“The whole thing is medical,” wrote alchemist Barchius in 1639, and for most of the Voynich manuscript’s history, that’s been the closest thing there is to a consensus view about it. And in the end there’s the recipe section, with no illustrations at all: only line after line of that incomprehensible text, each paragraph marked with a star in the margin. In the pharmaceutical section, illustrations of containers are lined up next to illustrations of herbs. The biological section is filled with illustrations of naked humans, mostly women, in a series of tubes or baths filled with liquid. Some of the herbs appear to be real plants, some of them don’t seem to exist, and a few of them are said to resemble sunflowers, which did not exist in Europe in the 15th century (although this identification has been questioned).įollowing the botanical section is the astronomical section, with pictures of the sun, moon, and stars and then the cosmological section, with pictures of circular geometric designs and the zodiac section, which features emblems of the zodiac signs. The first section is the botanical section, which comprises about half the manuscript and includes pictures of herbs. Over time, Voynich enthusiasts have given each section a conventional name: botanical, astronomical, cosmological, zodiac, biological, pharmaceutical, and recipes. The Voynich manuscript appears to have seven separate sections. “He relinquished hope only with his life.” What’s in the book? It seems to have consumed the lives of its owners: “To its deciphering he devoted unflagging toil,” wrote the friend of one owner after his death. (Rudolf was passionately devoted to alchemy and the occult.) Rudolf, however, seemed to have no luck decoding the manuscript, and it passed from hand to hand until it ended up in Jesuit holdings in Rome, where it would remain hidden until Voynich turned it up 300 years later.Īlong the way, the manuscript paused with early cryptologists like the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher, who claimed to have decoded the Egyptian hieroglyphs (he hadn’t), but it remained unsolved. The first supposed owner of the manuscript is believed to be the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II, who allegedly purchased it for 600 gold ducats ($90,000 today) sometime around the beginning of the 17th century, apparently under the belief that the manuscript was the work of the 13th-century English alchemist Roger Bacon. It entered the historical record centuries old and already unreadable. As far back as anyone has been able to track discussion of the Voynich manuscript, there is no history of it existing as anything other than a marvelous, indecipherable curiosity. No one knows who wrote the Voynich manuscript or for what purpose, but carbon dating places its origins between 14, despite Voynich’s claim that it was a 13th-century document. Where did the Voynich manuscript come from? Here are the questions posed by that Sphinxian riddle. Cryptologists across the world have tried and failed to decode the Voynich since at least the 17th century, when an alchemist described it as “a certain riddle of the Sphinx.” Gibbs may have failed to decipher the Voynich manuscript, but he joins a long and illustrious lineage of failures. Earlier this September, scholar Nicholas Gibbs published an article in the Times Literary Supplement claiming to have cracked the code, only to be pooh-poohed by medievalists across the internet. The text that came to be known as the Voynich manuscript is now housed at Yale, and dozens of medievalists and cryptologists study it every year. To this date, no one has successfully solved either problem. “Two problems presented themselves - the text must be unravelled and the history of the manuscript must be traced.” “The fact that this was a 13th century manuscript in cipher convinced me that it must be a work of exceptional importance, and to my knowledge the existence of a manuscript of such an early date written entirely in cipher was unknown,” Voynich said. It wasn’t in any known shorthand or variation of medieval Latin or English or French or any other known language. And not a word of the script was comprehensible. It was long - 234 pages - filled with pictures of plants and naked women and what appeared to be astrological diagrams, and line after line of script. It wasn’t gilded or beautifully illuminated, like the manuscripts with which it was bundled, but it caught his eye nonetheless: It was in code. gUqiPd.In 1912, an antiques dealer named Wilfrid Voynich came across a remarkable manuscript. Sorry, It Looks Like a Researcher Didn’t Just Crack the Voynich Manuscript After All
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