Voynich Manuscript

Believed to have originated in the early 1400s, the Voynich Manuscript is an ancient text that still baffles scientists. The manuscript is hand-written in an unknown language that has been carbon-dated to roughly 1404 – 1438. While hundreds of cryptographers and master codebreakers have tried to decipher it over the years, none have as yet succeeding in grasping the meaning or origin of this strange manuscript. Most ancient languages have been either known or deciphered, so to find one that simply can’t be broken, is…stunning.

Because they have no other name for the language, the Voynich manuscript and its strange writing system is referred to as ‘Voynichese’ these days. It is written on vellum (fine parchment paper), and stylistic analysis indicates it may have been composed in Italy during the Italian Renaissance. Of course, as with any mystery, the origins, authorship, and purpose of the manuscript are much debated. There have been many theories concerning the text, including, “an otherwise unrecorded script for a natural language or constructed language; an unread code, cypher or other cryptography; or simply a meaningless hoax.” The idea of a meaningless hoax, strikes me as odd, considering the documented carbon dating of the manuscript, but everybody has a right to their own opinion.

The manuscript, as it was found, contains around 240 pages, but it looks as if some pages might be missing. There are some oddities, such as the fact that some pages are foldable sheets of varying size. Most of the pages have “fantastical illustrations or diagrams, some crudely colored, with sections of the manuscript showing people, fictitious plants, astrological symbols etc.” Whatever language this was, the people read from left to right like we do in English. For the purpose of identification, the manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912. Seeing the value of the manuscript, it ws decided that it should be held in Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where it has been since 1969.

While 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, it has never been demonstrably deciphered, and none of the many hypotheses proposed over the last hundred years has been independently verified. To this day the mystery of its meaning and origin has remained just that…a mystery, and very likely it always will be. It is my thought that this was an obscure and long-lost language, possibly a journal of some sort, but then, you guess is as good as mine.