What do obscure plant species, constellations, and naked women have in common?
They’re all prominently featured in a 600 year old book called the Voynich manuscript,
which has been baffling scientists for over a century.
Why?
Because drawings of the plants, stars, and women are displayed in a 240-page medieval
text alongside a language that remains absolutely indecipherable to this day.
The world’s greatest minds, from linguistic experts to wartime code breakers, have put
their heads together and poured over the Voynich text for years.
They’ve come no closer to understanding what language it’s written in, what part
of the world it’s from, or if it’s written in any language at all!
So we’re mobilizing our world class team of researchers, scientists, and engineers
to share the Voynich manuscript with our intelligent viewers, and see if we can be the ones to
solve the mystery.
In 1912, a Polish book dealer named Wilfrid Michael Voynich purchased an interesting-looking
manuscript from a Jesuit library in Italy.
Unable to understand what language it was written in, he asked academics to translate
it, starting a frustrating century long journey of code cracking, disproven theories, and
furious in-fighting among the academic world.
Some of the academics that studied the Voynich Manuscript theorized that the whole thing
might be a hoax.
However, if it is, it’s a very old hoax indeed.
The book is made out of vellum, a specially treated animal skin, because the 15th century
was a less vegan-friendly time.
Radiocarbon dating performed on the animal skin pages shows that they were produced in
the early 1400s.
The journey of the book in the beginning of its existence remains somewhat of a mystery.
Scholars know that at some point in the early 17th century, the book was owned by a member
of the Habsburg court of Rudolf II in Prague, probably Rudolf himself.
From the late 1600s to the late 1800s, it was stored at the Collegio Romano.
This still leaves large lapses in time early on when the book’s whereabouts and ownership
are unaccounted for.
Since Voynich re-introduced the book to the world, academics have argued wildly over what
language it may be written in, if the book is instead a code, or if it’s written in
any real language at all.
Part of the problem with deciphering the manuscript is that no one can seem to agree on one theory.
The first major hypothesis about the book’s origins came from academic Joseph Martin Feely,
who believed it was the work of medieval scientist Roger Bacon.
He believed that Bacon, for reasons unknown, chose to write this text in abbreviated medieval
Latin encoded in a substitution cipher.
Apparently the theory assumed that since this was before Netflix or the Internet, people
had way too much free time on their hands to write secret code books about plants.
There’s a glaring issue with this hypothesis: while the Voynich manuscript has been dated
to the early 1400s, Bacon died in 1292.
So unless Bacon faked his own death and lived to the ripe old age of 200, we can safely
dismiss this first theory.
In 2016, a natural language processing expert by the name of Professor Greg Kondrak decided
to apply modern artificial intelligence to try to solve the mystery of the Voynich manuscript.
His findings suggested that the book was actually written in Hebrew, but in an alphagram code.
This type of code rearranges the letters in each word alphabetically.
Kondrak’s computer-assisted translation of the manuscript read the first sentence
of this mysterious book as, “she made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and
people.”
This translation may not win any grammatical awards, but it does follow a bit of logic,
especially if we take into account that the translation is of a much older version of
Hebrew.
However, Hebrew scholars and other academics have disputed Kondrak’s theory.
They claim that in order to make any sort of sense out of the manuscript, Kondrak had
to make a lot of spelling corrections and adjustment to force a Hebrew translation to
work.
In his own published paper, Kondrak himself said that the translation required a lot of
changes to make sense, and that the first attempt at translation through a Hebrew alphagram
was “not quite coherent”.
Others point to the fact that Kondrak used Google Translate to help decipher the script
as a lack of scientific rigor in the study.
Anyone who has used Google Translate to try to order a sandwich and then been slapped
in a foreign country will probably side against Kondrak’s methods here as well.
The most recent theory, published in 2019, is by an English academic named Dr. Gerard
Cheshire.
After working on the manuscript for two weeks, he finally had a eureka moment when he identified
the writing in the medieval codex as a proto-Romance language, a now-dead language that served
as the root for modern Romance languages.
According to Cheshire, the reason this identification wasn’t made earlier is that proto-Romance
languages were spoken, and almost never used in texts.
At the time, Latin was the preferred method of writing.
However, the University of Bristol, where Cheshire works, has made it clear that this
theory is not endorsed by them and is only Cheshire’s private research, clearly lacking
confidence in the professor’s theory.
Academics dispute his findings as a stretch, essentially stating that Cheshire had a pre-existing
theory and then tried to make the Voynich manuscript fit that theory, instead of working
the other way around.
Lisa Fagin Davis, the executive director of the Medieval Academy of America and reigning
Queen of Academic Burns, stated that Cheshire’s theory was, “just more aspirational, circular,
self-fulfilling nonsense”.
You may notice that many of the translation theories regarding the book assume that a
complex code was used, as the language is unidentifiable.
However, many people who have studied the Voynich manuscript believe it is some kind
of reference guide or wellness guide, perhaps aimed at women.
This begs the question, if the Voynich manuscript is simply a 15th century version of Goop...why
would it be coded so mysteriously at all?
Wouldn’t it just be written in Latin, or another common European text of the time?
After all, some of the most brilliant code crackers of the 20th century have taken a
stab at the Voynich manuscript and come up with nothing.
Alan Turing, known as the father of modern computer science, and perhaps more famously
as Benedict Cumberbatch in “The Imitation Game”, tried to solve the code and failed.
If the man who solved the Nazi Enigma code and helped the Allies win World War II couldn’t
decipher the Voynich manuscript, perhaps it isn’t really a code at all.
This brings up another big theory.
Could the Voynich manuscript be one of the world’s oldest hoaxes?
It might seem ridiculous that someone would painstakingly write and illustrate 240 pages
as a joke to frustrate academics five centuries later.
The creation of the Voynich manuscript would have taken an incredibly long time, in an
era where the lifespan was usually under 40 and TB and dysentery ran rampant.
Even with multiple people writing it, the book would have taken at least two to eight
scribes several years of work to create.
Why would anyone care to create such an elaborate hoax?
Well, it’s possible that writing the Voynich manuscript could have made someone a lot of
money.
After all, it was not unknown for mystics and cult leaders to come up with complex,
incomprehensible scripts and claim they were divine, then sell them to the highest bidder
Historians point out that Rudolf II, the first presumed owner of the Voynich Manuscript,
was very interested in the occult and alchemy.
Two men that were found around his court at the time, John Dee and Edward Kelley, were
self-proclaimed mystics, and publicly-proclaimed conmen.
Could they have made up the Voynich Manuscript to trick Rudolf II into providing a massive
payday?
Accounts at the time state that the ruler paid 600 gold ducats for the book, equivalent
to about $90,000 today.
Though it’s never been definitely proven that Dee and Kelly sold him the manuscript,
this kind of cash would have been a great incentive for the two fraudsters to come up
with the Voynich manuscript as a hoax.
However, this theory creates a major problem with the book’s timeline.
Though the Voynich manuscript has been dated to the early 1400s, the two con men didn’t
allegedly sell the book to Rudolf II until the late 1500s.
Where was it for the previous 150 years?
And if it was a hoax created by Dee and Kelley, that means they wrote the strange, incomprehensible
text years after the pages were made.
So why were 240 pages of vellum sitting around blank yet preserved for 150 years before the
two men found them?
In any case, Rudolf eventually lost his trust in the two men and exposed Kelley as a fraud.
Things came to a head when he asked the mystic to produce gold using methods of alchemy Kelley
claimed he knew, and when Kelley tried to create gold using alchemy he...well, couldn’t.
In return, Rudolf imprisoned him in a tall tower that Kelley eventually fell out of.
Perhaps with assistance.
The other problem with this theory is that many academics argue the writing in the book
has identifiable semantic patterns.
These make it more likely to be an actual language than a hoax.
Other cryptographers argue that it could be a sophisticated hoax made to resemble a language
pattern, and the debate goes back and forth with no clear answer or solution, as with
most aspects of the Voynich manuscript.
Perhaps the biggest reveal of the Voynich book so far is that academics can be a really
stubborn group.
So what else can be found in this indecipherable book to help us understand it?
Well, there’s the illustrations, for one.
The Voynich drawings range from plant species and planets to a series of naked women in
green pools.
Based on the drawings, the book can roughly be divided into six sections: herbal, astronomical,
biological, cosmological, pharmaceutical, and recipes.
Can’t the drawings of plants in the book help give us an indication of where it may
have been written?
Weirdly enough, identifying the plants of the Voynich manuscript has only made the book’s
origins more mysterious.
Most people believe the Voynich book was created in Italy or central Europe.
Experts trying to match the book’s plants with species common to that area have run
up against many problems, including the fact that most plant drawings seem to be an amalgamation
of many different species.
The other issue is that some plant species that may have been present 600 years ago are
likely extinct by now, and therefore unidentifiable.
However, one man named Arthur Tucker, who is the co-director of the Claude E. Phillips
Herbarium at Delaware State University, identified 37 of the 303 plants in the Voynich manuscript
and claims they are native to...Central America!
This theory creates a lot more issues than it solves.
Mainly, how would central Europeans create a book that identified plants in the Americas,
as they wouldn’t know of the Americas’ existence for at least another 50 years?
At this point, it seems one of the most far-fetched theories regarding the origin of the Voynich
manuscript might not be so extreme after all: what if the book is an alien creation?
Let’s look at the facts: it’s written in a language that not a single historian
or linguistic expert can identify.
If it’s a code, the most brilliant cryptographers in the world have been unable to solve it.
In addition, some historians allege that the detailed drawings of planets and star systems
in the Voynich manuscript wouldn’t be possible in the early 1400s, as humans didn’t yet
know about some of the planetary motions depicted in the book.
However, there are a few problems with this theory as well.
First of all, as anyone who watched “Arrival” knows, if we ever do come into contact with
aliens, their systems of writing, language, and communication are likely to be extremely
different than ours.
If aliens chose to write a codex of biology and astronomy as seen on Earth, the chances
they would choose to do it with ink on vellum, in what appears to be a slow, handwritten
style, are very, very, low.
One would imagine if aliens had the technology to get to Earth, they would not have alien
scribes doing this kind of work on paper.
They would probably just be able to absorb the information and immediately mentally transfer
it to everyone in their species.
So what is the Voynich manuscript after all?
Was it a hoax by two con men to make money off a spiritual European ruler?
A book written in a code no one has been able to crack yet?
Or is it an insight into a language and culture that has been completely lost to time, to
the point where not one historian or linguist working today is able to recognize the only
evidence of its remains?
The Voynich manuscript is currently housed at the Beinecke Library at Yale University,
and many of its pages are available online to the public.
We may never know what secrets the Voynich manuscript holds.
Unless you, dear reader, end up being the one to crack the code.
Are you up for the challenge?
While you brainstorm how to show off by solving one of the greatest mysteries of all time,
why not keep the watch party going!
Check out this video here, and if you need even more time to think about cracking the
Voynich manuscript, check out this one as well!
Either way, you’re going to need more fun informational videos before you start your
mission, so click now!