The Voynich Manuscript is one of the most enigmatic medieval manuscripts. Neither its author, nor its content, nor even the language in which it was written is known for certain. This richly illustrated codex has gone through many owners, and for decades scholars have theorized about the text's origins. The Voynich manuscript is a subject of special attention for cryptographers, which remains undeciphered today.
Description of the Voynich manuscript
The Voynich Manuscript is a handwritten codex measuring 23.5 by 16.2 cm and 5 cm thick. It has about 240 pages, some of which are folding, that is, they have larger size wider than the others. Some of the pages of the manuscript have been lost. The document contains text in an unknown language and illustrations for it. It is not known exactly who and when compiled this manuscript.
According to research carried out in 2009 using the methods of physical and chemical analysis, its text and drawings are applied with a bird pen, using the same black-brown iron gall ink, and the illustrations are colored in blue, green, white and red-brown paints based on natural ingredients. Some illustrations also contain traces of faded yellow paint. The pagination of the manuscript and the Latin alphabet on its first page are applied using other inks, which also differ in composition. The data of the same analysis confirm that the manuscript was written in Europe, but not outside of it. The text was written by several people, at least two, and the illustrations were also made by several authors.
Pages 34 and 74 from the Voynich manuscript
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The material from which the manuscript is made is parchment. However, this is not a palimpsest. Radiocarbon analysis of several fragments of this material from different parts of the manuscript makes it possible to date the time of its creation to the first half of the 15th century. At the same time, the text and drawings also date from this era. This does not rule out the possibility that parchment made during this period could have been used later, but there is no conclusive evidence for this.
According to its content, the Voynich manuscript is conditionally divided into several chapters - including the so-called "herbarium", which depicts plants and explanations for them, "astronomy" with drawings that resemble some constellations, "cosmology" with circular diagrams, "signs of the Zodiac" , "biology", where people are represented, mostly naked women during bathing, "pharmaceutics", where fragments of vessels are shown, reminiscent of apothecary equipment and fragments of plants. Some of the final pages of the manuscript are not illustrated.
Manuscript owners
The data of radiocarbon and paleographic analysis of the manuscript do not allow us to reliably determine the place of its creation. Region of its possible origin Researchers different countries define it differently, calling it Italy, then Germany, then Spain, then the Czech Republic or France.
The origin and history of this manuscript also still have many ambiguities and were more or less reliably documented only in the 20th century. The manuscript received its current name, under which it gained worldwide fame, from one of its owners, Mikhail (Wilfred) Voynich (1865–1930), a Polish revolutionary. Having fled Russia due to persecution for his political activities, Voynich abandoned his revolutionary ideas and began trading in antiquarian books and manuscripts, first in the UK and then in the USA. In 1915, he made public a medieval manuscript, which he had bought, according to him, three years earlier in Italy, at Villa Mondragone, from Jesuit monks. After Voynich's death, the manuscript was owned by his wife, the writer Ethel L. Voynich (1864–1960), and was later purchased by the antiquary Hans-Peter Kraus for $24,500. Kraus tried to resell the manuscript further for $160,000, but failed and donated it to the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University in 1969. Currently, the manuscript is available for study by everyone in the form of a digitized copy on the website of this library and in the form of a facsimile edition, published in 2016.
Michael-Wilfred Voynich
// wikipedia.org
Origin and authorship of the manuscript
Voynich believed that the English medieval philosopher Roger Bacon (1214?–1292) was the author of the manuscript, and thus he believed that it was produced in the ΧΙΙΙ century. He drew this suggestion from a 1665/6 letter from the Czech scholar Jan M. Marci (1595–1667) to his German colleague, the Jesuit monk Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), whose help he sought to decipher the manuscript. Marzi claimed that the manuscript had previously belonged to the German emperor Rudolf ΙΙ of Habsburg (1576–1612), who, as a great lover of various rarities, purchased this manuscript for 600 ducats. Based on the known data on the biography of Martzi, Voynich also suggested that after the emperor, the owner of the manuscript was the Czech alchemist Georg Barsh (or Baresh), who left Martzi his library. In addition to him, another owner of the manuscript Voynich considered Jakob Horczycki (1575-1622), a doctor and gardener of the emperor. Voynich relied on the fact that the manuscript had a signature, which he subjected to chemical analysis and considered to be his.
Roger Bacon
// wikipedia.org
At present, well-known sources about the composition of the book and manuscript collections of Rudolf ΙΙ do not confirm Marzi's statement, and the version about the authenticity of Horcicka's signature was convincingly refuted by the Czech historian J. Hurich, who found the autographs of this doctor. However, at the same time, other letters from Marzi Kircher, as well as the correspondence of their acquaintances, discovered in the 1990s in the Czech National Library and the Duke August Library in Wolfenbüttel, indicate that the manuscript really belonged to Georg Barsch at one time, and then through Marcy went to Kircher. In the 2000s, R. Sandbergen, J. Smolka, and F. Neal, who studied these materials, thus traced the passage of the manuscript from Marzi to the Jesuits, from whom Voynich acquired it in 1912.
The question of the authorship of the manuscript, however, remains open. In addition to Roger Bacon, the authorship of the manuscript was attributed to the English scientist John Dee (1527-1609), who was fond of alchemy, his acquaintance Edward Kelly (1555-1597), as well as their German colleague Johann Trithemius (1462-1516) and some other authors of the Middle Ages and early Modern time, interested in or practicing encryption business. However, at present, since radiocarbon data convincingly date this manuscript to the first half of the 15th century, their involvement in its creation is devoid of solid evidence. Among the possible authors of the manuscript, Voynich himself was also named, believing that the manuscript was his hoax, made for profit. However, this version was also declared untenable.
Study of the Voynich manuscript
The first attempts to decipher the manuscript were made by the aforementioned Marzi and Kircher in the 17th century. They, like the efforts of Voynich himself, were not successful. Nevertheless, it is with Voynich that the era of scientific study of this manuscript begins, which continues to this day. In this process, two main periods can be distinguished: before the use of computer technology and after it. At the same time, both periods are characterized by attention to the manuscript both on the part of specialists, that is, cryptologists, linguists, historians, mathematicians, programmers, and so on, and on the part of numerous amateurs.
The first period falls on the 1920s–1960s. At this time, the theory of the American philosopher R. Newbold (1928) appeared, who, like Voynich, considered R. Bacon to be the author. A group of manuscript investigators also formed, including US military cryptographers, one of whom was W. F. Friedman. Friedman prepared the first machine-readable version of the manuscript (1946) on the basis of assigning Latin letters and their combinations to the characters in which its text is written, and thus he created the prerequisite for studying it using a computer. The American entrepreneur J. Fabian, one of the private sponsors of this study, hoped that the philosopher F. Bacon (1561–1626) was the author of the manuscript, but Friedman convincingly proved that this was not the case.
Fragment of the text of the manuscript
// wikipedia.org
In the 1970s, this work was continued by P. Carrier, who opened a new era in the study of the manuscript with the help of electronic computers. At this time, the first generalizing studies about the manuscript appeared. In 1978, two works came out at once: R. M. Brumbau suggested that this was a hoax in the style of the Neoplatonists, created to deceive Rudolph ΙΙ, and M.E. D'Imperio was less categorical, simply presenting an overview of existing versions. In subsequent years, numerous studies by specialists around the world offered a variety of versions regarding the possible language of the manuscript, believing that it could be not only one, but several languages, including non-European, including artificial. Back in 1976, physicist W. Bennet found that the level of entropy in the language of the book is lower than in any European language, which gave rise to the version of a possible "Polynesian trace" in the manuscript.
In 2016, a group of researchers - A. A. Arutyunov, L. A. Borisov, D. A. Zenyuk, A. Yu. Ivchenko, E.P. Kirina-Lilinskaya, Yu. N. Orlov, K. P. Osminin, S. L. Fedorov, S. A. Shilin - put forward a hypothesis that the text is written in a mixed language without vowels: 60% of the text is written in one of the languages West Germanic group (English or German), and 40% of the text is in the language of the Romance group (Italian or Spanish) and/or in Latin. A similar hypothesis was advanced back in 1997 by the linguist J. B. M. Guy, who believed that the manuscript was written in two dialects of the same language. However, up to the present time, none of the versions regarding the language (or languages) of the manuscript is fully substantiated, since no one has been able to read it.
Pages 29 and 99 from the Voynich manuscript
// wikipedia.org
A number of researchers tried to establish which plants are depicted in the manuscript. So, A. O. Tucker and R. G. Talbert suggested that the manuscript contains images found in North America, which indicates its creation after the expeditions of Columbus. However, this version has not yet received further confirmation.
In recent years, the research of British scientists G. Rugg and G. Tylor, who adhere to the version that the Voynich manuscript is nothing more than a hoax, has enjoyed great authority regarding the problem of deciphering the manuscript. They prove that the text of the manuscript could have been formed according to the principle of the Cardano grid, which made it possible to create the appearance of a meaningful text, which is in fact just gibberish.
Significance of the Voynich manuscript for the history of science and the development of encryption
Opening of the Voynich Manuscript
// wikipedia.org
For a long time, the manuscript maintains interest in the study of the history of scientific knowledge and ways to protect information. At the same time, due to the fact that her "mystery of the cipher of the Voynich manuscript" has not yet been solved, she did not have a direct impact on the development of encryption business anywhere. The difficulties faced by any researchers of this manuscript are due, among other things, to the fact that a team of specialists of a different nature does not always gather, that is, mathematicians, historians, linguists, programmers, and so on, which would allow for a simultaneous multidisciplinary study of this manuscript. The veil of secrecy that has formed around this manuscript also attracts non-professionals, who from time to time make loud statements in the media, creating a stir around it.
How to follow the research of the Voynich manuscript?
In order to keep abreast of the latest trends in the study of this manuscript, you need to at least master the English language and regularly read the journal "Cryptologia", as well as keep track of updates on the website of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University. Regular updates regarding this manuscript are also published on the blog of the oldest online research group for this manuscript and on R. Sandbergen's website.
nudes female bodies, plants that do not grow anywhere in the world and maps of non-existent islands - all these are just illustrations for a text in which not only words, but also letters are incomprehensible. Only artificial intelligence was able to penetrate the secrets of an ancient book that was not deciphered even by crackers of top-secret Nazi codes. The 360 website tells the details of this story.
Canadian linguists claim that they have managed to beat the best cryptologists in the world, from CIA and NSA analysts to the "stars" of past generations - British and American military intelligence specialists. A team of scientists from the University of Alberta partially Voynich's manuscript. Written approximately 600 years ago, the book uses a language not found in any other text created by mankind in its entire long history - even its alphabet is unique.
Over the past 100 years, the manuscript has become the "holy grail" of lovers of unsolvable mysteries. Despite numerous attempts by mathematicians, linguists and cipher experts, the language has never been understood. Until recently, its structure remained an invincible fortress, on the walls of which many talented researchers broke their spears.
book mystery
The Canadians gave up trying to solve the puzzle by conventional means, relying on neural network algorithms in their study of the ancient manuscript. The program previously identified each of the 300 languages into which the Universal Declaration of Human Rights has been translated with 97% accuracy. Now she could read the unreadable.
The Voynichevsky language has been studied up and down - it is known that about 35 thousand words of the manuscript have some characteristic features of European languages, but at the same time they can be part of constructions reminiscent of Arabic or Greek. A number of examinations helped to determine even the exact composition of the ink and the approximate dating of the book - the beginning of the 15th century. One of the drawings shows the castle fortress, whose battlements point to the same era and to a specific place - the north of modern Italy. But all this data did not help to read at least one word of the text.
Some researchers, in desperation, assumed that the book was written in a fictitious language that did not make sense - supposedly it was a fake that helped charlatans posing as astrologers and doctors to swindle money from nobles and wealthy merchants.
But Canadian scientists believe that the book was written in a real and well-known language. After analyzing the text with a neural network, it gave an unambiguous answer - this is Hebrew. Only in each word the letters were swapped, and the vowels were completely discarded. This made it difficult to work, but some words still managed to be translated. The manuscript often contains "farmer", "light", "air", and "fire". The very first sentence has also been deciphered.
She gave advice to the priest, the head of the house, me and the people
- the first sentence of the Voynich manuscript.
word magic
In textbooks on cryptography, this manuscript is cited as an example of an ideal code, whose secret was not revealed to the best minds of the twentieth century - the Voynich manuscript was repeatedly recognized as the most mysterious book in the world.
In 1912, the antiquarian Wilfried Voynich discovered it in the library of the Jesuit palace in Rome. His surname is known today for two reasons: thanks to the literary success of the wife of the antiquarian Ethel Lillian (in particular, who wrote the novel The Gadfly) and the Voynich manuscript. The reason why the book began to be called by the name of one of the owners is simple - the author and its real name are unknown to anyone.
There are no inscriptions or drawings on the cover of the old work, but inside, almost on each of the 240 pages, there are colorful illustrations of exotic plants, the starry sky and human figures. In some places an anatomical atlas with rather detailed images of women and men without clothes, in some places a reference book on botany, in which herbs known to modern science are side by side with unprecedented flowers, the book most of all resembles a medieval grimoire - a collection of spells and witchcraft recipes.
Despite the terrible punishments for sorcerers, many books devoted to magic and spells were created in the Middle Ages. The manuscripts that have come down to us are often written in "dead" languages and full of riddles, but at least they can be read. The Voynich manuscript, until recently, defied even the most sophisticated experts in secret ciphers.
During World War II, a team of British Bletchley Park cryptanalysts, hardened by working with the codes of the Nazi Enigma cipher machine, took up the text, recalls the BBC. They tried hard to find the meaning of the lines in the yellow pages of the manuscript, but in the end they retreated and admitted their defeat.
Against this background, the success of the neural network looks amazing, but Greg Kondrak, who is in charge of computer algorithms, warns that it is still far from a complete solution. Artificial intelligence is not able to understand the meaning of words that changes depending on the context, not to mention the allegories and puzzles that can be hidden behind seemingly simple phrases. According to the scientist, a person who understands Hebrew perfectly and is well versed in history is needed - such a specialist will be able to give a correct analysis of the data received.
Can we carefully, like detectives, look at the text and understand what kind of message is encrypted in it?
— Greg Kondrak, quoted byDailyMail.
While all the secrets of the Voynich manuscript have not yet become known to neural networks, you can delve into them yourself. True, only if you have seven or eight thousand euros. This is the approximate price of copies of the book that will be printed by a small Spanish publishing house. In total, 898 copies will be released exactly resembling the original.
The collection of the Yale University Library (USA) contains a unique rarity, the so-called Voynich Manuscript. On the Internet, many sites are devoted to this document, it is often called the most mysterious esoteric manuscript in the world.
The manuscript is named after its former owner, the American bookseller W. Voynich, husband of the famous writer Ethel Lilian Voynich (author of The Gadfly). The manuscript was bought in 1912 in one of the Italian monasteries. It is known that in the 1580s. The then German Emperor Rudolf II became the owner of the manuscript. The encrypted manuscript with numerous color illustrations was sold to Rudolf II by the famous English astrologer, geographer and explorer John Dee, who was very interested in getting the opportunity to freely leave Prague for his homeland, England. Therefore, Dee is said to have exaggerated the antiquity of the manuscript. According to the features of paper and ink, it is attributed to the 16th century. However, all attempts to decipher the text over the past 80 years have been in vain.
This book, measuring 22.5 x 16 cm, contains coded text, in a language that has not yet been identified. It originally consisted of 116 sheets of parchment, fourteen of which are currently considered lost. Written in a fluent calligraphic handwriting with a quill pen and ink in five colors: green, brown, yellow, blue and red. Some letters are similar to Greek or Latin, but are mostly hieroglyphs that have not yet been found in any other book.
Almost every page contains drawings, based on which the text of the manuscript can be divided into five sections: botanical, astronomical, biological, astrological and medical. The first, by the way the largest section, includes more than a hundred illustrations of various plants and herbs, most of which are unidentifiable or even phantasmagoric. And the accompanying text is carefully divided into equal paragraphs. The second, astronomical section is similarly designed. It contains about two dozen concentric diagrams with images of the Sun, Moon and various constellations. A large number of human figures, mostly female, decorate the so-called biological section. It seems that it explains the processes of human life and the secrets of the interaction of the human soul and body. The astrological section is replete with images of magical medallions, zodiacal symbols and stars. And in the medical part, probably, recipes for the treatment of various diseases and magical advice are given.
Among the illustrations are more than 400 plants that have no direct analogues in botany, as well as numerous figures of women, spirals of stars. Experienced cryptographers, in an attempt to decipher a text written in unusual scripts, most often acted as was customary in the 20th century - they carried out a frequency analysis of the occurrence of various characters, choosing the appropriate language. However, neither Latin, nor many Western European languages, nor Arabic came up. The bust continued. We checked Chinese, Ukrainian, and Turkish ... In vain!
The short words of the manuscript are reminiscent of some of the languages of Polynesia, but nothing came of it either. Hypotheses about the extraterrestrial origin of the text appeared, especially since the plants are not similar to those familiar to us (although they are very carefully traced), and the spirals of stars in the 20th century reminded many of the spiral arms of the Galaxy. It remained completely unclear what the text of the manuscript was talking about. John Dee himself was also suspected of a hoax - he allegedly composed not just an artificial alphabet (there really was one in Dee's works, but has nothing to do with that used in the manuscript), but also created a meaningless text on it. In general, the research has come to a standstill.
History of the manuscript.
Since the alphabet of the manuscript has no visual resemblance to any known writing system and the text has not yet been deciphered, the only "clue" to determine the age of the book and its origin is the illustrations. In particular, the clothes and decorations of women, as well as a couple of castles in the diagrams. All details are typical for Europe between 1450 and 1520, so the manuscript is most often dated to this period. This is indirectly confirmed by other signs.
The earliest known owner of the book was George Baresch, an alchemist who lived in Prague in the early 17th century. Baresh, apparently, was also puzzled by the mystery of this book from his library. Upon learning that Athanasius Kircher, the famous Jesuit scholar of the Collegio Romano, had published a Coptic dictionary and deciphered (as it was then believed) Egyptian hieroglyphs, he copied part of the manuscript and sent this sample to Kircher in Rome (twice), asking help decipher it. Baresch's 1639 letter to Kircher, discovered in modern times by Rene Zandbergen, is the earliest known reference to the Manuscript.
It remains unclear whether Kircher responded to Baresh's request, but it is known that he wanted to buy the book, but Baresh probably refused to sell it. After Baresh's death, the book passed to his friend, Johannes Marcus Marci, rector of the University of Prague. Marzi allegedly sent it to Kircher, an old friend of his. His cover letter from 1666 is still attached to the Manuscript. Among other things, the letter claims that it was originally purchased for 600 ducats by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, who considered the book to be the work of Roger Bacon.
The further 200 years of the fate of the Manuscript are unknown, but it is most likely that it was kept along with the rest of Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Roman College (now the Gregorian University). The book probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal States to the Kingdom of Italy. The new Italian authorities decided to confiscate a large amount of property from the Church, including the library. According to research by Xavier Ceccaldi and others, before this, many books from the university library were hastily transferred to the libraries of university staff, whose property was not confiscated. Kircher's correspondence was among these books, and also, apparently, there was a Voynich manuscript, since the book still bears the bookplate of Petrus Beckx, at that time the head of the Jesuit order and the rector of the university.
Bex's library was moved to Villa Mondragone in Frascati (villa Borghese di Mondragone a Frascati) - a large palace near Rome, acquired by the Jesuit society in 1866.
In 1912, the College of Rome needed funds and decided in the strictest confidence to sell some of its property. Wilfried Voynich acquired 30 manuscripts, including the one that now bears his name. In 1961, after Voynich's death, the book was sold by his widow Ethel Lilian Voynich (author of The Gadfly) to another bookseller, Hanse P. Kraus. Unable to find a buyer, in 1969 Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University.
So, what do our contemporaries think about this manuscript?
For example, Sergei Gennadyevich Krivenkov, Ph.D. in Biology, a specialist in computer psychodiagnostics, and Klavdiya Nikolaevna Nagornaya, a leading software engineer at the IGT of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation (St. apparently, recipes, which, as you know, have a lot of special abbreviations, which ensures short "words" in the text. Why encrypt? If these are recipes for poisons, then the question disappears ... Dee himself, for all his versatility, was not an expert on medicinal herbs, so he hardly wrote the text. But then the fundamental question is: what kind of mysterious "unearthly" plants are depicted in the pictures? It turned out that they are ... composite. For example, the flower of the well-known belladonna is connected to a leaf of a lesser known, but equally poisonous plant called hoof. And so it is in many other cases. As you can see, aliens have nothing to do with it. Among the plants there were also rose hips and nettles. But also… ginseng.
From this it was concluded that the author of the text went to China. Since the vast majority of plants are still European, I traveled from Europe. Which of the influential European organizations sent its mission to China in the second half of the 16th century? The answer is known from history - the order of the Jesuits. By the way, their major residency closest to Prague was in the 1580s. in Krakow, and John Dee, together with his partner, the alchemist Kelly, first also worked in Krakow, and then moved to Prague (where, by the way, the emperor was pressured through the papal nuncio to expel Dee). So the paths of a connoisseur of poisonous recipes, who first went on a mission to China, then sent back by courier (the mission itself remained in China for many years), and then worked in Krakow, could well intersect with the paths of John Dee. Competitors, in a nutshell...
As soon as it became clear what many of the pictures of the “herbarium” meant, Sergey and Claudia began to read the text. The assumption that it mainly consists of Latin and occasionally Greek abbreviations was confirmed. However, the main thing was to reveal the unusual cipher used by the compiler of the recipes. Here I had to recall many differences in both the mentality of the people of that time, and the features of the then encryption systems.
In particular, at the end of the Middle Ages, they did not at all create purely digital keys to ciphers (there were no computers then), but very often numerous meaningless symbols (“blanks”) were inserted into the text, which generally devalues the use of frequency analysis when deciphering a manuscript. But here we managed to find out what is a “dummy” and what is not. The compiler of the recipes of poisons was not alien to "black humor". So, he obviously did not want to be hanged as a poisoner, and the symbol with an element resembling a gallows, of course, is not readable. Numerology techniques typical of that time were also used.
Ultimately, under the picture with belladonna and hoof, for example, it was possible to read the Latin names of these particular plants. And advice on preparing a deadly poison ... Here, both the abbreviations characteristic of recipes and the name of the god of death in ancient mythology (Thanatos, brother of the god of sleep Hypnos) came in handy. Note that when deciphering, it was possible to take into account even the very malicious nature of the alleged compiler of the recipes. So the study was carried out at the intersection of historical psychology and cryptography, I also had to combine pictures from many reference books on medicinal plants. And the casket opened...
Of course, for a complete reading of the entire text of the manuscript, and not its individual pages, the efforts of a whole team of specialists would be required. But the “salt” here is not in the recipes, but in the disclosure of the historical mystery.
What about stellar spirals? It turned out that we are talking about the best time to collect herbs, and in one case - that mixing opiates with coffee, alas, is very unhealthy.
So, apparently, galactic travelers are worth looking for, but not here ...
And the scientist Gordon Rugg from the University of Keely (Great Britain) came to the conclusion that the texts strange book XVI century may well be gibberish. Is the Voynich Manuscript a sophisticated forgery?
Mysterious 16th-century book may be elegant nonsense, says computer scientist. Rugg used Elizabethan espionage techniques to reconstruct the Voynich manuscript that had puzzled codebreakers and linguists for nearly a century.
Using espionage techniques from the time of Elizabeth I, he was able to create a semblance of the famous Voynich manuscript, which has intrigued cryptographers and linguists for more than a hundred years. “I think fakery is a very likely explanation,” says Rugg. “Now it’s the turn of those who believe in the meaningfulness of the text to give their explanation.” The scientist suspects that the English adventurer Edward Kelly made the book for the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Other scientists consider this version plausible, but not the only one.
“Critics of this hypothesis have noted that the “Voynich language” is too complicated for nonsense. How could a medieval fraudster produce 200 pages of written text with so many subtle patterns in the structure and distribution of words? But it is possible to replicate many of these wonderful Voynich characteristics using a simple 16th-century encoder. The text generated by this method looks like Voynich, but is pure nonsense, with no hidden meaning. This discovery does not prove that the Voynich manuscript is a hoax, but it does support the long-standing theory that the document may have been concocted by the English adventurer Edward Kelly to fool Rudolf II.
In order to understand why it took so much time and effort of qualified specialists to expose the manuscript, it is necessary to tell a little more about it. If we take a manuscript in an unknown language, then it will differ from a deliberate forgery by a complex organization that is noticeable to the eye, and even more so during computer analysis. Without going into a detailed linguistic analysis, it can be noted that many letters in real languages occur only in certain places and in combination with certain other letters, and the same can be said about words. These and other features of real language are indeed inherent in the Voynich manuscript. Scientifically speaking, it is characterized by low entropy, and it is almost impossible to forge a text with low entropy by hand - and we are talking about the 16th century.
No one has yet been able to show whether the language in which the text is written is cryptography, a modified version of some existing language, or nonsense. Some features of the text are not found in any of the existing languages - for example, the repetition of the most common words two or three times - which confirms the nonsense hypothesis. On the other hand, the distribution of word lengths and the way letters and syllables are combined are very similar to those of real languages. Many people think that this text is too complicated to be a simple fake - it would take some crazy alchemist many years to achieve such correctness.
However, as Rugg showed, such a text is quite easy to create using a cipher device invented around 1550 and called the Cardan lattice. This lattice is a table of symbols, the words of which are formed by moving a special stencil with holes. Empty cells of the table provide the compilation of words of different lengths. Using the syllable-table grids from the Voynich manuscript, Rugg compiled a language with many, though not all, hallmarks manuscript. It took him only three months to create a book like a manuscript. However, in order to irrefutably prove the meaninglessness of the manuscript, the scientist needs to recreate a sufficiently large passage from it using this technique. Rugg hopes to achieve this through grid and table manipulation.
It seems that attempts to decipher the text fail, because the author was aware of the peculiarities of encodings and compiled the book in such a way that the text looked plausible, but did not lend itself to analysis. As noted by NTR.Ru, the text contains at least the appearance of cross-references, which is what cryptographers are usually looking for. The letters are written in such a variety of ways that scientists can never establish how large the alphabet is in which the text is written, and since all the people depicted in the book are naked, this makes it difficult to date the text by clothing.
In 1919, a reproduction of the Voynich manuscript came to the University of Pennsylvania philosophy professor Romain Newbould. Newbould, who recently turned 54, had broad interests, many of which had an element of mystery. In the hieroglyphs of the text of the manuscript, Newbould saw microscopic shorthand signs and proceeded to decipher them, translating them into letters of the Latin alphabet. The result is secondary text using 17 different letters. Then Newbould doubled all the letters in the words, except for the first and last, and subjected to a special replacement words containing one of the letters "a", "c", "m", "n", "o", "q", "t" , "u". In the resulting text, Newbould replaced pairs of letters with a single letter, in a rule he never made public.
In April 1921, Newbould announced the preliminary results of his work to a scientific audience. These results characterized Roger Bacon as the greatest scientist of all times and peoples. According to Newbould, Bacon actually created a microscope with a telescope and with their help made many discoveries that anticipated the discoveries of scientists in the 20th century. Other statements from Newbold's publications concern the "mystery of new stars".
“If the Voynich manuscript really contains the secrets of new stars and quasars, it is better for it to remain undeciphered, because the secret of an energy source that surpasses the hydrogen bomb and is so easy to handle that a thirteenth-century man could figure it out is precisely the secret in the solution of which our civilization does not need, - the physicist Jacques Bergier wrote about this. - We somehow survived, and even then only because we managed to keep the tests hydrogen bomb. If there is an opportunity to release even more energy, it is better for us not to know, or not to know yet. Otherwise, our planet will very soon disappear in a blinding flash of a supernova.”
Newbold's report caused a sensation. Many scientists, although they refused to express an opinion on the validity of their methods of transforming the text of the manuscript, considering themselves incompetent in cryptanalysis, readily agreed with the results. One famous physiologist even stated that some of the drawings in the manuscript were probably depicting epithelial cells magnified 75 times. The general public was fascinated. Entire Sunday supplements to reputable newspapers were devoted to this event. One poor woman walked hundreds of miles to ask Newbould to use Bacon's formulas to drive out the evil tempting spirits that had taken possession of her.
There were also objections. Many did not understand the method used by Newbold: people could not use his method to compose new messages. After all, it is quite obvious that a cryptographic system must work in both directions. If you own a cipher, you can not only decrypt messages encrypted with it, but also encrypt a new text. Newbold becomes more and more obscure, less accessible. He died in 1926. His friend and colleague Roland Grubb Kent published his work in 1928 under the title The Roger Bacon Cipher. American and English historians who studied the Middle Ages treated it more than with restraint.
However, people have revealed much deeper secrets. Why hasn't anyone figured this one out?
According to one Manley, the reason is that “decryption attempts hitherto have been made on the basis of false assumptions. In fact, we do not know when and where the manuscript was written, what language the encryption is based on. When the correct hypotheses are worked out, the cipher will perhaps appear simple and easy ... ".
It is interesting, based on which version of the above, they built a research methodology in the American Agency national security. After all, even their specialists became interested in the problem of the mysterious book and in the early 80s worked on deciphering it. Frankly speaking, I can't believe that such a serious organization was engaged in the book purely out of sporting interest. Perhaps they wanted to use the manuscript to develop one of the modern encryption algorithms for which this secret agency is so famous. However, their efforts were also unsuccessful.
It remains to state the fact that in our era of global information and computer technologies, the medieval puzzle remains unsolved. And it is not known whether scientists will ever be able to fill this gap and read the results of many years of work of one of the forerunners of modern science.
Now this one-of-a-kind creation is stored in the Yale University Rare and Rare Book Library and is valued at $160,000. The manuscript is not given to anyone: anyone who wants to try their hand at transcribing can download high-quality photocopies from the university website.
This was the name of a manuscript in a previously unknown language with certain knowledge of a specialist in various fields of science. Today, the Voynich manuscript has been fully deciphered, but there are still many mysteries associated with it. Here is what is known today about this manuscript and what knowledge he revealed in his creation.
Who is Voynich
That was the name of the antiquary Wilfried Voynich (1865 - 1930), a collector who came across a unique manuscript of the 15th century. The authorship of the manuscript is still disputed, but its content is considered more strange.
The text of the manuscript itself was written in an unknown language, in which one word had many meanings. However, until today, no one could understand the content of the book and what exactly was encrypted in it, and most importantly, the meaning of what the author was trying to convey.
Today, no one can give a specific answer as to who the author of the manuscript is. Encyclopedias mention many names of probable authors of the text, but there is no exact evidence anywhere that the text of the manuscript was written by these people. There is even a hypothesis that the text was written in a mental hospital, but it is still difficult to figure out when and by whom. Therefore, researchers, experts in the study and decoding of cryptograms, fought over the content and authorship of the manuscript for a long time, but at the moment it is still unknown who, in fact, the author of the manuscript is. So far, the name "Voynich manuscript" bears the name of the antiquary to whom this manuscript fell into the hands.
The book is about herbs folk medicine. It has several sections devoted to botany, astrology, biology, cosmology and pharmaceuticals. However, most of all, strange pictures in the book are knocking down, which can cause a lot of questions. It is also interesting that most plants are difficult to identify with modern ones. Only a few resemble marigolds, pansies, thistles and others.
The book consists of 246 pages of small size, neatly filled with calligraphic handwriting with unknown text and no less strange pictures. The plants depicted on them are different from those that exist today. For example, the American sunflower was oval in shape, and the red pepper was depicted as green. Today, researchers are inclined to the version that it was a description of some Mexican botanical garden, and the irregular shapes of plants are associated with the style of the picture.
Modern researchers believe that the mysterious text was written in a phonetic language, and the author himself invented the symbols.
The manuscript was written by the same hand, but at different times. It is also known for certain that the book has nothing to do with either Arabic or Hebrew.
There are many astrological symbols in the book, but they cannot be correlated with what is known today from astrology. Also, if you rotate pie charts, which are many in the text, a cartoon effect appears, the images begin to rotate.
The astrological section proved that the medicine of that time was always connected with astrology. However, those who read the Voynich manuscript, which was deciphered, in the original and in a language understandable today, noted that knowledge has nothing to do with what is relevant to modern astrology. It closely coexists with astrology and medicine.
The biological section is full of pictures in which women constantly bathe in either clean or dirty water. There are many pipes and branches everywhere. Obviously, hydrotherapy at that time was still one of the most common methods. Water in the text symbolized health and disease.
The Voynich manuscript was deciphered, but the pharmaceutical section turned out to be the most difficult section, in which it is difficult to identify the plants depicted in the pictures and their names. There is also a version that the versatility of an artificial language, which cannot be identified and compared even with ancient languages, suggests that the book has a double bottom. But what exactly is still a mystery.
With the exception of the final part of the book, there are pictures on all pages. Judging by them, the book has several sections, different in style and content:
- "Botanical". Each page contains an image of one plant (sometimes two) and several paragraphs of text, a manner common to European herbal books of the time. Some parts of these drawings are enlarged and clearer copies of sketches from the "pharmaceutical" section.
- "Astronomical". Contains circular diagrams, some of them with the moon, sun and stars, presumably of astronomical or astrological content. One series of 12 diagrams depicts the traditional symbols of the zodiac constellations (two fishes for Pisces, a bull for Taurus, a soldier with a crossbow for Sagittarius, etc.). Each symbol is surrounded by exactly thirty miniature female figures, most of them naked, each holding an inscribed star. The last two pages of this section (Aquarius and Capricorn, or, relatively speaking, January and February) have been lost, and Aries and Taurus are divided into four pair charts with fifteen stars each. Some of these diagrams are located on subpages.
- "Biological". Dense, unbroken text flowing around images of bodies, mostly naked women, bathing in ponds or streams connected by elaborate piping, some of the "pipes" clearly taking the shape of the body's organs. Some women have crowns on their heads.
- "Cosmological". Other pie charts, but of no clear meaning. This section also has subpages. One of these six-page attachments contains some kind of map or diagram with six "islands" connected by "dams", with castles and possibly a volcano.
- "Pharmaceutical". Many signed drawings of parts of plants with images of apothecary vessels on the margins of the pages. This section also has several paragraphs of text, possibly with recipes.
- "Recipe". The section consists of short paragraphs separated by flower-shaped (or star-shaped) marks.
Text
The text is clearly written from left to right, with a slightly "torn" right margin. Long sections are divided into paragraphs, sometimes with a paragraph mark in the left margin. The manuscript lacks regular punctuation. The handwriting is stable and clear, as if the alphabet was familiar to the scribe, and he understood what he was writing.
Page from the "Biological" section
There are over 170,000 characters in the book, usually separated from each other by narrow spaces. Most characters are written with one or two simple strokes of the pen. An alphabet of 20-30 letters of the manuscript can be used to write the entire text. The exception is a few dozen special characters, each of which appears in the book 1-2 times.
Wider spaces divide the text into about 35,000 "words" of varying length. They seem to follow some phonetic or spelling rules. Some characters must appear in every word (like vowels in English), some characters never follow others, some may double in a word (like two n in a word long), some do not.
Statistical analysis of the text revealed its structure, which is characteristic of natural languages. For example, word repetition follows Zipf's law, and vocabulary entropy (about ten bits per word) is the same as that of Latin and English. Some words appear only in certain sections of the book, or only on a few pages; Some words are repeated throughout the text. There are very few repetitions among about a hundred captions for illustrations. In the "Botanical" section, the first word of each page occurs only on that page, and is possibly the name of a plant.
The text looks more monotonous (in a mathematical sense) compared to European text. There are separate examples when the same word is repeated three times in a row. Words that differ by only one letter are also unusually common. The entire "lexicon" of the Voynich manuscript is smaller than the "normal" vocabulary of an ordinary book should be.
The illustrations in the "biological" section are connected by a network of channels
Story
The further 200 years of the fate of the Manuscript are unknown, but it is most likely that it was kept along with the rest of Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Roman College (now the Gregorian University). The book probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal States to the Kingdom of Italy. The new Italian authorities decided to confiscate a large amount of property from the Church, including the library. According to research by Xavier Ceccaldi and others, before this, many books from the university library were hastily transferred to the libraries of university staff, whose property was not confiscated. Kircher's correspondence was among these books, and also, apparently, there was a Voynich manuscript, since the book still bears the bookplate of Petrus Beckx, at that time the head of the Jesuit order and the rector of the university.
Bex's library was moved to Villa Mondragone in Frascati (villa Borghese di Mondragone a Frascati) - a large palace near Rome, acquired by the Jesuit society in .
Guess about authorship
Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon
A 1665 accompanying letter from Marzi Kircher states that, according to his deceased friend Raphael Mnishovsky, the book was purchased by Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) for 600 ducats (several thousand dollars in modern money). According to this letter, Rudolph (or possibly Raphael) believed that the author of the book was the famous and versatile Franciscan friar Roger Bacon (1214-1294).
Although Marzi wrote that he "refrains from judgment" (suspending his judgment) regarding the statement of Rudolf II, but it was taken quite seriously by Voynich, who rather agreed with him. His belief in this strongly influenced most attempts at decipherment over the next 80 years. However, researchers who have studied the Voynich manuscript and are familiar with Bacon's work strongly deny this possibility. It should also be noted that Raphael died in 1611 and the transaction must have taken place before the abdication of Rudolph II in 1611 - at least 55 years before Marzi's letter.
John Dee
The suggestion that Roger Bacon was the author of the book led Voynich to conclude that only person who could sell the manuscript to Rudolf is John Dee, a mathematician and astrologer at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, also known for having a large library of Bacon's manuscripts. Dee and him scrier(an assistant medium who uses a crystal ball or other reflective object to summon spirits) Edward Kelly is connected to Rudolph II by living in Bohemia for several years, hoping to sell their services to the emperor. However, John Dee meticulously kept diaries where he did not mention the sale of the manuscript to Rudolf, so this deal seems rather unlikely. One way or another, if the author of the manuscript is not Roger Bacon, then the possible connection of the history of the manuscript with John Dee is very illusory. On the other hand, Dee himself could write a book and spread the word that it was Bacon's work, hoping to sell it.
Edward Kelly
Edward Kelly
Marzi's personality and knowledge were adequate for the task, and Kircher, that "Dr. I-know-everything" who, as we now know, was "famous" for obvious mistakes rather than brilliant accomplishments, was an easy target. Indeed, Georg Baresch's letter bears a certain resemblance to a joke that Orientalist Andreas Muller once played on Athanasius Kircher. Müller fabricated a meaningless manuscript and sent it to Kircher with a note that the manuscript came to him from Egypt. He asked Kircher for a translation of the text, and there is evidence that Kircher provided it immediately.
It is interesting to note that the only confirmation of the existence of Georg Baresch are three letters sent to Kircher: one was sent by Baresh himself in 1639, the other two by Marzi (about a year later). It is also curious that the correspondence between Marzi and Athanasius Kircher ends in 1665, precisely with the "cover letter" of the Voynich manuscript. However, Marzi's secret dislike for the Jesuits is just a hypothesis: a devout Catholic, he himself studied as a Jesuit and, shortly before his death in 1667, was awarded honorary membership in their order.
Rafael Mniszowski
Marzi's friend Raphael Mniszowski, who was the alleged source of the Roger Bacon story, was himself a cryptographer (among many other occupations) and supposedly invented a cipher around 1618 that he considered unbreakable. This led to the theory that he was the author of the Voynich manuscript, which was needed for the practical demonstration of the above cipher - and made poor Baresh a "guinea pig". After Kircher published his book on deciphering the Coptic language, Raphael Mniszowski, on this theory, decided that confusing Athanasius Kircher's ingenious cipher would be a much more tasty trophy than stymied Baresh. To do this, he could convince Georg Baresch to ask for help from the Jesuits, that is, from Kircher. To motivate Baresh to do this, Raphael Mniszowski may have invented a story about Roger Bacon's mysterious cipher book. Indeed, doubts about Raphael's story in the Voynich manuscript's cover letter could mean that Johann Marcus Marzi suspected a lie. However, there is no clear evidence for this theory.
Anthony Eskem
Dr. Leonell Strong, a cancer researcher and amateur cryptographer, also tried to decipher the manuscript. Strong believed that the clue to the manuscript lies in "a special double system of arithmetic progressions of numerous alphabets". Strong claimed that, according to the text he transcribed, the manuscript was written by the 16th-century English author Anthony Ascham, whose works include A Little Herbal published in 1550. Although the Voynich manuscript contains sections similar to an herbalist, the main argument against this theory is that it is not known where the author of the Herbalist could have acquired such literary and cryptographic knowledge.
Theories about content and purpose
The general impression given by the remaining pages of the manuscript suggests that it was intended to serve as a pharmacopoeia, or separate topics from a book of medieval or earlier medicine. However, the confusing details of the illustrations fuel many theories about the origins of the book, the content of its text, and the purpose for which it was written. The following are some of these theories.
herbalism
With a high degree of certainty, we can say that the first part of the book is devoted to herbs, but attempts to compare them with real samples of herbs and with stylized drawings of herbs of that time generally failed. Only a couple of plants, pansies and maidenhair fern can be identified with sufficient accuracy. Those drawings from the "botanical" section that match the sketches from the "pharmaceutical" section give the impression of being exact copies of them, but with missing parts that are filled with implausible details. Indeed, many plants seem to be composite: the roots of some specimens are linked to leaves from others and to flowers from still others.
Sunflowers
Brumbaugh thought one of the illustrations was of a New World sunflower. If this were the case, it might help to determine the time of the manuscript's writing and reveal intriguing circumstances of its origin. However, the resemblance is very slight, especially when compared to real wild specimens, and since the scale is not determined, the depicted plant may be another member of this family, which includes dandelion, chamomile, and other species around the world.
Alchemy
The pools and canals in the "biological" section may indicate a connection to alchemy, which would have been significant if the book contained instructions for making medical elixirs and concoctions. However, alchemical books of that time were characterized by a graphic language, where processes, materials and components were depicted in the form of special pictures (an eagle, a frog, a man in a grave, a couple in bed, etc.) or standard text symbols (a circle with a cross, etc.). d.). None of these can be convincingly identified in the Voynich manuscript.
Alchemical herbalism
Sergio Toresella, an expert on paleobotany, noted that the manuscript could be alchemical herbalism, which actually had nothing to do with alchemy, but was a fake herbalist's book with fictitious pictures that a quack healer could carry with him in order to impress customers. Presumably, there was a network of home workshops for the production of such books somewhere in northern Italy, just at the time of the supposed writing of the manuscript. However, such books differ significantly from the Voynich manuscript in both style and format, and besides, they were all written in common language.
Astrological botany
However, after Newbold's death, cryptologist John Manly of the University of Chicago noted serious flaws in this theory. Each line contained in the symbols of the manuscript allowed for several interpretations when deciphered without a reliable way to identify the “correct” option among them. William Newbold's method also required rearranging the "letters" of the manuscript until a meaningful Latin text was produced. This led to the conclusion that virtually any desired text could be obtained from the Voynich manuscript using Newbold's method. Manley argued that these lines appeared as a result of ink cracking when it dried on rough parchment. Currently, Newbold's theory is practically not considered when transcribing a manuscript.
Steganography
This theory is based on the assumption that the text of a book is mostly meaningless, but contains information hidden in subtle details, such as the second letter of each word, the number of letters in each line, and so on. The coding technique called steganography is very old and was described by Johannes Trithemius in . Some researchers suggest that plain text was passed through something like a Cardano grid. This theory is difficult to prove or disprove, as stegotext can be difficult to crack without any clues. An argument against this theory may be that the presence of text in an incomprehensible alphabet conflicts with the purpose of steganography - hiding the very existence of any secret message.
Some researchers suggest that meaningful text could be encoded in the length or shape of individual strokes of the pen. Indeed, there are instances of steganography of the time that use lettering (cursive or roman) to hide information. However, after examining the text of the manuscript at high magnification, the strokes of the pen seem quite natural, and to a large extent the differences in lettering are caused by the uneven surface of the parchment.
Exotic natural language
Multilingual text
In Solution of the Voynich Manuscript: A liturgical Manual for the Endura Rite of the Cathari Heresy, the Cult of Isis, 1987, Leo Levitov ) stated that the unencrypted text of the manuscript is a transcription of "the oral language of a polyglot". So he called "a bookish language that could be understood by people who do not understand Latin, if they read what is written in this language." He proposed a partial decipherment in the form of a mixture of medieval Flemish with many loanwords from Old French and Old High German.
According to Levitov's theory, the endura ritual was nothing more than a suicide committed with someone's help: as if such a ritual was adopted by the Cathars for people whose death is close (the actual existence of this ritual is in question). Levitov explained that the fictitious plants in the illustrations of the manuscript did not actually represent any representatives of the flora, but were secret symbols of the Cathar religion. Women in the pools, together with a bizarre system of channels, displayed the ritual of suicide itself, which, he believed, was associated with bloodletting - opening the veins, followed by blood flowing into the bath. Constellations with no astronomical counterparts displayed the stars on the cloak of Isis.
This theory is questionable for several reasons. One of the inconsistencies is that the Cathar faith, in a broad sense, is Christian Gnosticism, in no way connected with Isis. Another is that the theory places the book in the twelfth or thirteenth century, which is considerably older than even those of Roger Bacon's authorship theorists. Levitov did not provide evidence for the veracity of his reasoning beyond his translation.
Constructed language
The peculiar internal structure of the "words" of the Voynich manuscript led William Friedman and John Tiltman, independently of each other, to the conclusion that the unencrypted text could have been written in an artificial language, specifically in a special "philosophical language". In these types of languages, the vocabulary is organized according to a system of categories, so that general meaning words can be determined by analyzing the sequence of letters. For example, in the modern synthetic language Ro, the prefix "bofo-" is a category of color, and every word beginning with bofo- would be the name of a color, so red is bofoc and yellow is bofof. Very roughly, this can be compared with the book classification system used by many libraries (at least in the West), for example, the letter "P" may be responsible for the section of languages \u200b\u200band literature, "RA" for the Greek and Latin subsection, "RS" for the Romance languages, etc.
The concept is quite old, as evidenced by the 1668 book Philosophical Language by the scholar John Wilkins. In most known examples of such languages, categories are also subdivided by adding suffixes, hence a particular subject can have many words associated with it with a repeated prefix. For example, all plant names begin with the same letters or syllables, as well as, for example, all diseases, etc. This property could explain the monotony of the text of the manuscript. However, no one has been able to convincingly explain the meaning of this or that suffix or prefix in the text of the manuscript, and, moreover, all known examples of philosophical languages belong to a much later period, the 17th century.
Hoax
The bizarre text properties of the Voynich manuscript (such as doubled and tripled words) and the suspicious content of the illustrations (fantastic plants, for example) have led many people to conclude that the manuscript may in fact be a hoax.
In 2003, Dr. Gordon Rugg, professor at the University of Keele (England) showed that a text with characteristics identical to the Voynich manuscript can be created using a three-column table: with dictionary suffixes, prefixes and roots, which would be selected and combined by means of overlaying several cards on this table with three cut-out windows for each component of the “word”. To obtain short words and to diversify the text, cards with fewer boxes could be used. A similar device, called the Cardano lattice, was invented as a coding tool in 1550 by the Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardano, and was intended to hide secret messages within another text. However, the text created as a result of Rugg's experiments does not have the same words and such frequency of their repetition, which are observed in the manuscript. The similarity between the Rugga text and the text in the manuscript is only visual, not quantitative. Similarly, one can "prove" that English (or any other) language does not exist by creating random nonsense that looks like English in the same way that a Rugg text looks like a Voynich manuscript. So this experiment is not conclusive.
Influence on popular culture
There are several examples where the Voynich manuscript has influenced, at least indirectly, some examples of popular culture.
- In the work of Howard Lovecraft there is a certain ominous book "Necronomicon". Despite the fact that Lovecraft most likely did not know about the existence of the Voynich manuscript, Colin Wilson (eng. Colin Wilson) published the story "The Return of Loigor" in 1969, where the character reveals that the Voynich manuscript is an unfinished Necronomicon.
- The contemporary writer Harry Veda has presented a fictional explanation of the origin of the Voynich manuscript in the short story "The Corsair".
- Codex Seraphinianus- contemporary work art created in the style of the Voynich manuscript.
- Contemporary composer Hanspeter Kyburz has written a small piece of music based on the Voynich manuscript, reading part of it as a musical score.
- Drawings and fontreminiscent of the Voynich manuscript can be seen in the movie Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade ).
- The plot of "Il Romanzo Di Nostradamus" by Valerio Evangelisti presents the Voynich manuscript as a work of adepts of black magic, with which the famous French astrologer Nostradamus struggled all his life.
- IN computer game in the style of the quest "Broken Sword 3: Sleeping Dragon" (Eng. Broken Sword III: The Sleeping Dragon ) from DreamCatcher, the text of the Voynich manuscript deciphers
