about the book's origins, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended.
The first section of the book is almost certainly herbal
Herbal
AThe use of a or an depends on whether or not herbal is pronounced with a silent h. herbal is "a collection of descriptions of plants put together for medicinal purposes." Expressed more elaborately — it is a book containing the names and descriptions of plants, usually with information on their...
, but attempts to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with the stylized drawings of contemporary herbals, have largely failed. Few of the plant drawings (such as a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern
Maidenhair fern
Adiantum , the maidenhair ferns, is a genus of about 200 species of ferns in the family Pteridaceae, though some researchers place it in its own family, Adiantaceae...
) can be identified with reasonable certainty. Those herbal pictures that match pharmacological sketches appear to be clean copies of these, except that missing parts were completed with improbable-looking details. In fact, many of the plant drawings in the herbal section seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third.
Brumbaugh believed that one illustration depicted a New World sunflower, which would help date the manuscript and open up intriguing possibilities for its origin. However, the resemblance is slight, especially when compared to the original wild species; and, since the scale of the drawing is not known, the plant could be many other members of the same family
Asteraceae
The Asteraceae or Compositae , is an exceedingly large and widespread family of vascular plants. The group has more than 22,750 currently accepted species, spread across 1620 genera and 12 subfamilies...
, which includes the common daisy, chamomile
German Chamomile
Matricaria chamomilla or German chamomile, also spelled camomile, is an annual plant of the composite family Asteraceae. Synonyms are: Chamomilla chamomilla, Chamomilla recutita , Matricaria recutita, and Matricaria suaveolens.-Distribution:It usually grows near populated areas all over Europe and...
, and many other species from all over the world.
The basins and tubes in the "biological" section are sometimes interpreted as implying a connection to alchemy
Alchemy
Alchemy is an influential philosophical tradition whose early practitioners’ claims to profound powers were known from antiquity. The defining objectives of alchemy are varied; these include the creation of the fabled philosopher's stone possessing powers including the capability of turning base...
, yet bear little obvious resemblance to the alchemical equipment of the period.
Astrological considerations frequently played a prominent role in herb gathering, bloodletting
Bloodletting
Bloodletting is the withdrawal of often little quantities of blood from a patient to cure or prevent illness and disease. Bloodletting was based on an ancient system of medicine in which blood and other bodily fluid were considered to be "humors" the proper balance of which maintained health...
and other medical procedures common during the likeliest dates of the manuscript. However, apart from the obvious Zodiac
Zodiac
In astronomy, the zodiac is a circle of twelve 30° divisions of celestial longitude which are centred upon the ecliptic: the apparent path of the Sun across the celestial sphere over the course of the year...
symbols, and one diagram possibly showing the classical planets, no one has been able to interpret the illustrations within known astrological traditions (European or otherwise).
A circular drawing in the "astronomical" section depicts an irregularly shaped object with four curved arms, which, in 1928, antiquarian William Romaine Newbold interpreted as a picture of a galaxy
Galaxy
A galaxy is a massive, gravitationally bound system that consists of stars and stellar remnants, an interstellar medium of gas and dust, and an important but poorly understood component tentatively dubbed dark matter. The word galaxy is derived from the Greek galaxias , literally "milky", a...
, which could only be obtained with a telescope
Telescope
A telescope is an instrument that aids in the observation of remote objects by collecting electromagnetic radiation . The first known practical telescopes were invented in the Netherlands at the beginning of the 1600s , using glass lenses...
. Similarly, he interpreted other drawings as cells
Cell (biology)
The cell is the basic structural and functional unit of all known living organisms. It is the smallest unit of life that is classified as a living thing, and is often called the building block of life. The Alberts text discusses how the "cellular building blocks" move to shape developing embryos....
seen through a microscope
Microscope
A microscope is an instrument used to see objects that are too small for the naked eye. The science of investigating small objects using such an instrument is called microscopy...
. However, Newbold's analysis has since been dismissed as overly speculative.
History
The history of the book is unknown. It was discovered in 1912 at the Villa Mondragone near Rome by antique book dealer Wilfrid Voynich. The text and illustrations are all characteristically European. When Voynich first discovered the manuscript, his first impression was that it dated from the 12th century.In 2009, University of Arizona
University of Arizona
The University of Arizona is a land-grant and space-grant public institution of higher education and research located in Tucson, Arizona, United States. The University of Arizona was the first university in the state of Arizona, founded in 1885...
researchers performed C14 dating on the manuscript's vellum, which they assert (with 95% confidence) was made between 1404 and 1438. In addition, it has been reported that the McCrone Research Institute
McCrone Research Institute
The McCrone Research Institute is a not-for-profit educational and research organization for microscopy located in Chicago, Illinois. It was founded by Dr. Walter C. McCrone in 1960...
in Chicago
Chicago
Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
found that much of the ink was added not long afterwards, though this latter result has yet to be confirmed properly.
Based on a 1666 letter that accompanied the manuscript when it was being sent from Johannes Marcus
Jan Marek Marci
Jan Marek Marci , or Johannes Marcus Marci, was a Bohemian doctor and scientist, rector of the University of Prague, and official physician to the Holy Roman Emperors...
to Athanasius Kircher
Athanasius Kircher
Athanasius Kircher was a 17th century German Jesuit scholar who published around 40 works, most notably in the fields of oriental studies, geology, and medicine...
, the book once belonged to Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612), who paid 600 gold ducats (approximately USD $80,000 in 2011) for it. The book was then given or loaned to Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz (died 1622), the head of Rudolf's botanical gardens. With modern ultraviolet lighting methods, Tepenecz's name can be seen faintly on the first page of the manuscript, and the handwriting is consistent with Tepenecz's name in other books that he owned.
The next confirmed owner is Georg Baresch, an obscure alchemist
Alchemy
Alchemy is an influential philosophical tradition whose early practitioners’ claims to profound powers were known from antiquity. The defining objectives of alchemy are varied; these include the creation of the fabled philosopher's stone possessing powers including the capability of turning base...
in Prague
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
. Baresch apparently was just as puzzled as we are today about this "Sphynx
Sphinx
A sphinx is a mythical creature with a lion's body and a human head or a cat head.The sphinx, in Greek tradition, has the haunches of a lion, the wings of a great bird, and the face of a woman. She is mythicised as treacherous and merciless...
" that had been "taking up space uselessly in his library" for many years. On learning that Athanasius Kircher
Athanasius Kircher
Athanasius Kircher was a 17th century German Jesuit scholar who published around 40 works, most notably in the fields of oriental studies, geology, and medicine...
, a Jesuit
Society of Jesus
The Society of Jesus is a Catholic male religious order that follows the teachings of the Catholic Church. The members are called Jesuits, and are also known colloquially as "God's Army" and as "The Company," these being references to founder Ignatius of Loyola's military background and a...
scholar from the Collegio Romano, had published a Coptic
Coptic language
Coptic or Coptic Egyptian is the current stage of the Egyptian language, a northern Afro-Asiatic language spoken in Egypt until at least the 17th century. Egyptian began to be written using the Greek alphabet in the 1st century...
(Egyptian
Egyptology
Egyptology is the study of ancient Egyptian history, language, literature, religion, and art from the 5th millennium BC until the end of its native religious practices in the AD 4th century. A practitioner of the discipline is an “Egyptologist”...
) dictionary and "deciphered" the Egyptian hieroglyphs, Baresch sent a sample copy of the script to Kircher in Rome (twice), asking for clues. His 1639 letter to Kircher is the earliest confirmed mention of the manuscript that has been found so far.
It is not known whether Kircher answered the request, but apparently, he was interested enough to try to acquire the book, which Baresch refused to yield. Upon Baresch's death, the manuscript passed to his friend Jan Marek Marci
Jan Marek Marci
Jan Marek Marci , or Johannes Marcus Marci, was a Bohemian doctor and scientist, rector of the University of Prague, and official physician to the Holy Roman Emperors...
(1595–1667) (Johannes Marcus Marci), then rector
Rector
The word rector has a number of different meanings; it is widely used to refer to an academic, religious or political administrator...
of Charles University in Prague, who a few years later sent the book to Kircher, his longtime friend and correspondent. Marci's 1666 cover letter (written in Latin) was still with the manuscript when Voynich purchased it:
There are no records of the book for the next 200 years, but in all likelihood it was stored with the rest of Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Collegio Romano (now the Pontifical Gregorian University
Pontifical Gregorian University
The Pontifical Gregorian University is a pontifical university located in Rome, Italy.Heir of the Roman College founded by Saint Ignatius of Loyola over 460 years ago, the Gregorian University was the first university founded by the Jesuits...
). It probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy
Victor Emmanuel II of Italy
Victor Emanuel II was king of Sardinia from 1849 and, on 17 March 1861, he assumed the title King of Italy to become the first king of a united Italy since the 6th century, a title he held until his death in 1878...
captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal States
Papal States
The Papal State, State of the Church, or Pontifical States were among the major historical states of Italy from roughly the 6th century until the Italian peninsula was unified in 1861 by the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia .The Papal States comprised territories under...
. The new Italian government decided to confiscate many properties of the Church, including the library of the Collegio. According to investigations by Xavier Ceccaldi and others, just before this happened, many books of the University's library were hastily transferred to the personal libraries of its faculty, which were exempt from confiscation. Kircher's correspondence was among those books—and so apparently was the Voynich manuscript, as it still bears the ex libris
Bookplate
A bookplate, also known as ex-librīs [Latin, "from the books of..."], is usually a small print or decorative label pasted into a book, often on the inside front cover, to indicate its owner...
of Petrus Beckx, head of the Jesuit order and the University's Rector at the time.
Beckx's "private" library was moved to the Villa Mondragone
Villa Mondragone
Villa Mondragone is a patrician villa originally in the territory of the Italian commune of Frascati , now in the territory of Monte Porzio Catone...
, Frascati
Frascati
Frascati is a town and comune in the province of Rome in the Lazio region of central Italy. It is located south-east of Rome, on the Alban Hills close to the ancient city of Tusculum. Frascati is closely associated with science, being the location of several international scientific...
, a large country palace near Rome that had been bought by the Society of Jesus
Society of Jesus
The Society of Jesus is a Catholic male religious order that follows the teachings of the Catholic Church. The members are called Jesuits, and are also known colloquially as "God's Army" and as "The Company," these being references to founder Ignatius of Loyola's military background and a...
in 1866 and housed the headquarters of the Jesuits' Ghislieri College
Ghislieri College
The Ghislieri College , founded in 1567 by Pope Pius V and inspired by the Almo Collegio Borromeo, is the second the most ancient colleges in Pavia and co-founder of the IUSS, located in Pavia as well....
.
Around 1912, the Collegio Romano was short of money and decided to discreetly sell some of its holdings. Wilfrid Voynich acquired 30 manuscripts, among them the manuscript that now bears his name. In 1930, after his death, the manuscript was inherited by his widow, Ethel Lilian Voynich
Ethel Lilian Voynich
Ethel Lilian Voynich, née Boole was a British novelist and musician, and a supporter of several revolutionary causes. She was born in Cork. Her father was the mathematician George Boole. Her mother was feminist philosopher Mary Everest, niece of George Everest and an author for the...
(known as the author of the novel The Gadfly
The Gadfly
The Gadfly is a novel by Ethel Lilian Voynich, published in 1897 , set in 1840s Italy under the dominance of Austria, a time of tumultuous revolt and uprisings. The story centers on the life of the protagonist, Arthur Burton, as a member of the Youth movement, and his antagonist, Padre Montanelli...
and daughter of famous mathematician George Boole
George Boole
George Boole was an English mathematician and philosopher.As the inventor of Boolean logic—the basis of modern digital computer logic—Boole is regarded in hindsight as a founder of the field of computer science. Boole said,...
). She died in 1960 and left the manuscript to her close friend, Miss Anne Nill. In 1961, Nill sold the book to another antique book dealer, Hans P. Kraus
Hans P. Kraus
Hans Peter Kraus , also known as H. P. Kraus or HPK, was an Austrian-born book dealer described as “without doubt the most successful and dominant rare book dealer in the world in the second half of the 20th century” and in a league with other rare book dealers such as Bernard Quaritch, Guillaume...
. Unable to find a buyer, Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University in 1969.
Authorship
Marci's 1666 cover letter to Kircher says that, according to his late friend Raphael Mnishovsky
Raphael Sobiehrd-Mnishovsky
Raphael Sobiehrd-Mnishovsky of Sebuzin and of Horstein was a Bohemian lawyer and writer, who held various secretarial, diplomatic, and judicial posts under Rudolf II, Mathias, Ferdinand II, and, Ferdinand III, under whom Raphael was the attorney-general.Mnishovsky was also a poet and...
, the book had once been bought by Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor
Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor
Rudolf II was Holy Roman Emperor , King of Hungary and Croatia , King of Bohemia and Archduke of Austria...
and King of Bohemia
Bohemia
Bohemia is a historical region in central Europe, occupying the western two-thirds of the traditional Czech Lands. It is located in the contemporary Czech Republic with its capital in Prague...
(1552–1612), for 600 ducat
Ducat
The ducat is a gold coin that was used as a trade coin throughout Europe before World War I. Its weight is 3.4909 grams of .986 gold, which is 0.1107 troy ounce, actual gold weight...
s (66.42 troy ounce
Troy ounce
The troy ounce is a unit of imperial measure. In the present day it is most commonly used to gauge the weight of precious metals. One troy ounce is nowadays defined as exactly 0.0311034768 kg = 31.1034768 g. There are approximately 32.1507466 troy oz in 1 kg...
actual gold weight
Actual gold weight
The actual gold weight of a bullion coin or bar is the amount of fine, pure, or intrinsic gold content in troy ounces. It is typically used to describe gold or silver coins....
, around US$80,831.20 as of 2011). According to the letter, Mnishovsky (but not necessarily Rudolf) speculated that the author was the Franciscan
Franciscan
Most Franciscans are members of Roman Catholic religious orders founded by Saint Francis of Assisi. Besides Roman Catholic communities, there are also Old Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, ecumenical and Non-denominational Franciscan communities....
friar and polymath
Polymath
A polymath is a person whose expertise spans a significant number of different subject areas. In less formal terms, a polymath may simply be someone who is very knowledgeable...
Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon, O.F.M. , also known as Doctor Mirabilis , was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods...
(1214–94).
Even though Marci said that he was "suspending his judgment" about this claim, it was taken quite seriously by Wilfrid Voynich, who did his best to confirm it. His conviction strongly influenced most deciphering attempts for the next 80 years. Mnishovsky died in 1644, and the deal must have occurred before Rudolf's abdication in 1611—at least 55 years before Marci's letter.
The assumption that Roger Bacon was the author led Voynich to conclude that the person who sold the manuscript to Rudolf could only have been John Dee
John Dee (mathematician)
John Dee was an English mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, occultist, navigator, imperialist and consultant to Queen Elizabeth I. He devoted much of his life to the study of alchemy, divination and Hermetic philosophy....
(1527–1608), a mathematician and astrologer at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, known to have owned a large collection of Bacon's manuscripts. This theory is also conveyed by Voynich manuscript scholar Gordon Rugg
Gordon Rugg
Gordon Rugg was born in Perth, Scotland in 1955. He has a first degree in French and Linguistics and a PhD in Psychology, both from Reading University, UK. His background includes working as a timberyard worker, a field archaeologist and an English lecturer...
. Dee and his scrier
Scrying
Scrying is a magic practice that involves seeing things psychically in a medium, usually for purposes of obtaining spiritual visions and less often for purposes of divination or fortune-telling. The most common media used are reflective, translucent, or luminescent substances such as crystals,...
(mediumic assistant) Edward Kelley
Edward Kelley
Sir Edward Kelley or Kelly, also known as Edward Talbot was an ambiguous figure in English Renaissance occultism and self-declared spirit medium who worked with John Dee in his magical investigations...
lived in Bohemia for several years, where they had hoped to sell their services to the emperor. However, Dee's meticulously kept diaries do not mention that sale and make it seem quite unlikely. If the Voynich manuscript author is not Bacon, the connection to Dee may just disappear. It is possible that Dee himself may have written it and spread the rumour that it was originally a work of Bacon's in the hopes of later selling it.
Edward Kelley
Sir Edward Kelley or Kelly, also known as Edward Talbot was an ambiguous figure in English Renaissance occultism and self-declared spirit medium who worked with John Dee in his magical investigations...
, was a self-styled alchemist who claimed to be able to turn copper into gold by means of a secret powder that he had dug out of a Bishop's tomb in Wales
Wales
Wales is a country that is part of the United Kingdom and the island of Great Britain, bordered by England to its east and the Atlantic Ocean and Irish Sea to its west. It has a population of three million, and a total area of 20,779 km²...
. As Dee's scrier, he claimed to be able to invoke angels through a shewstone and had long conversations with them—which Dee dutifully noted down. The angel's language was called Enochian
Enochian
Enochian is a name often applied to an occult or angelic language recorded in the private journals of John Dee and his seer Edward Kelley in the late 16th century. The men claimed that it was revealed to them by angels...
, after Enoch
Enoch (ancestor of Noah)
Enoch is a figure in the Generations of Adam. Enoch is described as Adam's greatx4 grandson , the son of Jared, the father of Methuselah, and the great-grandfather of Noah...
, the Biblical father of Methuselah
Methuselah
Methuselah is the oldest person whose age is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible. Extra-biblical tradition maintains that he died on the 11th of Cheshvan of the year 1656 , at the age of 969, seven days before the beginning of the Great Flood...
; according to legend, he had been taken on a tour of heaven by angels and had later written a book
Book of Enoch
The Book of Enoch is an ancient Jewish religious work, traditionally ascribed to Enoch, the great-grandfather of Noah. It is not part of the biblical canon as used by Jews, apart from Beta Israel...
about what he saw there. Several people have suggested that, Kelley could have fabricated the Voynich manuscript to swindle the emperor (who was already paying Kelley for his supposed alchemical expertise).
Fabrication by Voynich
Some suspected Voynich of having fabricated the manuscript himself. As an antique book dealer, he probably had the necessary knowledge and means, and a "lost book" by Roger Bacon would have been worth a fortune. Furthermore, Baresch's letter (and Marci's as well) only establish the existence of a manuscript, not that the Voynich manuscript is the same one spoken of there. In other words, these letters could possibly have been the motivation for Voynich to fabricate the manuscript (assuming he was aware of them), rather than as proofs authenticating it. However, many consider the expert internal dating of the manuscript and the recent discovery of Baresch's letter to Kircher as having eliminated this possibility.Other theories
A photostatic reproduction of the first page of the Voynich manuscript, taken by Voynich sometime before 1921, showed some faint writing that had been erased. With the help of chemicals, the text could be read as the name "Jacobj à Tepenece". This is taken to be Jakub Hořčický of Tepenec, who was also known by his Latin name: Jacobus SinapiusJacobus Sinapius
Jakub Hořčický , later granted the title z Tepence , was a Bohemian pharmacist and personal doctor of Emperor Rudolf II...
(1575–1622). He was a specialist in herbal medicine, Rudolph II's personal physician, and curator of his botanical gardens. Voynich, and many other people after him, concluded from this "signature" that Jacobus owned the Voynich manuscript before Baresch and saw in that a confirmation of Mnishovsky's story. Others have suggested that Jacobus himself could be the author.
However, that writing does not match Jacobus's signature, as found in a document located by Jan Hurych in 2003. It is possible that the writing on page f1r was added by a later owner or librarian and is only this person's guess as to the book's author. (In the Jesuit history books that were available to Kircher, Jesuit-educated Jacobus is the only alchemist or doctor from Rudolf's court who deserves a full-page entry, while, for example, Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe
Tycho Brahe , born Tyge Ottesen Brahe, was a Danish nobleman known for his accurate and comprehensive astronomical and planetary observations...
is barely mentioned.) Moreover, the chemicals applied by Voynich have so degraded the vellum that hardly a trace of the signature can be seen today; thus, there is also the suspicion that the signature was fabricated by Voynich in order to strengthen the Roger Bacon theory.
Jan Marek Marci
Jan Marek Marci
Jan Marek Marci , or Johannes Marcus Marci, was a Bohemian doctor and scientist, rector of the University of Prague, and official physician to the Holy Roman Emperors...
met Kircher when he led a delegation from Charles University to Rome in 1638, and over the next 27 years, the two scholars exchanged many letters on a variety of scientific subjects. Marci's trip was part of a continuing struggle by the secularist
Secularism
Secularism is the principle of separation between government institutions and the persons mandated to represent the State from religious institutions and religious dignitaries...
side of the university to maintain their independence from the Jesuits, who ran the rival Clementinum
Clementinum
The Clementinum is a historic complex of buildings in Prague. Until recently the complex hosted the National, University and Technical libraries, the City Library also being located nearby on Mariánské Náměstí. The Technical library and the Municipal library have moved to the Prague National...
college in Prague. In spite of those efforts, the two universities were merged in 1654, under Jesuit control. It has therefore been speculated that political animosity against the Jesuits led Marci to fabricate Baresch's letters, and later the Voynich manuscript, in an attempt to expose and discredit their "star" Kircher.
Marci's personality and knowledge appear to have been adequate for this task; and Kircher was an easy target. Indeed, Baresch's letter bears some resemblance to a hoax that orientalist Andreas Mueller once played on Kircher. Mueller concocted an unintelligible manuscript and sent it to Kircher with a note explaining that it had come from Egypt. He asked Kircher for a translation, and Kircher, reportedly, produced one at once. The only proofs of Georg Baresch's existence are three letters sent to Kircher: one by Baresch (1639), and two by Marci (about a year later). It is also curious that the correspondence between Marci and Kircher ends in 1666, precisely with the Voynich manuscript "cover letter".
However, Marci's secret grudge against the Jesuits is pure conjecture: a faithful Catholic, he himself had studied to become a Jesuit, and, shortly before his death in 1667, he was granted honorary membership in their Order.
Raphael Mnishovsky
Raphael Sobiehrd-Mnishovsky
Raphael Sobiehrd-Mnishovsky of Sebuzin and of Horstein was a Bohemian lawyer and writer, who held various secretarial, diplomatic, and judicial posts under Rudolf II, Mathias, Ferdinand II, and, Ferdinand III, under whom Raphael was the attorney-general.Mnishovsky was also a poet and...
, the friend of Marci who was the reputed source of Bacon's story, was himself a cryptographer (among many other things) and apparently invented a cipher that he claimed was uncrackable (ca. 1618). This has led to the theory that he produced the Voynich manuscript as a practical demonstration of his cipher and made poor Baresch his unwitting test subject. After Kircher published his book on Coptic, Mnishovsky (so the theory goes) may have thought that stumping him would be a much better trophy than stumping Baresch and convinced the alchemist to ask the Jesuit's help. He would have invented the Roger Bacon story to motivate Baresch. Indeed, the disclaimer in the Voynich manuscript cover letter could mean that Marci suspected a lie. However, there is no definite evidence for this theory.
Leonell C. Strong, a cancer research scientist and amateur cryptographer, believed that the solution to the Voynich manuscript was a "peculiar double system of arithmetical progressions of a multiple alphabet". Strong claimed that the plaintext
Plaintext
In cryptography, plaintext is information a sender wishes to transmit to a receiver. Cleartext is often used as a synonym. Before the computer era, plaintext most commonly meant message text in the language of the communicating parties....
revealed the Voynich manuscript to be written by the 16th-century English author Anthony Ascham, whose works include A Little Herbal, published in 1550. Although the Voynich manuscript does contain sections resembling A Little Herbal, the main argument against this theory is that it is unknown where Ascham would have obtained such literary and cryptographic knowledge.
In his 2006 book, Nick Pelling
Nick Pelling
Nick Pelling is a British-born computer programmer, best known for a series of 1980s computer games for the BBC Micro written under the nom-de-plume Orlando M. Pilchard. He was educated at Brentwood School, and has both a BSc in Maths and Philosophy and an MBA with Distinction...
proposed that the Voynich manuscript was written by Antonio Averlino (also known as "Filarete"), an Italian Renaissance architect. From a 1465 letter by Francesco Filelfo
Francesco Filelfo
Francesco Filelfo was an Italian Renaissance humanist.-Biography:Filelfo was born at Tolentino, in the March of Ancona. He is believed to be a third cousin of Leonardo Da Vinci. At the time of his birth, Petrarch and the students of Florence had already brought the first act in the recovery of...
, it is known that Averlino intended travelling to Constantinople
Istanbul
Istanbul , historically known as Byzantium and Constantinople , is the largest city of Turkey. Istanbul metropolitan province had 13.26 million people living in it as of December, 2010, which is 18% of Turkey's population and the 3rd largest metropolitan area in Europe after London and...
: yet not long before in September 1461, the Venetian border guards in Crete had sent Matteo di Andrea de' Pasti
Matteo di Andrea de' Pasti
Matteo di Andrea de' Pasti was an Italian sculptor and medalist.Matteo was born in Verona. He worked on many royal commissions, including work for Lionello d'Este and Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. Matteo collaborated with the architect Leone Battista Alberti on the design and construction of the...
back to Venice in chains for carrying a copy of Roberto Valturio
Roberto Valturio
Roberto Valturio was an Italian engineer and writer born in Rimini. He was the author of the military treatise De Re militari .-References:...
's De Re Militari on a similar journey East on behalf of Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta. Averlino (according to Pelling's hypothesis) therefore constructed the Voynich manuscript as a way of carrying his own books of engineering and military secrets with him to the Ottoman Empire
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
. Pelling, largely following John Tiltman's analysis, conjectures that the manuscript was enciphered using a broad set of simple cryptographic and steganographic
Steganography
Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity...
components appropriate to the mid-15th century: and that these were consciously arranged in a complicated system so as to produce ciphertext resembling a medieval document in an unknown language, complete with apparent consonant-vowel pairing of letters and fake page references. He also concludes that most of the marginalia were added by the original author, but that when later owners tried to physically restore the badly faded text, their incorrect guesses at what these had originally read caused them to become unreadable.
Hoax
The bizarre features of the Voynich manuscript text (such as the doubled and tripled words), the suspicious contents of its illustrations (such as the chimeric plantsChimera (plant)
Chimeras in botany are usually single organisms composed of two genetically different types of tissue. They occur in plants, on the same general basis as with animal chimeras...
) and its lack of historical reference support the idea that the manuscript is a hoax. In other words, if no one is able to extract meaning from the book, perhaps this is because the document contains no meaningful content in the first place.
Between 1976 and 1978, Italian artist Luigi Serafini
Luigi Serafini
Luigi Serafini is an Italian artist, architect and designer. He is best known for creating the Codex Seraphinianus, an illustrated encyclopedia of imaginary things in a constructed language...
proved that it is not hard to create a book like this, and created the Codex Seraphinianus
Codex Seraphinianus
Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978...
, which also contains pictures of imaginary plants, and a language that has been studied by linguists for decades.
The argument for authenticity, on the other hand, is that the manuscript appears too sophisticated to be a hoax. While hoaxes of the period tended to be quite crude, the Voynich manuscript exhibits many subtle characteristics which show up only after careful statistical analysis. These fine touches require much more work than would have been necessary for a simple forgery, and some of the complexities are only visible with modern tools. The question then arises: why would the author employ such a complex and laborious forging algorithm in the creation of a simplistic hoax, if no one in the expected audience (that is, the creator's contemporaries) could tell the difference?
Various hoax theories have been proposed over time:
In 2003, computer scientist Gordon Rugg
Gordon Rugg
Gordon Rugg was born in Perth, Scotland in 1955. He has a first degree in French and Linguistics and a PhD in Psychology, both from Reading University, UK. His background includes working as a timberyard worker, a field archaeologist and an English lecturer...
showed that text with characteristics similar to the Voynich manuscript could have been produced using a table of word prefixes, stems, and suffixes, which would have been selected and combined by means of a perforated paper overlay. The latter device, known as a Cardan grille
Cardan grille
-History:In 1550, Girolamo Cardano , known in French as Jérôme Cardan, proposed a simple grid for writing hidden messages. He intended to cloak his messages inside an ordinary letter so that the whole would not appear to be a cipher at all....
, was invented around 1550 as an encryption tool, more than 100 years after the estimated creation date of the Voynich manuscript. Some maintain that the similarity between the pseudo-texts generated in Gordon Rugg's experiments and the Voynich manuscript is superficial, and the grille method could be used to emulate any language to a certain degree.
In April 2007, a study by Austrian researcher Andreas Schinner published in Cryptologia
Cryptologia
Cryptologia is a journal in cryptography published quarterly since January 1977. Its remit is all aspects of cryptography, but there is a special emphasis on historical aspects of the subject. The founding editors were Brian J. Winkel, David Kahn, Louis Kruh, Cipher A. Deavours and Greg Mellen...
supported the hoax hypothesis. Schinner showed that the statistical properties of the manuscript's text were more consistent with meaningless gibberish produced using a quasi-stochastic
Stochastic
Stochastic refers to systems whose behaviour is intrinsically non-deterministic. A stochastic process is one whose behavior is non-deterministic, in that a system's subsequent state is determined both by the process's predictable actions and by a random element. However, according to M. Kac and E...
method such as the one described by Rugg, than with Latin and medieval German texts. However, this comparison is valid only for plain text in European languages, or text enciphered with a simple substitution cipher
Substitution cipher
In cryptography, a substitution cipher is a method of encryption by which units of plaintext are replaced with ciphertext according to a regular system; the "units" may be single letters , pairs of letters, triplets of letters, mixtures of the above, and so forth...
, while analysis suggests a much more complex enciphering method and (or) non-European origin of the underlying text of the Voynich manuscript.
Ciphers
According to the "letter-based cipher" theory, the Voynich manuscript contains a meaningful text in some European language, that was intentionally rendered obscure by mapping it to the Voynich manuscript "alphabet" through a cipherCipher
In cryptography, a cipher is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption — a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is encipherment. In non-technical usage, a “cipher” is the same thing as a “code”; however, the concepts...
of some sort—an algorithm
Algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm is an effective method expressed as a finite list of well-defined instructions for calculating a function. Algorithms are used for calculation, data processing, and automated reasoning...
that operated on individual letters.
This has been the working hypothesis for most deciphering attempts in the twentieth century, including an informal team of NSA cryptographers led by William F. Friedman
William F. Friedman
William Frederick Friedman was a US Army cryptographer who ran the research division of the Army's Signals Intelligence Service in the 1930s, and parts of its follow-on services into the 1950s...
in the early 1950s. Simple monoalphabetic cipher
Substitution cipher
In cryptography, a substitution cipher is a method of encryption by which units of plaintext are replaced with ciphertext according to a regular system; the "units" may be single letters , pairs of letters, triplets of letters, mixtures of the above, and so forth...
s can be excluded, because they are very easy to crack; so deciphering efforts have generally focused on polyalphabetic cipher
Polyalphabetic cipher
A polyalphabetic cipher is any cipher based on substitution, using multiple substitution alphabets. The Vigenère cipher is probably the best-known example of a polyalphabetic cipher, though it is a simplified special case...
s, invented by Alberti
Leone Battista Alberti
Leon Battista Alberti was an Italian author, artist, architect, poet, priest, linguist, philosopher, cryptographer and general Renaissance humanist polymath...
in the 1460s. This class includes the popular Vigenère cipher
Vigenère cipher
The Vigenère cipher is a method of encrypting alphabetic text by using a series of different Caesar ciphers based on the letters of a keyword. It is a simple form of polyalphabetic substitution....
, which could have been strengthened by the use of nulls and/or equivalent symbols, letter rearrangement, false word breaks and so on. Some people assumed that vowels had been deleted before encryption. There have been several claims of deciphering along these lines, but none has been widely accepted—chiefly because the proposed deciphering algorithms depended on so many guesses by the user that they could extract a meaningful text from any random string of symbols.
The main argument for this theory is that the use of a strange alphabet by a European author can hardly be explained except as an attempt to hide information. Indeed, Roger Bacon knew about ciphers, and the estimated date for the manuscript roughly coincides with the birth of cryptography
Cryptography
Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...
as a systematic discipline. Against this theory is the observation that a polyalphabetic cipher would normally destroy the "natural" statistical features that are seen in the Voynich manuscript. Also, although polyalphabetic ciphers were invented about 1467, variants only became popular in the 16th century, somewhat too late for the estimated date of the Voynich manuscript.
According to the "codebook cipher" theory, the Voynich manuscript "words" would actually be code
Code (cryptography)
In cryptography, a code is a method used to transform a message into an obscured form, preventing those who do not possess special information, or key, required to apply the transform from understanding what is actually transmitted. The usual method is to use a codebook with a list of common...
s to be looked up in a "dictionary" or codebook
Codebook
A codebook is a type of document used for gathering and storing codes. Originally codebooks were often literally books, but today codebook is a byword for the complete record of a series of codes, regardless of physical format.-Cryptography:...
. The main evidence for this theory is that the internal structure and length distribution of those words are similar to those of Roman numerals—which, at the time, would be a natural choice for the codes. However, book-based ciphers are viable only for short messages, because they are very cumbersome to write and to read.
Micrography
Following its 1912 rediscovery, one of the earliest efforts to unlock the book's secrets (and the first of many premature claims of decipherment) was made in 1921 by William Newbold of the University of PennsylvaniaUniversity of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
. His singular hypothesis held that the visible text is meaningless itself, but that each apparent "letter" is in fact constructed of a series of tiny markings only discernible under magnification
Magnification
Magnification is the process of enlarging something only in appearance, not in physical size. This enlargement is quantified by a calculated number also called "magnification"...
. These markings were supposed to be based on ancient Greek
Ancient Greece
Ancient Greece is a civilization belonging to a period of Greek history that lasted from the Archaic period of the 8th to 6th centuries BC to the end of antiquity. Immediately following this period was the beginning of the Early Middle Ages and the Byzantine era. Included in Ancient Greece is the...
shorthand
Shorthand
Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed or brevity of writing as compared to a normal method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek stenos and graphē or graphie...
, forming a second level of script that held the real content of the writing. Newbold claimed to have used this knowledge to work out entire paragraphs proving the authorship of Bacon and recording his use of a compound microscope four hundred years before Leeuwenhoek. However, John Matthews Manly of the University of Chicago
University of Chicago
The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...
pointed out serious flaws in this theory. Each shorthand character was assumed to have multiple interpretations, with no reliable way to determine which was intended for any given case. Newbold's method also required rearranging letters at will until intelligible Latin was produced. These factors alone ensure the system enough flexibility that nearly anything at all could be discerned from the microscopic
Microscopic
The microscopic scale is the scale of size or length used to describe objects smaller than those that can easily be seen by the naked eye and which require a lens or microscope to see them clearly.-History:...
markings. Although evidence of micrography
Micrography
Micrography , also called microcalligraphy, is a Jewish form of calligrams developed in the 9th century, with parallels in Christianity and Islam, utilizing minute Hebrew letters to form representational, geometric and abstract designs...
using the Hebrew language
Hebrew language
Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afroasiatic language family. Culturally, is it considered by Jews and other religious groups as the language of the Jewish people, though other Jewish languages had originated among diaspora Jews, and the Hebrew language is also used by non-Jewish groups, such...
can be traced as far back as the ninth century, it is nowhere near as compact or complex as the shapes Newbold made out. Close study of the manuscript revealed the markings to be artifacts caused by the way ink cracks as it dries on rough vellum. Perceiving significance in these artifacts can be attributed to pareidolia
Pareidolia
Pareidolia is a psychological phenomenon involving a vague and random stimulus being perceived as significant. Common examples include seeing images of animals or faces in clouds, the man in the moon or the Moon rabbit, and hearing hidden messages on records played in reverse...
. Thanks to Manly's thorough refutation, the micrography theory is now generally disregarded.
Steganography
This theory holds that the text of the Voynich manuscript is mostly meaningless, but contains meaningful information hidden in inconspicuous details—e.g. the second letter of every word, or the number of letters in each line. This technique, called steganographySteganography
Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity...
, is very old, and was described by Johannes Trithemius
Johannes Trithemius
Johannes Trithemius , born Johann Heidenberg, was a German abbot, lexicographer, historian, cryptographer, polymath and occultist who had an influence on later occultism. The name by which he is more commonly known is derived from his native town of Trittenheim on the Mosel in Germany.-Life:He...
in 1499. Though it has been suggested that the plain text was to be extracted by a Cardan grille
Cardan grille
-History:In 1550, Girolamo Cardano , known in French as Jérôme Cardan, proposed a simple grid for writing hidden messages. He intended to cloak his messages inside an ordinary letter so that the whole would not appear to be a cipher at all....
of some sort, this seems somewhat unlikely because the words and letters are not arranged on anything like a regular grid. Still, steganographic claims are hard to prove or disprove, since stegotexts can be arbitrarily hard to find. An argument against steganography is that having a cipher-like cover text highlights the very existence of the secret message, which would be self-defeating: yet because the cover text no less resembles an unknown natural language, this argument is not hugely persuasive.
It has been suggested that the meaningful text could be encoded in the length or shape of certain pen strokes. There are indeed examples of steganography from about that time that use letter shape (italic
Emphasis (typography)
In typography, emphasis is the exaggeration of words in a text with a font in a different style from the rest of the text—to emphasize them.- Methods and use :...
vs. upright) to hide information. However, when examined at high magnification, the Voynich manuscript pen strokes seem quite natural, and substantially affected by the uneven surface of the vellum.
Exotic natural language
The linguist Jacques GuyJacques Guy
Jacques Guy is a French linguist, born in 1944 and living in Australia since 1968. He started undergraduate studies at the École des Langues Orientales in Paris, focusing on Chinese, Japanese and Tahitian. He then wrote his Ph.D...
once suggested that the Voynich manuscript text could be some exotic natural language, written in the plain
Plaintext
In cryptography, plaintext is information a sender wishes to transmit to a receiver. Cleartext is often used as a synonym. Before the computer era, plaintext most commonly meant message text in the language of the communicating parties....
with an invented alphabet. The word structure is similar to that of many language families of East and Central Asia, mainly Sino-Tibetan
Sino-Tibetan languages
The Sino-Tibetan languages are a language family comprising, at least, the Chinese and the Tibeto-Burman languages, including some 250 languages of East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia. They are second only to the Indo-European languages in terms of the number of native speakers...
(Chinese
Chinese language
The Chinese language is a language or language family consisting of varieties which are mutually intelligible to varying degrees. Originally the indigenous languages spoken by the Han Chinese in China, it forms one of the branches of Sino-Tibetan family of languages...
, Tibetan
Tibetan language
The Tibetan languages are a cluster of mutually-unintelligible Tibeto-Burman languages spoken primarily by Tibetan peoples who live across a wide area of eastern Central Asia bordering the Indian subcontinent, including the Tibetan Plateau and the northern Indian subcontinent in Baltistan, Ladakh,...
, and Burmese
Burmese language
The Burmese language is the official language of Burma. Although the constitution officially recognizes it as the Myanmar language, most English speakers continue to refer to the language as Burmese. Burmese is the native language of the Bamar and related sub-ethnic groups of the Bamar, as well as...
), Austroasiatic (Vietnamese
Vietnamese language
Vietnamese is the national and official language of Vietnam. It is the mother tongue of 86% of Vietnam's population, and of about three million overseas Vietnamese. It is also spoken as a second language by many ethnic minorities of Vietnam...
, Khmer
Khmer language
Khmer , or Cambodian, is the language of the Khmer people and the official language of Cambodia. It is the second most widely spoken Austroasiatic language , with speakers in the tens of millions. Khmer has been considerably influenced by Sanskrit and Pali, especially in the royal and religious...
, etc.) and possibly Tai
Tai languages
The Tai or Zhuang–Tai languages are a branch of the Tai–Kadai language family. The Tai languages include the most widely spoken of the Tai–Kadai languages, including standard Thai or Siamese, the national language of Thailand; Lao or Laotian, the national language of Laos; Burma's Shan language;...
(Thai
Thai language
Thai , also known as Central Thai and Siamese, is the national and official language of Thailand and the native language of the Thai people, Thailand's dominant ethnic group. Thai is a member of the Tai group of the Tai–Kadai language family. Historical linguists have been unable to definitively...
, Lao
Lao language
Lao or Laotian is a tonal language of the Tai–Kadai language family. It is the official language of Laos, and also spoken in the northeast of Thailand, where it is usually referred to as the Isan language. Being the primary language of the Lao people, Lao is also an important second language for...
, etc.). In many of these languages, the "words" have only one syllable
Syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...
; and syllables have a rather rich structure, including tonal patterns.
This theory has some historical plausibility. While those languages generally had native scripts, these were notoriously difficult for Western visitors. This difficulty motivated the invention of several phonetic scripts, mostly with Latin letters
Romanization
In linguistics, romanization or latinization is the representation of a written word or spoken speech with the Roman script, or a system for doing so, where the original word or language uses a different writing system . Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written...
but sometimes with invented alphabets. Although the known examples are much later than the Voynich manuscript, history records hundreds of explorers and missionaries who could have done it—even before Marco Polo
Marco Polo
Marco Polo was a Venetian merchant traveler from the Venetian Republic whose travels are recorded in Il Milione, a book which did much to introduce Europeans to Central Asia and China. He learned about trading whilst his father and uncle, Niccolò and Maffeo, travelled through Asia and apparently...
's thirteenth century journey, but especially after Vasco da Gama
Vasco da Gama
Vasco da Gama, 1st Count of Vidigueira was a Portuguese explorer, one of the most successful in the Age of Discovery and the commander of the first ships to sail directly from Europe to India...
sailed the sea route to the Orient in 1499. The Voynich manuscript author could also be a native of East Asia who lived in Europe, or who was educated at a European mission.
The main argument for this theory is that it is consistent with all statistical properties of the Voynich manuscript text which have been tested so far, including doubled and tripled words (which have been found to occur in Chinese and Vietnamese texts at roughly the same frequency as in the Voynich manuscript). It also explains the apparent lack of numerals and Western syntactic features (such as article
Article (grammar)
An article is a word that combines with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. Articles specify the grammatical definiteness of the noun, in some languages extending to volume or numerical scope. The articles in the English language are the and a/an, and some...
s and copulas), and the general inscrutability of the illustrations. Another possible hint is two large red symbols on the first page, which have been compared to a Chinese-style book title, inverted and badly copied. Also, the apparent division of the year into 360 degrees (rather than 365 days), in groups of 15 and starting with Pisces, are features of the Chinese agricultural calendar
Chinese calendar
The Chinese calendar is a lunisolar calendar, incorporating elements of a lunar calendar with those of a solar calendar. It is not exclusive to China, but followed by many other Asian cultures as well...
(jie qi). The main argument against the theory is the fact that no one (including scholars at the Chinese Academy of Sciences
Chinese Academy of Sciences
The Chinese Academy of Sciences , formerly known as Academia Sinica, is the national academy for the natural sciences of the People's Republic of China. It is an institution of the State Council of China. It is headquartered in Beijing, with institutes all over the People's Republic of China...
in Beijing
Beijing
Beijing , also known as Peking , is the capital of the People's Republic of China and one of the most populous cities in the world, with a population of 19,612,368 as of 2010. The city is the country's political, cultural, and educational center, and home to the headquarters for most of China's...
) has been able to find any clear examples of Asian symbolism or Asian science in the illustrations.
In 1976, James Child of the National Security Agency
National Security Agency
The National Security Agency/Central Security Service is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting U.S...
proposed that the manuscript was written in a "hitherto unknown North Germanic dialect".
In late 2003, Zbigniew Banasik of Poland proposed that the manuscript is plaintext written in the Manchu language
Manchu language
Manchu is a Tungusic endangered language spoken in Northeast China; it used to be the language of the Manchu, though now most Manchus speak Mandarin Chinese and there are fewer than 70 native speakers of Manchu out of a total of nearly 10 million ethnic Manchus...
and gave a proposed incomplete translation of the first page of the manuscript.
Glossolalia
In their book, Gerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill hint to the possibility that the Voynich manuscript may be a case of glossolaliaGlossolalia
Glossolalia or speaking in tongues is the fluid vocalizing of speech-like syllables, often as part of religious practice. The significance of glossolalia has varied with time and place, with some considering it a part of a sacred language...
, channeling
Mediumship
Mediumship is described as a form of communication with spirits. It is a practice in religious beliefs such as Spiritualism, Spiritism, Espiritismo, Candomblé, Voodoo and Umbanda.- Concept :...
or outsider art
Outsider Art
The term outsider art was coined by art critic Roger Cardinal in 1972 as an English synonym for art brut , a label created by French artist Jean Dubuffet to describe art created outside the boundaries of official culture; Dubuffet focused particularly on art by insane-asylum inmates.While...
.
If this is true, then the author felt compelled to write large amounts of text in a manner which somehow resembles stream of consciousness, either due to voices heard, or due to his own urge. While in glossolalia this often takes place in an invented language (usually made up of fragments of the author's own language), invented scripts for this purpose are rare. Kennedy and Churchill use Hildegard von Bingen's works to point out similarities between the illustrations she drew when she was suffering from severe bouts of migraine
Migraine
Migraine is a chronic neurological disorder characterized by moderate to severe headaches, and nausea...
—which can induce a trance-like state prone to glossolalia—and the Voynich manuscript. Prominent features found in both are abundant "streams of stars", and the repetitive nature of the "nymphs" in the biological section.
The theory is virtually impossible to prove or disprove, short of deciphering the text; Kennedy and Churchill are themselves not convinced of the hypothesis, but consider it plausible. (In the culminating chapter of their work, Kennedy states his belief that it is a hoax or forgery, whilst Churchill, acknowledging the possibility of a synthetic forgotten language, as advanced by Friedman, or forgery to be preeminent theories, concludes that if the manuscript is genuine, mental illness or delusion seems to have affected the author).
Hybrid language
In his book Solution of the Voynich Manuscript: A liturgical Manual for the Endura Rite of the Cathari Heresy, the Cult of Isis (1987), Leo Levitov declared the manuscript a plaintextPlaintext
In cryptography, plaintext is information a sender wishes to transmit to a receiver. Cleartext is often used as a synonym. Before the computer era, plaintext most commonly meant message text in the language of the communicating parties....
transcription of a "polyglot oral tongue". This he defined as "a literary language which would be understandable to people who did not understand Latin and to whom this language could be read". His proposed decryption has three Voynich letters making a syllable, to produce a series of syllables that form a mixture of Middle Dutch
Middle Dutch
Middle Dutch is a collective name for a number of closely related West Germanic dialects which were spoken and written between 1150 and 1500...
with many borrowed Old French
Old French
Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories that span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from the 9th century to the 14th century...
and Old High German
Old High German
The term Old High German refers to the earliest stage of the German language and it conventionally covers the period from around 500 to 1050. Coherent written texts do not appear until the second half of the 8th century, and some treat the period before 750 as 'prehistoric' and date the start of...
words.
According to Levitov, the rite of Endura was the assisted suicide ritual for people already believed to be near death, famously associated with the Cathar
Cathar
Catharism was a name given to a Christian religious sect with dualistic and gnostic elements that appeared in the Languedoc region of France and other parts of Europe in the 11th century and flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries...
faith (although the reality of this ritual is also in question). He explains that the chimerical plants are not meant to represent any species of flora, but are secret symbols of the faith. The women in the basins with elaborate plumbing represent the suicide ritual itself, which he believed involved venesection: the cutting of a vein to allow the blood to drain into a warm bath. The constellations with no celestial analogue are representative of the stars in Isis's mantle.
This theory is questioned on several grounds. First, the Cathar
Cathar
Catharism was a name given to a Christian religious sect with dualistic and gnostic elements that appeared in the Languedoc region of France and other parts of Europe in the 11th century and flourished in the 12th and 13th centuries...
faith is widely understood to have been a Christian gnosticism
Gnosticism
Gnosticism is a scholarly term for a set of religious beliefs and spiritual practices common to early Christianity, Hellenistic Judaism, Greco-Roman mystery religions, Zoroastrianism , and Neoplatonism.A common characteristic of some of these groups was the teaching that the realisation of Gnosis...
, and not in any way associated with Isis
Isis
Isis or in original more likely Aset is a goddess in Ancient Egyptian religious beliefs, whose worship spread throughout the Greco-Roman world. She was worshipped as the ideal mother and wife as well as the matron of nature and magic...
. Second, this theory places the book's origins in the twelfth or thirteenth century, which is several centuries earlier than most experts believe based on internal evidence. Third, the Endura ritual involved fasting, not venesection. Levitov offered no evidence beyond his translation for this theory.
Jim Child, a linguist of Indo-European languages, asserts that he has identified in the manuscript a "skeletal syntax several elements of which are reminiscent of certain Germanic languages", while the content itself is expressed using "a great deal of obscurity".
Constructed language
The peculiar internal structure of Voynich manuscript "words" led William F. FriedmanWilliam F. Friedman
William Frederick Friedman was a US Army cryptographer who ran the research division of the Army's Signals Intelligence Service in the 1930s, and parts of its follow-on services into the 1950s...
to conjecture that the text could be a constructed language
Constructed language
A planned or constructed language—known colloquially as a conlang—is a language whose phonology, grammar, and/or vocabulary has been consciously devised by an individual or group, instead of having evolved naturally...
. In 1950, Friedman asked the British army officer John Tiltman to analyze a few pages of the text, but Tiltman did not share this conclusion. In a paper in 1967, General Tiltman said, "After reading my report, Mr. Friedman disclosed to me his belief that the basis of the script was a very primitive form of synthetic universal language such as was developed in the form of a philosophical classification of ideas by Bishop Wilkins
John Wilkins
John Wilkins FRS was an English clergyman, natural philosopher and author, as well as a founder of the Invisible College and one of the founders of the Royal Society, and Bishop of Chester from 1668 until his death....
in 1667 and Dalgarno a little later. It was clear that the productions of these two men were much too systematic, and anything of the kind would have been almost instantly recognisable. My analysis seemed to me to reveal a cumbersome mixture of different kinds of substitution".
The concept of an artificial language is quite old, as attested by John Wilkins
John Wilkins
John Wilkins FRS was an English clergyman, natural philosopher and author, as well as a founder of the Invisible College and one of the founders of the Royal Society, and Bishop of Chester from 1668 until his death....
's Philosophical Language
An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language
An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language is the best-remembered of the numerous works of John Wilkins, in which he expounds a new universal language, meant primarily to facilitate international communication among scholars, but envisioned for use by diplomats, travelers, and...
(1668), but still postdates the generally accepted origin of the Voynich manuscript by two centuries. In most known examples, categories are subdivided by adding suffix
Suffix
In linguistics, a suffix is an affix which is placed after the stem of a word. Common examples are case endings, which indicate the grammatical case of nouns or adjectives, and verb endings, which form the conjugation of verbs...
es; as a consequence, a text in a particular subject would have many words with similar prefixes—for example, all plant names would begin with the similar letters, and likewise for all diseases, etc. This feature could then explain the repetitious nature of the Voynich text. However, no one has been able yet to assign a plausible meaning to any prefix or suffix in the Voynich manuscript.
Cultural impact
Many books and articles have been written about the manuscript. The first facsimileFacsimile
A facsimile is a copy or reproduction of an old book, manuscript, map, art print, or other item of historical value that is as true to the original source as possible. It differs from other forms of reproduction by attempting to replicate the source as accurately as possible in terms of scale,...
edition was published in 2005, Le Code Voynich: the whole manuscript published with a short presentation in French
French language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
. Because of heavy image cropping this does not quite constitute a proper facsimile edition.
The manuscript has also inspired several works of fiction.
See also
- Artificial script
- Asemic writingAsemic writingAsemic writing is a wordless open semantic form of writing. The word asemic means "having no specific semantic content". With the nonspecificity of asemic writing there comes a vacuum of meaning which is left for the reader to fill in and interpret. All of this is similar to the way one would...
- Book of SoygaBook of SoygaThe Book of Soyga, also titled Aldaraia, is a 16th century Latin treatise on magic, one copy of which is known to have been possessed by the Elizabethan scholar John Dee....
- Codex SeraphinianusCodex SeraphinianusCodex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978...
- False documentFalse documentA false document is a literary technique employed to create verisimilitude in a work of fiction. By inventing and inserting documents that appear to be factual, an author tries to create a sense of authenticity beyond the normal and expected suspension of disbelief for a work of art...
- False writing systemFalse writing systemFalse writing systems are artificially constructed alphabets or scripts used to convey a degree of concealed verisimilitude...
- Fictional languageFictional languageFictional languages are by far the largest group of artistic languages. Fictional languages are intended to be the languages of a fictional world and are often designed with the intent of giving more depth and an appearance of plausibility to the fictional worlds with which they are associated, and...
- Oera Linda Book
- Rohonc Codex
- RongorongoRongorongoRongorongo is a system of glyphs discovered in the 19th century on Easter Island that appears to be writing or proto-writing. It cannot be read despite numerous attempts at decipherment. Although some calendrical and what might prove to be genealogical information has been identified, not even...
External links
- The Voynich Manuscript from the digital collection of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript LibraryBeinecke Rare Book and Manuscript LibraryYale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library was a 1963 gift of the Beinecke family. The building was designed by architect Gordon Bunshaft of the firm of Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, and is the largest building in the world reserved exclusively for the preservation of rare books...
, Yale UniversityYale UniversityYale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States... - The Voynich Manuscript online at Internet ArchiveInternet ArchiveThe Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
- René Zandbergen's Voynich Manuscript Page about the Voynich Manuscript, including a Voynich MS - Pages / Folios gallery, and a bibliography
- Cipher Mysteries, Nick Pelling's historical cipher research site
- VoynichCentral.com, including a gallery page with a special page of highlights and features
- Voynich Manuscript Mailing List HQ
- Voynich Manuscript Bibliography by Jim Reeds
- The Voynich Manuscript by Kevin Knight
- Nature news article: World's most mysterious book may be a hoax A summary of Gordon Rugg's paper directed towards a more general audience
- Gordon Rugg, "The Mystery of the Voynich Manuscript", Scientific American, June 21, 2004
- Antoine Casanova, "méthodes d’analyse du langage crypté: Une contribution à l’étude du manuscrit de Voynich", 'Université PARIS VIII', 19 mars 1999
- The Voynich Code: The World's Mysterious Manuscript, an Austrian documentary film on the manuscript