![]() ![]() Brumbaugh later concluded that the VM was a treatise on the Elixir of Life written in Middle High German that "makes perfect sense." 13 In 1976, Robert Brumbaugh published a decoding of the manuscript claiming he had detected a cipher for "Roger Bacon" encrypted as the number 2675221365. Voynich himself, who purchased the manuscript found in the Jesuit Collegio Mondragone in Italy, suggested that it had been written by Roger Bacon, but this conjecture was disproven. The New York Times has called the Voynich Manuscript the "white whale of the code-breaking world." In 1975 Robert Brumbaugh called it "a kind of Mount Everest for cryptanalysts." A statistical analysis of the VM text by Torsten Timm and Andreas Schinner in 2019 supported the so-called “hoax hypothesis,” i.e., interpretation of the text as a set of meaningless strings of unrelated script characters.įanciful claims of authorship have been made. Its intractable cipher has made the Voynich a famous case in the history of cryptography, the subject of unending speculation. ![]() 12 His conclusion was that the text was a series of code words indecipherable without a dictionary of code definitions. ![]() The celebrated cryptologist William Friedman (1891-1969), who had decrypted the Japanese Imperial Navy "Purple" code in the early days of World War II, devoted considerable work to decode the Voynich manuscript, but Friedman ultimately abandoned his efforts when he failed to make any progress. 3, 4 The Voynich Manuscript has been called "the world's most mysterious manuscript" 5 and "the book nobody can read." 6, 7 It's been called "an elegant hoax" and a "liturgical manual for the cult of Isis." In 1921, John Manly, a Chaucer scholar, declared it to be the “most mysterious manuscript in the world." 8 Gordon Rugg concluded that "The features of Voynichese are inconsistent with any human language," 9 and continued saying that he could not prove that the manuscript was a hoax, 10 but that the hypothesis is "indeed feasible." 11 After years of study, Robert Brumbaugh ended up calling the Voynich Manuscript "nonsensical." The document has been studied by numerous cryptographers, but until this time no one has demonstrably deciphered the text. In 1969, the book was donated to Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where it is catalogued under call number MS 408. The document is named after Wilfrid Voynich, an antique book dealer from Poland who presented it publicly in 1910. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library, Yale University. Introduction to the Celestial Section, top of. Introductionįigure 1 Sample Voynich Manuscript Text. "Experts determine age of book 'nobody can read.'" PhysOrg. Keywords: Voynich Manuscript, Medieval Arabic, King Alfonso V, History of Cryptology, CatharsġStolte, Daniel. A hypothesis is developed that the patron funding production of the Voynich Manuscript may have been Alfonso V, king of Aragon/Catalonia and, King of Naples. Translation reveals that the text deals exclusively with the Cathars, a religious heresy prominent in the south of France in the 12th – 13th centuries. A 600-word dictionary of Arabic-Voynich-English was developed. An equivalency table between Arabic letters and the Voynich characters is developed, and large sections of the Voynich text are translated, including pages picturing flowers, stars, spices and women. This research shows that the strange Voynich symbols code for Arabic. The Voynich Manuscript has been called "The World's Most Mysterious Manuscript" and "The Book Nobody Can Read.” Sections of the manuscript appear to deal with strange plants and flowers, naked women lounging in pools of water, celestial bodies such as stars, the moon and the Sun, and kitchen spices and herbs. 1 The document has been studied by numerous cryptographers, but until this time no one has demonstrably deciphered the text. The Voynich Manuscript (VM) is an illustrated codex hand-written in a unique writing system whose pages have been carbon-dated to 1404-1438 CE. ![]()
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