The Voynich manuscript and its text that are to be decoded
Are you someone who has a penchant for decoding secret messages? If the answer is yes and if you have done some bit of research in this arena, then you have probably heard of the Voynich Manuscript. This centuries-old enigma of the literary world is preserved in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Turns out, it’s almost impossible to decode its text.
Voynich Manuscript: The story behind the name
For those unaware, the Voynich Manuscript is an illustrated and hand-written codex (ancestor of modern book) that has been composed in a mysterious writing system, often known as ‘Voynichese.’ After a series of radio carbon dating, it was revealed that the manuscript dates back to the 15th century Italy, during the Renaissance. Now comes the question about its authorship. Well, it hasn’t been found till date.
However, what we do know is how it got its name. Over the years, it has passed through many hands. For instance, in the 17th century, its first known owner was an alchemist in Prague called Georg Baresch. But it finally landed with Wilfrid Michael Voynich, a Polish-Lithuanian book dealer in the year 1912. Since then, the manuscript has been regarded as Voynich’s possession and hence the name.
Interestingly, it is also known as Beinecke MS 408 as in 1969, it was finally transferred to Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
Voynich Manuscript: A sneak peek
Unfortunately, the manuscript is both incomplete and partially damaged. It approximately contains 234 pages, that are mostly out-of-order or even missing in some places. It is replete with illustrations featuring people, castles, plants and even dragons. Apart from these, there are also astronomical signs spread across the book. Experts, after years of analysis, have divided the book into six sections (based on the illustrations): Botany, astronomy and astrology, biology, cosmology, pharmaceutical. There is also another text-only section where the beginnings of short entries are marked with decoration. This segment is believed to be recipes. The botany section, spanning through 113 pages, is the largest section of the manuscript.
Mysteries surrounding Voynich manuscript
This book, often considered as the enigma of the literary world lives up to its name. Okay, so what are the mysteries. Well, where do we even start? The language is highly disputable. While most consider it to be Hebrew, there have also been suggestions that it might be in Malay, Arabic, Amharic, Latin or High German or maybe a bizarre combination of all. Some even think that it’s an unrecorded script for a natural language or a constructed language, an unreadable code, cryptography or just a plain meaningless hoax. Nonetheless, the mystery continues.
There have been others who have also posited that the Voynich Manuscript is written in codes, more specifically, a substitution cipher. Yes, it is as complex as it sounds. In this technique, a message can be decoded by switching plaintext (letters of the alphabet) with ciphertext (made-up characters). So, you can understand it’s nearly impossible to figure out what really was written or who the real author was.
In case you are wondering whether or not anyone has really put efforts into deciphering it, the answer is yes and the number is countless. Has anyone been successful? No! Some of the professionals who attempted to encode the Voynich manuscript include Alan Turing, the man responsible for decoding the German Enigma Code during the Second World War, the professor-student duo Greg Kondrak and Bradley Hauer who took recourse to Artificial Intelligence.
The duo even used Google Translate and concluded that the language was most probably Hebrew. But they couldn’t confirm anything either. Years went by but the duo never game up. In fact, recently, they tried to unscramble the code itself and may have decoded the first sentence, that reads: “She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people.” However, many other experts have challenged their findings.
Interestingly, the Yale University has recently published the manuscript online and its digital version contains 225 pages.