For six hundred years, the Voynich manuscript has stumped scholars, cryptographers,
physicists, computer scientists, pretty much everybody.
Now, a researcher in Germany has claimed to have finally decoded the most mysterious book
in the world, a. What's it say?
Well. Welcome to the wire files, where smart folks like us come to laugh and learn, have
the secrets of the Voynich manuscript finally been revealed?
Will a German Egyptologist claims he solved it as he.
Well, he thinks so.
But first, some background.
Voynich manuscript is a two hundred and forty page medieval codex, written in an
indecipherable language full of bizarre drawings of strange plants, astrological symbols
and lots and lots of naked women.
Oh, is centerfold.
Actually, there is spicy.
The voyage manuscript defies classification and is also defied comprehension.
Everybody's taking a shot at this.
Cryptologists FBI operatives, respected, medievalists mathematic and scientific scholars,
skilled linguists.
They've all been left stumped.
Even Alan Turing took a crack at it and came up short.
So sorry. A book written in an unknown language no one has been able to decode with
crumbling pages made of Bauen Calfskin dating back to the 15th century, you probably
picture something out of a Nicholas Cage movie.
And what you might not picture is a book filled with whimsical illustrations of nude
women in bathtubs, bathtubs with windows, bathtubs shaped like ovaries, bathtubs oozing
green liquid bathtubs, bathtubs, bathtubs everywhere.
These, along with drawings of star shaped flowers and wild green vines, are all kind of
tucked inside the pages.
The mysterious book has been divided into sections by historians verbal, astrological,
pharmacological and bone.
Theological, biological.
The study above the study of Barths.
That makes more sense. The verbal section is thick with elaborate drawings of
unrecognized plants, their twisted and spiky with dripping leaves and wide petals and one
drawing. There's some kind of reptilian sea creature who looks like a mix between a
dragon and a seahorse is chewing on one of the leaves.
Looks like whoever made this book was also making funny tea with those plants.
That would that would answer some questions.
In the astrological section, pages fold out into massive charts of the night sky with
complicated constellations intertwined with doodles of naked women holding stars and
emerging from tubes.
Is just a centerfold you were talking about.
Yup. No mermaids and nothing.
No bit of a letdown.
You need a girlfriend. Let's go to the store and pick one up.
That's not a healthy way to start a relationship.
If she doesn't work out, we'll exchange it for a new one.
You can't do that.
Right, right, right, right. How many times have you said you'd like to trade your wife
in? Some say the astrological part is the book's most translatable section.
It features constellations like Pisces, Taurus and Sagittarius, but they're a little bit
off and the only logical section is by far the most bizarre.
You've got naked women floating, swimming, drowning and resting in all kinds of baths.
And the bath circuit takes shape, baths or holes in the ground, winding river like pipes
and baths shaped like a woman's reproductive system.
This section is the most famous in the manuscript, and it's easy to see why.
People have wondered for centuries why the author was so fascinated with women in
bathtubs. This is giving me some ideas for a new fishbowl design.
Nope, don't even go to you.
Would blowing glass.
Oh, I'm not blowing anything for you.
The last session, the pharmacological section is almost all Texan Boyana cheese is Boigny
cheese made by cows or goats.
Technically, it was made by a man.
I have nipples. Greg, could you milk me?
You Voynov Cheese is written from left to right, and although it's never been officially
deciphered, there's definitely a structure to it.
Researchers have concluded that the language has twenty to twenty five distinct letters,
but nobody's been able to figure out how the letters fit together, according to Creped
analyst Elizabeth Friedman in 1960.
To anyone who attempts to translate, it is doomed to utter frustration.
Same goes for trying to understand what you do about rhythm can argue with that.
The theories about the Voynich manuscript are all over the place.
Some think the book was written by philosophers in a secret code.
Only they could understand.
But my favorite theory is aliens.
Yep. If you Google Voynich plus aliens, you get all kinds of great stuff because it
contains a language that cannot be found anywhere else on the planet.
And given the fact that the ancient manuscript depicts star charts that are unknown to
us. The voyage manuscript could have been created by a being not from Earth, who during
the fourteen hundreds crash landed here knowing that humans didn't have the necessary
technology to help them return to his planet.
Maybe the alien visitor decided to chronicle his remaining life on Earth inside the
manuscript, a coloring book.
Oh, I love the Internet.
After hundreds of years of failed attempts to translate it, no theory was really off the
table. But this June, one man claimed to have cracked the code once and for all.
According to German Egyptologist Rainer Hartig, Voynich Cheese is actually based in
Hebrew. He concluded that the text must be a Semitic language, and given the European
imagery in the book's illustrations, he narrowed the options to Arabic, Aramaic or
Hebrew, which were languages spoken by the European scholars of the Middle Ages.
After identifying a connection between certain Voynich characters in Hebrew, he managed
to translate the first few words and then full sentences.
It will be years, Hanak says, before the full manuscript will be translated.
So what's it say?
Mostly gibberish.
Experts in ancient Hebrew are not convinced that HanTing cracked anything.
They've poked more than a few holes in his translation and said he's taken quite a few
liberties with the language to try to derive meaning where it just doesn't exist.
About us. Over the past few decades, at least 60 Voynich Solutions have been published so
far. All of them have been debunked.
In twenty nineteen, David Cheshire, a research associate at the University of Bristol in
England, thought the book was written in a language lost the time.
A predecessor to modern English and Spanish, he told Roman studies.
When I realised the magnitude of the achievement, it was like a Eureka moment.
And Cheshire's News hit the media like a tsunami and was debunked with the same amount of
force. Botched research and a rush to publication added up to a pretty embarrassing mess.
And as stated in ARS Technica after the fallout, another day, another dubious claim that
someone has decoded the Voynich manuscript.
In 2017, television writer Nicholas Gibbs made international news when he claimed to have
solved the mystery, Gibbs believed that the book is a women's health manual and the
language is actually made up of Latin abbreviations.
And the woman's health book theory might hold some merit.
I mean, why else would you do the ovaries in a bunch of fallopian tubes unless you,
Jackie Treehorn and Lubarsky fans get it?
But the Latin abbreviation idea was the less convincing Latin experts found his
translations to be pretty much nonsense.
This wasn't too much of a shock.
Gibbs didn't have a lot of credibility to begin with.
He was studying the text for a television show and lacked real experience in historical
text decoding. So the producers think they know everything.
Even the Hebrew theory has been brought up and shut down before in twenty sixteen to
computer scientists announced that they had successfully translated the entire sentences
of the book from Hebrew.
How do they test their theory?
Well, they typed every Hebrew letter they recognized into Google Translate.
According to their findings, the first sentence of the manuscript reads She made
recommendations to the priest men of the house and me and people seemed legit.
It wasn't Hebrew experts reviewed this work and said the translation wasn't even close.
Now, while the language of the Voynich manuscript remains unknown, the book's history is
slightly less mysterious, although there's still a few hundred years not accounted for.
Historians at the University of Arizona have carbon dated the book to the 15th century
between 14 four and fourteen thirty eight, and clues such as the style of the
illustrations, the type of pigments and paints used and the calfskin that the text was
written on all indicated probably originated in northern Italy.
The voyage first appears in the historical record in the late 16th century, when Holy
Roman Emperor Rudolf the second purchased the book and the Imperial Physician's signature
is visible on the first page of the text.
So we know he probably had it.
It been passed into the hands of George Bresch, an alchemist from Prague who referred to
the book as a certain riddle of the Sphinx that was uselessly taking up space.
When Barrack's ER inherited the manuscript, he sent it to an Egyptian hieroglyphics
expert in Rome for help decoding the text if he decode it.
He did not. He said it couldn't be cracked when they weren't given the manuscript, then
disappeared for two hundred and fifty years, finally resurfacing when it was purchased by
Polish book dealer Wilfred Voynich in 1912.
And Voynich dedicated his life to deciphering it, and eventually the book was named after
him for a time. Some people believe that Voynich himself wrote the manuscript hoping to
sell the medieval mystery for a lot of money.
But carbon dating proved this theory impossible.
The book was eventually donated to Yale's Vinicky Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where
remains today capturing imaginations, igniting curiosities and fueling controversies.
Historians and cryptologists, linguists and scientists continue their search for the
Voynich manuscripts, meaning the most logical theory to me is that it was a hoax
perpetrated on Emperor Rudolf by Edward Kelly, a medieval scam artist.
Kelly would go into these trances, reclaim to be able to speak to angels and other people
would then write down what the angels said in their angel language.
A lot of people spoke this angel language.
No. What did they write down?
Just, you know, nonsense.
That is not at all helpful.
It's not. If the manuscript really is a transcription of one of these angel sessions
decoding, it is going to be tricky the way angels even have a language.
Oh, some people in the comments are going to insist they do.
You'll see. So the best cryptographers are stumped.
Computer scientists and all their tools have got nowhere.
And experts in ancient languages have all hit dead ends.
I guess all we have left to do is wait for an angel.
We were awaiting your arrival.
Thanks for hanging out with us today.
My name is A.J. That's Hellfish.
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