Voynich manuscript content. Mysterious Voynich manuscript

Today there will be provocative letters from Matsura Nadezhda Ivanovna, 53 years old. The spelling is preserved, the translation sequence may not have been preserved, because There were many letters, and it is difficult for me to understand the meaning of "what comes after what."

The Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious book written about 500 years ago by an unknown author in an unknown language using an unknown alphabet.

Many attempts have been made to decipher the Voynich manuscript, but so far without any success. The only important conclusion made by the experts is that the text is written in artificial language with a clear logical structure. It has become the "Holy Grail" of cryptography, but it is entirely possible that the manuscript is only a hoax, an incoherent collection of characters.

What I am writing about is written in the Voynich manuscript and in circles. The earth taught me to read ancient manuscripts. But the Earth has "a few hours" left. No need to ask the scientists, their opinion is not connected with the translation. Yes and with common sense(approx. Dmitry).

The manuscript was written not in letters, but in signs. If a child of 6 years old wrote. He does not yet know the letters, but he has a concept of them. There was no written language in that area. China stopped at this level of development: 3-4 years. They know how to “carry” paper with a pen, but they don’t get letters. The hand falls more easily from top to bottom than it goes from left to right. Such children are not even given a fork, they do not reach the table and eat on the floor.

Are you asking how I translated the manuscript? Maybe you already guessed it yourself? Planets from the Sun to Pluto-11. The souls of dead people go to the center of the Earth and there they are. There - "planet" -12. In the bible it goes as "the island of Patmos". I am planet 13. A cat knows about cat life because she is a cat. A dog knows a dog's life. I know the life of the gods. I am the daughter of the planet Earth, I have been taught the laws of life all my life. I appeared at the very last moment before the death of mankind. You can not believe me, you can think whatever you like about me - this will not affect the development of the laws of the Earth.

Signs in the manuscript:

"O" or "OO" - the birth rate is higher than the death rate.
The letter "F" with two sticks - the birth rate is equal to the death rate
"OO9" - the birth rate is lower than the death rate. The manuscript was written under the sign "OO9".
"8" is the number of Saturn, but Saturn, with the increased influence of Jupiter, already gives diseases of the musculoskeletal system.
"4" - Moon. Under Saturn - fairy tales to Pushkin, under Jupiter - illness cardiovascular systems. The moon draws on itself the energy of life from people and from the Earth.
"9" is the planet Uranus. Freaks began to appear, (small deviations in the structure of the body). Now we have these deviations are considered the norm. For example: a hooked nose. The information is ugly - wrong. In man. all the mistakes of mankind that led people to death are described. Now people do not see VERY prominent.

Translation of the Voynich manuscript

At the very beginning, the Earth was flat as a disk and it was inhabited by very large people, 6-10 m tall, there were no wars and diseases, they did not talk - they had telepathy, these people were called gods. They had great power, they lived on the territory of modern North. Africa. It was they who built the pyramids, and later Chinese wall, all buildings made of heavy stones, all sorts of Buddhas, etc. They built pyramids like children play pyramids. Humanity has developed mentally in the same way as a newborn child. They were called ATLANTS and they had ATLANTIS. All the planets except the Earth made people. The earth wears people. Each planet has its own territory on Earth and its own people: Saturn-Sev. Africa, Israel, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Georgia, Chechnya (you get the idea). Jupiter - Sev. America, Mars-South America, Earth-Russia, Moon-Baltic, Venus-the rest of Africa and Europe (Venus does the opposite), Mercury-Australia, Sun-China. Therefore, only Russian people can "treat" the Earth. We must not forget that there are wars, illnesses and deaths on Earth only because there are few Russian people. With the increase in the number of Russians, the entire population globe will live without wars and diseases, and in short - "in paradise". After ATLANTIS, people "grew up and went to school." The earth grew in size. Now is the period that is called old age and death. But the Earth will go in a new circle - it will again become a disk. The recipe for immortality indicates what needs to be done to cure all diseases, what love and conscience are, and how to return them.

Everything goes in circles. The phrase "what is old, what is young." The life of planet Earth also goes in circles, the Earth has made its circle and now it has no choice but to turn to people for help. The Earth is a living and thinking being, and it has been asking for help for a long time. The earth is like a single-celled amoeba. The amoeba divides into two cells. The territory of Russia and the number of Russian people are responsible for the life of the Earth. The fewer Russian people, the greater and stronger the cataclysms will be, they will not bypass Russia either. All this is written in crop circles (the Earth itself writes the circles), in the Voynich manuscript, in the drawings in Egypt, on the Phaistos disc ... If everything continues to go on in Russia - the Earth will explode (divide), If the axis shifts as a result of cataclysms Earth a few more degrees - the Earth will be blown away (all the gas will come out) and it will become a flat disk, such as it was at the very beginning. But the Earth gives a third option: in order to leave the dimensions of the Earth the same, Russian people must know the "recipe for immortality" that the Earth gives. This recipe is knowledge about the laws of life on planet Earth, about which people have no idea.

Atlantis is led by Saturn - "God the Conqueror". He is responsible for healthy body, for construction, for the exact sciences (mathematics). State borders in the North. Africa - straight lines. Pyramids were built by all people (about 40 people) from all planets, so they are all different. Saturn is a man, the head of the family in solar system. This is the first half of the life of the Earth and mankind. In this half, people know about life in terms of energy or also called TIME.

Energy or time is superior to matter. "Being determines consciousness", where the word "consciousness" is the subject. Saturn gives vital information through all the planets: it is an isosceles triangle with the top up. And the other half is led by Jupiter.

Jupiter - God of the sky. Number 7. He says to himself "Seven I". This is a man, the brother of Saturn, but he plays a role and does the work of a woman in the family. A man who plays the role of a woman cannot do the job right. Jupiter gives the same information as Saturn, only absolutely opposite from the point of view of matter. "Being determines consciousness." Here already the word "Being" is the subject. All our stories catchphrases, proverbs, favorite sayings, sayings of philosophers, etc. - all this is translated oppositely in terms of time. Man himself cannot think of anything, he receives everything from the planets. Now we take black for white and vice versa, we destroy the good, and we cultivate and multiply the bad. The Earth's atmosphere flips information. The sign is a triangle with the apex down. The transition from Saturn to Jupiter goes through "O" - a period, it is called "stop in time". Under Saturn there is no writing, under Jupiter there is. The manuscript was written during the transitional period. Jupiter is responsible for conversation, writing: politicians, philosophers, journalists, religion, writers ... In general, paper.

Everything that is written in letters is from Jupiter. Jupiter is a woman. "Listen to a woman and do the opposite." Now humanity is degrading very quickly: Bukins, Univer, Boys, interns, all kinds of comedy clubs ...

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 a 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

History

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

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 the only person who could have sold the manuscript to Rudolf was John Dee, a mathematician and astrologer in 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

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 deciphered, the manuscript was written English author 16th century by 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 was able to convincingly explain the meaning of this or that suffix or prefix in the text of the manuscript, and, moreover, all known examples 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 inside other 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.
AT 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

One of the most mysterious books, over the deciphering of which cryptologists and linguists from different countries of the world have been struggling for many years, is the so-called Voynich manuscript. Let's try to lift the veil of secrecy and find out what this book is and what is so mysterious about it.

In 1912, a collector, bookseller and antiques dealer, Wilfried Mikhail Voynich, discovered a very unusual medieval manuscript at a Jesuit college near Rome. It was established that it was created around 1450-1500. The mystery was that the manuscript was written in an unknown language, the letters and symbols of which did not belong to any known type of writing.

You can download the manuscript in pdf format from the link.

The text of the document is written in unusual letters, similar to curls and squiggles. Some of them resemble Latin letters, others resemble Arabic numerals. In addition to the text, the book contains illustrations depicting all kinds of plants, people, natural phenomena and space objects.

The book itself contains about 240 pages of handwritten text. The cover does not contain any inscriptions or illustrations. The book is made of thin cheap parchment, has small dimensions, and its thickness does not exceed 3 cm. Texts and drawings are made with a bird's pen. Color drawings. Some of the pages are missing.

To this day, scientists different countries world are trying to decipher the mysterious tome, but so far to no avail. The document got its name from the name of its owner and became known as the Voynich manuscript. It is currently in the Rare Book Library Yale University.

Origin of the manuscript

Wilfried Voynich himself claimed that he bought the tome in one of the Jesuit possessions, located south of Rome. Attached to the manuscript was a letter written in 1666. Its author was the rector of Prague University, Johann Marci. He addressed the letter to his comrade Athanasius Kircher, who was a well-known scientist and researcher at that time. In the letter, Marzi asked Kircher to decipher the manuscript, which was allegedly written by the famous medieval monk and alchemist Roger Bacon.

Attempts to decipher the manuscript

After the book fell into the hands of Wilfried Voynich, he tried to decipher it. For this, Voynich gave the tome to American cryptographers. One of them, William Newbold, claimed that he was able to decipher a document that he said was the laboratory notes of Roger Bacon, the alleged author of the book.

Judging by Newbold's transcripts, it appeared that Bacon used telescopes and microscopes for his experiments. But at that time they had not yet been invented. Thus, instead of revealing the secret of the manuscript, the scientist created new riddle. Taking advantage of this, Newbold's opponents proved that his transcripts were fictitious.

After Newbold's death, many other cryptographers took on the task of deciphering the cryptic manuscript. Some of them claimed to have figured it out. But in practice it turned out that the methods of deciphering offered by them do not fit all sections of the book at once. Hence the hypothesis was born that the texts were written in different languages.

In the 60-70s of the last century, the manuscript was handed over to employees of the NSA (Agency national security USA). They performed computer analysis of the text and statistical studies hoping to find elements of some known languages in the text. But their attempts were never successful.

In the late 70s, the philologist Robert Brumbau suggested that the tome was written specifically for Emperor Rudolf II in order to surprise him with secret knowledge and get a good reward for the manuscript. Initially, part of the book was genuine, but later charlatans, hungry for profit, supplemented it with complete nonsense and that is why the manuscript cannot be deciphered. In certain circles, this hypothesis is still considered correct, but not all researchers agree with it.

What is contained in the Voynich manuscript?

The book contains several sections devoted, apparently, to different spheres of life. Scientists have given these sections conditional names.

Botanical section

Various plants and text are depicted here. Apparently, this is a description of the plants depicted or how they are used. Some details of the illustrations are enlarged and drawn more clearly. The section is written in the style of medieval European herbalists.

Astronomical section

Here are diagrams in the form of a circle with the image of such celestial bodies like moon, sun, stars. In addition, there are images of the zodiac circle with graphic symbols constellations. Interestingly, thirty half-naked or naked women are depicted around the signs of the zodiac, and each has a star in their hands.

Biological section

Here are painted women without clothes and with crowns on their heads, who bathe in ponds or pools. The reservoirs are interconnected by water pipes. Some of these pipes are depicted as human organs. In addition to pictures, the pages of the section contain text.

Cosmological section

Here, as in the "astronomical" section, there are diagrams, but their essence is not clear. There are also subpages with other drawings. One of the attachments shows a map with six islands, which are interconnected by some structures that look like dams. Castles and a volcano are also drawn here.

Pharmaceutical section

In addition to the text, the section contains drawings of plants, their individual parts, as well as pharmaceutical flasks and vials. Presumably, the section describes the medicinal properties of herbs and recipes for their use.

Recipe section

There are no illustrations in this section, but only text in the form of paragraphs, which are separated from each other by asterisk marks.

Hypotheses about the purpose of the book

Obviously, the first part of the book describes various plants. Some of them are quite recognizable. Thistle, fern, pansy flower, lily. But in the manuscript there are images of other plants, unlike those that exist at the present time. Some of them look very strange.

The bodies of water or pools depicted on the pages of the manuscript are supposedly associated with alchemical teachings. It is quite possible that recipes for certain potions are given here. However, the “alchemical” section of the book is completely different from similar reference books of the time, which used a special graphic language and used special symbols.

There is an assumption that the Voynich manuscript contains information from the field of astrological botany. Perhaps it contains descriptions of favorable astrological periods for the collection of medicinal herbs, bloodletting and other medical procedures used at that time.

Text transcript options

The manuscript was studied by scientists for a long time. As a result, several theories have been put forward about the language in which it is written.

Theory one - Letter cipher

Supporters of this theory believe that the book was written in some known language, and then encrypted using a special cipher, where each letter is represented by a symbol.

During the twentieth century, many cryptologists trying to decipher the tome took this theory as a basis. For example, in the 1950s, William Friedman led a team of scientists from the US National Security Administration who were actively trying to find a way to decipher.

Apparently, the manuscript used some kind of complex cipher, including special characters, letter permutation, false spaces, etc. Some of the cryptologists suggested that vowels were removed from the text to make the cipher more complex.

Theory Two - Code Cipher

Decryption specialists hypothesized that each word in the text is encrypted with a special code. In this case, there must be a special code dictionary or book containing the decryption. An analogy was drawn with Roman numerals, which in the Middle Ages were often used to encrypt secret messages. However, such codes are convenient to write short texts and are not designed to encrypt books and manuscripts.

Theory Three - Visual Cipher

One of the researchers, James Finn, hypothesized that the Voynich manuscript was written in Hebrew and visually encrypted. Attempts to apply this hypothesis to the translation of the text led to the fact that some Hebrew words were revealed, written with distortions that mislead the reader. Most likely, other methods of visual coding were used in the book.

Theory Four - Micrography

In 1912, cryptanalyst, professor of philosophy and collector of old manuscripts William Newbold put forward his theory. According to her, the symbols as a whole do not carry any semantic load, but they consist of small dashes that can serve as a secret code. To see these dashes, you need to enlarge the text. Newbold compared this method with the cursive used in Ancient Greece. The scientist claimed that with the help of this method he managed to decipher part of the text.

However, much later, cryptologist John Manley discovered that Newbold's theory had significant flaws: the microscopic dashes that make up symbols can be interpreted in different ways. In addition, according to Newbold's theory, it is necessary to rearrange the letters until a readable text in Latin is obtained. But if you act in this way, you can get many options for all kinds of texts. Refuting Newbold's theory, John Manley argued that the dashes were not originally written, but appeared as a result of ink drying and cracking.

Theory Five – Steganography

According to this hypothesis, in general, the text of the Voynich manuscript does not carry any meaning, but it contains secret information encoded in individual elements of the text (for example, the third letter of each word, the number of characters in a line, etc.). An encryption system called steganography already existed at that time. Proponents of this theory believe that the test manuscript is written using the technique of steganography.

Theory Six - Exotic Language

Linguistic scholar Jacques Guy believed that the Voynich manuscript was written in some sort of exotic natural language using an invented alphabet. The word structure does bear similarities to many East Asian languages. In addition, some graphic elements are characteristic of Chinese manuscripts. And the division of the year into 360 days, grouped into periods of 15 days, suggests similarities with Chinese calendar for agriculture.

Theory Seven - Multilingual Text

Another hypothesis is that the Voynich manuscript is in fact a liturgical reference book of the Qatari religious communities that existed in the 12th-14th centuries. The author of this theory was Leo Levitov. He claimed that the plants depicted on the pages ancient book, are the secret religious symbols of the cult of Isis. And naked women bathing in ponds depicted the procedure of ritual suicide, common among representatives of this religion. However, this theory caused a lot of doubts and did not receive further distribution.

Theory Eight - Hoax

Professor Gordon Rugg, having comprehensively studied the manuscript, came to the conclusion that the Voynich manuscript is nothing more than an ordinary hoax. According to his theory, the text is a set of meaningless characters, and fantastic drawings are designed to add mystery to the document. Some researchers think that the book was written by a mentally ill person or a person with an unusual mindset, who did not have the intention to deceive anyone, but created it with some purpose known only to him.

At first glance, this theory looks plausible, but computer analysis of the text refutes it. Linguists checked the text for compliance with Zipf's law (a universal formula that displays the frequency of occurrence of words that can be applied to any language). The analysis showed that the text is not a meaningless set of characters, but actually contains some information.

Theory Nine - Artificial Language

Researchers William Friedman and John Tiltman independently concluded that an artificially created language was used to write the text of the manuscript. Such languages are designed in such a way that the meaning of a single word can be deciphered by studying the sequence of letters.

Despite the many theories put forward by various scientists and researchers, the text of the manuscript has not yet been deciphered.

Who is the author of the Voynich Manuscript?

It is still unknown who wrote this mysterious book. Authorship is attributed to different individuals.

Roger Bacon- a famous Franciscan monk, an alchemist who lived in the years 1214-1294 and possessed secret knowledge. Voynich himself was sure that this person was the author of the book and tried to find evidence for this. Most researchers also tend to this theory.
John Dee- an astrologer, a mathematician who served at the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Some researchers suggest that he could write a manuscript and pass it off as the work of Roger Bacon for financial gain.
Edward Kelly- Alchemist, companion of John Dee. He claimed that he was able to create gold from copper using a special magic powder. In addition, he said that he could talk with the Supreme Beings and receive information from them. There is an assumption that it was he who could invent and write the Voynich manuscript.
Wilfred Voynich. Many researchers were sure that Voynich himself was the author of the mysterious manuscript. Since he was an antiquary and bookseller, he could well come up with and create an unusual manuscript, in order to later pass it off as the lost work of Roger Bacon and get a good profit.
Jacob Gorzczycki- herbalist, court physician of Emperor Rudolph II. There is an assumption that he could well be the author of the mysterious document.
Rafael Sobegordy-Mnishovsky- a cryptographer who developed a special cipher that cannot be decrypted. Because of this, some scholars attribute the authorship of the book to him, claiming that he wrote it to demonstrate the invented cipher.
Authors group. According to this theory, the manuscript was written not by one person, but by several. The American cryptanalyst Prescott Carrier came to the conclusion that the texts of the "botanical" section of the book were written in different handwriting, therefore, there were at least two authors. However, studies conducted later showed that the manuscript was still written by one person.

Currently, attempts to uncover the mystery of the unusual manuscript continue. The manuscript is deciphered by both professional cryptographers and linguists, as well as ordinary amateurs who are interested in ancient secrets. The book was officially recognized as the most mysterious manuscript in the world.

Ten years ago, an e-mail club was organized dedicated to the Voynich manuscript, which exists to this day. Members of this club share with each other various theories and hypotheses regarding the content of the book, as well as conduct various types of statistical analysis. Undying interest in ancient manuscript gives hope that sooner or later it will still be deciphered.

The Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious book written about 500 years ago by an unknown author, in an unknown language, using an unknown alphabet.

Many attempts have been made to decipher the Voynich manuscript, but so far without any success. It has become the Holy Grail of cryptography, but it is not at all impossible that the manuscript is only a hoax, an incoherent set of characters.

The book is named after Wilfried Voynich, an American bookseller of Lithuanian origin (husband of the famous writer Ethel Lilian Voynich, the author of The Gadfly), who acquired it in 1912. It is now in the Beinecke Rare Book And Manuscript Library at Yale University.

Description

The book contains about 240 pages of thin parchment. There are no inscriptions or drawings on the cover. The page measures 15 by 23 cm, the thickness of the book is less than 3 cm. Gaps in the pagination (which seems to be younger than the book itself) indicate that some pages were lost by the time the book was found by Wilfried Voynich. The text is written with a bird's pen, and the illustrations are also made by it. The illustrations are crudely painted with colored paints, possibly after the book was written.

Illustrations

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", 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

Statistical analysis of the text revealed its structure, characteristic of natural languages. For example, the repetition of words follows Zipf's law, and the vocabulary entropy (about ten bits per word) is the same as that of Latin and in 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.

On the other hand, the language of the Voynich manuscript is in some ways quite unlike existing European languages. For example, there are almost no words in the book longer than ten "letters" and almost no one- and two-letter words. Inside the word, the letters are also distributed in a peculiar way: some characters appear only at the beginning of the word, others only at the end, and some always in the middle - an arrangement inherent in the Arabic letter (cf. also variants of the Greek letter sigma), but not in the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet.

History

Since the alphabet of the manuscript has no visual resemblance to any known system the letters and text have not yet been deciphered, the only "hook" for determining 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.

Bex's library was moved to the 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.

Roger Bacon

Although Marzi wrote that he "refrains from judgment" (suspending his judgment) regarding the statement of Rudolf II, but it was taken seriously enough by Voynich, who rather agreed with him. His belief in this strongly influenced most attempts at decipherment over the next 80 years. However, scholars 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 1644 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 the only person who could sell the manuscript to Rudolph was John Dee, a mathematician and astrologer in the court of Queen Elizabeth I, also known for having a large library of Bacon's manuscripts. . Dee and his scrier Edward Kelly are connected to Rudolf 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.

Theories about the language of the manuscript

Many theories have been put forward about the language used by the manuscript. Below are some of them.

Letter cipher

According to this theory, the Voynich manuscript contains meaningful text in some European language that was deliberately rendered unreadable by displaying it in the manuscript's alphabet using some kind of coding - an algorithm that operated on individual letters.

This was the working hypothesis for most decryption attempts throughout the 20th century, including an informal group of National Security Agency (NSA) cryptanalysts led by William Friedman in the early 1950s. The simplest ciphers based on character substitution can be ruled out as they are very easy to break. Therefore, the efforts of decipherers were directed to polyalphabetic ciphers invented by Alberti in the 1460s. This class includes the well-known Vigenere cipher, which may have been strengthened by using non-existent and/or similar characters, letter swapping, false spaces between words, etc. Some researchers suggest that the vowels were removed before encoding. There have been several claims of decipherment based on these speculations, but they have not been widely accepted. First of all, because the proposed decryption algorithms were based on so many guesses that they could extract meaningful information from any random sequence of characters.

The main argument in favor of this theory is that the use of strange symbols by a European author can hardly be explained otherwise than as an attempt to hide information. Indeed, Roger Bacon understood ciphers, and the supposed period of the manuscript's creation roughly coincides with the birth of cryptography as a systematic science. Against this theory is the observation that the use of a polyalphabetic cipher was supposed to destroy the "natural" statistical properties that are observed in the text of the Voynich manuscript, such as Zipf's law. Also, although the polyalphabetic cipher was invented around 1467, its varieties only became popular in the 16th century, which is somewhat later than the estimated time of writing the manuscript.

Code book cipher

According to this theory, the words in the text of the manuscript are actually codes that are deciphered in a special dictionary or code book. The main argument in favor of the theory is that the internal structure and distribution of word lengths are similar to those used in Roman numerals, which would have been a natural choice for this purpose at the time. However, codebook-based coding is only satisfactory when written short messages, as it is very burdensome to write and read.

visual cipher

James Finn suggested in his book Pandora's Hope (2004) that the Voynich manuscript is actually a visually encoded Hebrew text. After the letters in the manuscript have been correctly transcribed into the "European Voynich Alphabet" (EAB, or EVA in English), many of the words in the manuscript can be presented as Hebrew words that are repeated in various distortions to mislead the reader. For example, the word AIN from the manuscript is the Hebrew word for "eye", which is repeated as a corruption of "aiin" or "aiiin", giving the impression of several different words although they are actually the same word. It is assumed that other methods of visual coding can also be used. The main argument in favor of this theory is that it can explain the failures of other decoding attempts that relied more on mathematical methods decryption. The main argument against this point of view is that with this approach to the nature of the manuscript cipher, a heavy burden falls on the shoulders of a single decipherer to interpret the same text differently due to the many alternative visual encoding possibilities.

micrography

After the rediscovery in 1912, one of the earliest attempts to unravel the secret of the manuscript (and certainly the first among premature decipherment claims) was made in 1921 by William Newbold, a noted cryptanalyst and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. of Pennsylvania), as well as a collector of old books. His theory was that visible text is meaningless, but each character that makes up text is a collection of tiny dashes only visible when magnified. These lines supposedly formed the second level of reading the manuscript, which contained meaningful text. At the same time, Newbold relied on the ancient Greek method of cursive writing, which used a similar system. symbols. Newbold claimed that, from this premise, he was able to decipher an entire paragraph that proved Bacon's authorship and testified to his outstanding abilities as a scientist, in particular, to his use of a compound microscope four hundred years before Anthony van Leeuwenhoek.

However, after Newbold's death, cryptologist John Manly of the University of Chicago noted serious flaws in this theory. Each dash contained in the characters 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, etc. The coding technique called steganography is very old. and was described by Johannes Trithemius in 1499. 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. The 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 a secret message.

Exotic natural language

The linguist Jacques Guy suggested that the text of the Voynich manuscript could be written in one of the exotic natural languages, using an invented alphabet. The word structure is indeed similar to that found in many language families Eastern and Central Asia, primarily Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese), Austroasiatic (Vietnamese, Khmer) and, possibly, Thai (Thai, Lao, etc.). In many of these languages, "words" (the smallest linguistic units with a specific meaning) have only one syllable, and syllables have a fairly rich structure, including tone components (based on the use of rising and falling tone to distinguish between meanings).

This theory has some historical plausibility. The named languages had their own, non-alphabetic script, and their writing systems were difficult for Europeans to understand. This gave rise to several phonetic systems letters, mostly based on the Latin alphabet, but original alphabets were sometimes invented. Although the known examples of such alphabets are much younger than the Voynich manuscript, historical documents they talk about a lot of explorers and missionaries who could create a similar writing system - even before the travel of Marco Polo in the 13th century, but especially after the discovery of the sea route to the countries of the East by Vasco da Gama in 1499. The author of the manuscript could also be a native East Asia who lived in Europe or was educated in a European mission.

The main argument in favor of this theory is that it is consistent with all statistical properties text of the Voynich manuscript that have been discovered to date, including doubled and tripled words (which occur in Chinese and Vietnamese texts with approximately the same frequency as in the manuscript). It also explains the seeming lack of numerals and syntactical features of Western European languages (such as articles and linking verbs) and the general mystique of the illustrations. Another possible clue to researchers is two large red characters on the first page, which were seen as an inverted and inaccurately copied book title, characteristic of Chinese manuscripts. In addition, the division of the year into 360 days (instead of 365), which is supposedly presented in the manuscript, united in groups of 15 days, and the beginning of the year from the sign of fish are properties of the Chinese agricultural calendar. The main argument against this theory is that in reality no one (including scientists from the Academy of Sciences in Beijing) could find in the illustrations of the Voynich manuscript a reliable reflection of Eastern symbolism or Eastern science.

In late 2003, Zbigniew Banasik of Poland suggested that the unencrypted text of the manuscript was written in Manchu and provided an unfinished translation of the first page of the manuscript. Links to this translation:

Multilingual text

According to Levitov's theory, the endura ritual was nothing more than a suicide committed with someone else'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. The constellations, which have no astronomical analogues, 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. The other 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 be written in an artificial language, in particular in a special "philosophical language". In these types of languages, the vocabulary is organized according to a system of categories, so that the general meaning of a word 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, so 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, XVII century.

Hoax

In 2003, Dr. Gordon Rugg, professor at Keele University (England) showed that a text with characteristics identical to the Voynich manuscript could 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.

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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 interaction human soul and bodies. 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 didn't fit. 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. There have been hypotheses about alien origin text, 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.

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.

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 Latin names 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 of the strange book of the 16th century may well turn out to be abracadabra. 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 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 grids with syllable tables from the Voynich manuscript, Rugg compiled a language with many, though not all, of the hallmarks of the 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 enough big excerpt out of him. 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 professor of philosophy University of Pennsylvania Roman Newbold. 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 contain the tests of the 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 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 US National Security Agency. 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 in the hands: everyone who wants to try their hand at deciphering can download photocopies High Quality from the university website.