Even the name of the manuscript’s author remains a mystery. However, without the ability to read the text, its true content has remained elusive. Scholars have used these illustrations to organise the manuscript’s content into six major sections: botanical, astronomical and astrological, biological, cosmological, pharmaceutical, and recipes. The word-structure leaves only one possible explanation: the manuscript was not composed in an Indo-European language.”Ī page from the Voynich Manuscript Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale UniversityĪdding to the mystery, the manuscript’s 240 vellum pages bear illustrations of plants, floating heads, signs of the zodiac, fantastic creatures (including dragons), castles, women bathing, and astronomical symbols. “A lot of languages were proposed, such as Latin, Czech, or amongst others Nahuatl (spoken by the Aztecs), just to name a few. “Countless decipherment attempts were made,” Hannig writes in an article in German explaining his methodology.
THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT BOOK CRACKED
Now, after three years of analysis, the German Egyptologist Rainer Hannig from the Roemer -und Pelizaeus Museum in Hildesheim, believes he has cracked the code to translating the work, and found the manuscript's language to be based on Hebrew.
THE VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT BOOK TV
Because of the many mysteries surrounding its content, it has featured in TV shows, books, music, and even video games. Even more likely, it could just be one traveler’s journal through foreign lands (the flora and star documentation could suggest this), and though his language was lost to time, his journal was not, perhaps through the same action that brought the book to Wilfrid Voynich - a simple sale.Will the Voynich Manuscript, an early 15th century document kept at Yale University and known as the world’s most mysterious book, finally reveal its secrets?Īny attempts to decipher the manuscript's unique text, made up of a mixture of handwritten Latin letters, Arabic numbers, and unknown characters, have so far failed. It’s also still possible that the Voynich is indeed a hoax. Among the notable terms deciphered, the constellation Taurus was discovered, what appeared to be the seven-star cluster Pleiades was identified, as well as the word “Kantairon,” which appeared to be used to identify the medieval herb centaury. From there, Bax used the proper nouns as something of a legend for deciphering other characters. However, linguistics professor Stephen Bax announced that he has finally made a breakthrough in deciphering the text, by focusing on identifying proper names.Ī single page from the Voynich Manuscript, depicting what appears to be humans.īax explains that his potential breakthrough involved identifying proper nouns - namely through identifying the plants and stars depicted in illustrations found throughout the text - the way similar strategies have been used to identify Egyptian hieroglyphs. Professional and amateur cryptographers haven’t come close in making a breakthrough, and that includes World War I and II codebreakers. There have been so many unproven hypotheses put forth over the years that it’s widely considered that the manuscript was intentionally created as a (very) well-made hoax. The manuscript has never been even slightly decoded - the individual words, the sentence formation, or even the diagrams of stars and plants that are found throughout - have not been solidly identified. Through carbon dating, the Voynich Manuscript - named after book dealer Wilfrid Voynich who purchased it in 1912 - was found to have been created sometime in the early 1400s, and possibly created in Northern Italy during the Italian Renaissance. Now, a University of Bedfordshire applied linguistics professor claims he has cracked the code. The most mysterious manuscript in the world, the 600-year-old Voynich Manuscript, has been baffling bright minds for the better part of a millennium.