Raymond
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The Voynich ManuscriptThe Voynich manuscript is a mysterious illustrated book written in an indecipherable text. It is thought to have been written between 1450 and 1520. The author, script and language of the manuscript remain unknown.
Over its recorded existence, the Voynich manuscript has been the object of intense study by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including some top American and British codebreakers of World War II fame (all of whom failed to decrypt a single word).
This string of failures has turned the Voynich manuscript into a famous subject of historical cryptology.
The book is named after the Polish-American book-dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich, who acquired it in 1912.
As of 2005, the Voynich manuscript is item MS 408 in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University.
By current estimates, the book originally had 272 pages in 17 quires of 16 pages each. About 240 pages remain today, and gaps in the page numbering indicate that several pages were already missing by the time that Voynich acquired it. A quill pen was used for the text and figure outlines, and colored paint was applied to the figures, possibly at a later date.
The "biological" section of the manuscript has dense text and illustrations showing nude women bathing.The text was clearly written from left to right, with a slightly ragged right margin.
Longer sections are broken into paragraphs, sometimes with "bullets" on the left margin. There is no obvious punctuation.
The ductus (the speed, care, and cursiveness with which the letters are written) flows smoothly, indicating that the scribe understood what he was writing when it was written; the manuscript does not give the impression that each character had to be calculated before being inked onto the page.
Statistical analysis of the text reveals patterns similar to natural languages. For instance, the word frequencies follow Zipf's law, and the word entropy (about 10 bits per word) is similar to that of English or Latin texts.
Some words occur only in certain sections, or in only a few pages; others occur throughout the manuscript. There are very few repetitions among the thousand or so "labels" attached to the illustrations.
Except for the last section, which contains only text, almost every page contains at least one illustration. The sections, and their conventional names, are:
Herbal each page displays one plant (sometimes two), and a few paragraphs of texta format typical of European herbals of the time.
Astronomical contains circular diagrams, some of them with suns, moons, and stars, suggestive of astronomy or astrology.
Biological a dense continuous text interspersed with figures, mostly showing small nude women bathing in pools or tubs connected by an elaborate network of pipes, some of them clearly shaped like body organs. Some of the women wear crowns.
Cosmological more circular diagrams, but of an obscure nature. This section also has fold-outs; one of them spans six pages and contains some sort of map or diagram, with nine "islands" connected by "causeways", castles, and possibly a volcano.
Pharmaceutical many labeled drawings of isolated plant parts (roots, leaves, etc.); objects resembling apothecary jars drawn along the margins; and a few text paragraphs.
Recipes many short paragraphs, each marked with a flower-like (or star-like) "bullet points".
Dr Leonell Strong, a cancer research scientist and amateur cryptographer, tried to decipher the Voynich manuscript. Strong said that the solution to the Voynich manuscript was a "peculiar double system of arithmetical progressions of a multiple alphabet". Strong claimed that the plaintext revealed the Voynich manuscript to be written by the 16th century English author Anthony Ascham, whose works include A Little Herbal, published in 1550.
Although the Voynich manuscript does contain sections resembling a herbal, the main argument against this theory is that it is unknown where Anthony would have obtained such literary and cryptographic knowledge.
Prescott Currier, a US Navy cryptographer who worked with the manuscript in the 1970s, observed that the pages of the "herbal" section could be separated into two sets, A and B, with distinctive statistical properties and apparently different handwritings.
He concluded that the Voynich manuscript was the work of two or more authors who used different dialects or spelling conventions, but who shared the same script.
The first section of the book is almost certainly herbal, but attempts to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with the stylized drawings of contemporary herbals, have largely failed. Only a couple of plants (including a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern) can be identified with some certainty. Those "herbal" pictures that match "pharmacological" sketches appear to be "clean copies" of these, except that missing parts were completed with improbable-looking details. In fact, many of the plants seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third.
The basins and tubes in the "biological" section may seem to indicate a connection to alchemy, which would also be relevant if the book contained instructions on the preparation of medical compounds. However, alchemical books of the period share a common pictorial language, where processes and materials are represented by specific images (such as eagle, toad, man in tomb, couple in bed) or standard textual symbols (such as circle with cross); and none of these could be convincingly identified in the Voynich manuscript.
Astrological considerations frequently played a prominent role in herb gathering, blood-letting and other medical procedures common during the likeliest dates of the manuscript. However, apart from the obvious Zodiac symbols, and one diagram possibly showing the classical planets, no one has been able to interpret the illustrations within known astrological traditions.
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