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 from around the 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 Yale University Rare Book Library.

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 60s and 70s of the last century, the manuscript was handed over to employees of the NSA (US National Security Agency). 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 Rudolph 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 areas 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 depicting such celestial bodies as the Moon, the Sun, stars. In addition, there are images of the zodiac circle with graphic symbols of the 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 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, permutation of letters, 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 for writing short texts and are not intended for encrypting 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 ancient manuscript collector 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 the 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 of an ancient book were 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. Both professional cryptographers and linguists and ordinary amateurs who are interested in ancient secrets are engaged in deciphering the manuscript. 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. The undying interest in the ancient manuscript gives hope that sooner or later it will still be deciphered.

Today we turn to the most famous and unsolved text of all time, a medieval book of sciences filled with beautiful illustrations and strange wisdom: the Voynich Manuscript. No one has yet been able to read a single word of this book...
Let's go straight to the main point. The Voynich Manuscript has not yet been solved. Today, there is absolutely no hint of the author of the Voynich Manuscript, the meaning of the text and its purpose. There are several theories, but not a single brilliant answer in its discovery. The path of scientific discovery always captures and captivates not only what is known, but also what remains a mystery.

Somewhere in Europe in the early 1400s, presumably in northern Italy, the skin of pets was turned into parchment. Shortly thereafter, allegedly two people, using pen and ink, wrote a book of 38,000 words using an alphabet and a language that could not be identified. The Voynich Manuscript is not a huge book, measuring 16 by 23 centimeters and about 5 centimeters thick. The Voynich Manuscript has approximately 240 pages, depending on how you count them. Some of the pages unfold into large drawings and diagrams. The alphabet consists of 23 - 40 characters, depending on the classification. Some of the symbols may have a decorative version or a double combination.

The Voynich Manuscript contains six sections, according to the type of illustration:

• In the largest, first section of 130 pages, there are drawings of 113 plants and flowers that cannot be identified. The first section of the Voynich Manuscript was named Botanical.
• 26 pages of the second section are Astrological drawings. Lots of circular and concentric charts, as well as some signs of the zodiac.
• The third section, Biological, is filled with drawings of naked women frolicking in the many swimming pools with complex system water supply.
• Cosmological, the fourth section, presents the most impressive page spreads with circular diagrams of space objects.
• The fifth section, Biological, has more than a hundred sketches of plants, roots, powders, tinctures and potions of indeterminate composition and purpose.
• The final and most mysterious section of the Voynich Manuscript, called the Stars, contains 23 pages of text without illustrations. Each short paragraph of a section is marked with a star.

Some of the book's illustrations show an oriental influence. Including a map of the city with a circular layout, supposedly Baghdad, the center of knowledge of the East.

A few centuries later, it was not possible to determine exactly, The Voynich Manuscript received a cover, unfortunately, without registration. Even later, the illustrations became colored, although this was not done very neatly. In the 16th century, the Voynich Manuscript belongs to the English astrologer John Dee, who numbered the top corner of each page. John Dee sold the book to Emperor Rudolph II of Germany under the belief that it was written by Roger Bacon, who lived in the 13th century and is widely recognized as the author. scientific methods. The book was then owned by one or two signed owners, and in 1666 was presented to a student, Athanasius Kircher, in Rome. The gift was accompanied by a letter from Johannes Marcus Marci, with the hope of being able to decipher. Markus' letter has been preserved along with the book. Until 1912, the adventures of the book are unknown, until it was discovered by the antiques dealer Wilfred Voynich. The book was kept at the Jesuit College, Italy, at Villa Mondragone. Voynich brought the book to international attention. Again, with several owners, the book was donated to the Yale University Library, where it is kept under the official name MS 408.

The discovery of the Voynich Manuscript has given rise to many hypotheses about the contents of the book. Many people believe that the record is a code. All attempts at decryption have so far been unsuccessful. Some argue that the book is written in an invented language, as opposed to languages ​​that have evolved. There are opinions that when writing the Voynich Manuscript, the Cardan Grille, a special stencil that allows you to read only the necessary characters, was used. But perhaps the most popular theory holds that the Voynich Manuscript is a hoax of any period when parchment was used and for any purpose: scientific, financial gain, or just a weekend prank.

There are many possible authors of the book. Roger Bacon remains a suspect, but this opinion is based on the opinions of most of the book's previous owners and has not been substantiated. Roger Bacon did not write anything in the language of the Voynich manuscript, as far as we know. Moreover, he died in 1294, 100 years before the book was written. There can be no doubt about the dates, because the age of the parchment is known today, which Voynich and his predecessors could not know. A radiocarbon analysis of the 2011 parchment was performed at the University of Arzona by Dr. Greg Hodgins and put the date of its production in the early 1400s. Determining the age of ink is much worse. Most inks are organic-free and do not lend themselves to radiocarbon dating. Even if the ink contains organic components, there is no reliable technology for separating the carbon of the ink from the carbon of the document. The pigments used are comparable to the pigments of that time, but even an experienced forger could know this.

We have the opportunity to make several scientific assumptions. Parchment, often laundered and used repeatedly, is an excellent opportunity for modern scammers to create a document of ancient origin both visually and by radiocarbon analysis. But the chemical trace on the parchment remains in any case. We know that the Voynich Manuscript is the first and only text on these sheets of parchment. In addition, parchment has always been in high demand, and it is extremely unlikely to find virgin sheets through the ages, not used before, for a perfect fake. Given Marcy's 1666 letter of dedication, the age of the book can be assumed to match the age of its parchment.

Let's look at other properties of the Voynich Manuscript.

One of them is of great importance: The handwritten book is completely uncorrected. There are also no places with smaller text that they tried to squeeze into the page and complete the thought. All this is extremely unlikely if the book were a manuscript in the first edition. Mistakes and corrections in this case are inevitable. How to explain all this? There are several versions, two of which are the most plausible.

The first suggests that the Voynich Manuscript is a copy of another book. Possibly written by Roger Bacon. The copyist could carefully plan the placement of text on the pages based on the original, and if he worked carefully, do without errors. The theory of copying does not contradict the fact that the book was written from beginning to end by one or two people. The mere fact of a copy does little, but leads to a desire to decipher the document, leaving us wondering: Why would someone carefully copy a book that says nothing?

The second version of the neat-looking Voynich Manuscript will tell you more: The text makes no sense and consists of signs that were used to fill sheets of parchment. Corrections are not required. Compressing the text to complete the thought disappears in the absence of a semantic load.

The Voynich Manuscript's "complete nonsense" theory has just one objection: If a document doesn't make sense, then it's very high-quality nonsense, beyond the amateur level. The Voynich manuscript has been repeatedly analyzed by different computer methods, by different researchers and by different programs. Everything is unsuccessful. The text was metrically compared with different languages. The frequency of letters, the length of words is very close to real languages, but does not correspond to any. All this is reasoning, but the author imagines a monk or a professional clerk who worked day after day, perfectly understanding his task to give the text a semblance of reality. The task is not easy for an amateur, a person from the street or a professional in another field. If it is gibberish, then the Voynich Manuscript contains the highest quality gibberish.

Hints on the semantic component are not exhausted. The combination of words and their application in different sections looks like real text on various topics would look like. The pages of one section are more similar to each other than the pages of neighboring sections of the Voynich Manuscript.

The intrigue around the Voynich Manuscript is growing.

The analysis of the book by the US Navy cipher Prescott Currier, who discovered in 1970 two specific "languages" of the book, is quite famous. Speaking of "languages", Carrier specifies that these can be two dialects, two ways of encryption and calls them Voynich-A, Voynich-B. Interestingly, Voynich-A and Voynich-B are written in different handwriting, although they represent the same alphabet or cipher. Each page of the book is written in either Voynich-A or Voynich-B from start to finish. The Biology and Star sections are written in Voynich-B, the other sections in Voynich-A. The exception is the first and largest section: Botanical, which contains both "languages". "Languages" are not mixed, the book consists of so-called "bifolios", in which sheets are grouped before stitching the entire book. So each "bifolio" carries only one of the two "languages".

Among the hypotheses about the origin of the Voynich Manuscript, the author chooses the following:

Somewhere at the beginning of the 15th century, a professional alchemist, astronomer or physicist decided to create something that confirms his rare and priceless knowledge from the East on the market. This man engaged a monk or clerk to make a book filled with amazing drawings from various fields of knowledge and texts that no one can read. All this made it possible to interpret the "Wisdom of the East" at the discretion of the owner of the book, depending on the circumstances.

The monk had a clerk as his assistant, they developed an alphabet and, keeping the text similar to existing languages, wrote convincing nonsense. The quality of the creation allowed the owner of the book to impress even his colleagues in the craft. Thus, the "specialist" received a market-leading confirmation that is conceptually identical to the naturopath's robe, the energy diagrams of top-level yogis, and the titles "doctor" bought online by alternative medicine specialists of various trends.

This remains the main hypothesis for the origin of the Voynich Manuscript. Not a falsification, but a carefully thought out and well-crafted book filled with nothing but complete nonsense. Perhaps one day the Voynich Manuscript will reveal a different purpose, but for now this hypothesis is as good as the others.

Translation Vladimir Maksimenko 2013

This was the name of a manuscript in a previously unknown language with certain knowledge of a specialist in various fields 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 devoted to 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 irregular shapes plants are associated with the style of the drawing.

Modern researchers believe that the mysterious text was written in a phonetic language, and the author himself invented the symbols.

The manuscript was written in one hand, but in different time. 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.

The collection of the Yale University Library (USA) contains a unique Voynich Manuscript, which is considered the most mysterious esoteric manuscript in the world.

The manuscript was named after its former owner, an American bookseller. Wilfried Voynich, husband of the famous writer Ethel Lilian Voynich, author of the novel The Gadfly. Bookseller wilfriedVoynich bought the manuscript in 1912 in one of the Italian Jesuit monasteries.

History of the mysterious manuscript.

It is known that the owner of the manuscript was Rudolph II (German Rudolf II; 1552, Vienna - 1612, Prague, Bohemia) - King of Germany (Roman King) from 1575 to 1576. A mysterious manuscript with numerous color illustrations was sold to Rudolf II for 600 ducats famous mathematician, geographer, astronomer, alchemistand astrolo G Welsh origin John Dee , who wanted to get permission to freely leave Prague for his homeland, in Wales. John Dee exaggerated the antiquity of the manuscript, having assured King Rudolf that the author of this mysterious book is a famous English philosopher and naturalist Roger Bacon (1214 - 1292).

It is known that later the owner of the book was the alchemist Georg Baresch, who lived in Prague in early XVII century. Apparently Georg Baresh was also puzzled by the mystery of this enigmatic book.

Having learned that a famous German scientist, a Jesuit who studied linguistics, antiquities, theology, mathematics Athanasius Kircher (Athanasius Kircher -1602 - 1680 , Rome), from the Roman College (Collegio Romano) published Coptic dictionary and deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs, Georg Baresch sent Kircher to Rome several copied pages of the manuscript and a letter asking for help to decipher the cryptic writings. Letter 1639 GeorgeBaresh addressed to Kircher was discovered already in our time by Rene Zandbergen, and became the earliest mention of an undeciphered manuscript.

After death GeorgeBaresh the book was given to his friend, rector of Prague University Johann Markus (Jan Marek) martzi(Johannes Marcus Marci, 1595-1667). Johann Marzi presumably sent it away Athanasius Kircher , to his old friend. Transmittal letter 1666 Johanna Marzi still attached to the manuscript. The letter states that it was originally bought for 600 ducats king of germanyRudolph II, who considered the author of this book an English philosopher Roger Bacon (1214 - 1292).

The fate of the mysterious manuscript from 1666 to 1912 remains unknown. Probably the book was kept along with the rest of the correspondence Athanasius Kircher in the library of the Roman College, now Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, founded in 1551 by Ignatius Loyola and Francis Borgia.
The mysterious book probably remained there until 1870, when Troops of Victor Emmanuel II King of the Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont since 1849), from the Savoy dynasty entered Rome and annexed the Papal States to the Italian kingdom. The new Italian authorities decided to confiscate the property of the Papal State, including the library in Rome.

According to research Xaviera Ceccaldi (Xavier Ceccaldi), before the confiscation of papal property, many books from the library Pontifical Gregorian University were hastily transferred to the libraries of university employees, whose property was not confiscated. Kircher's correspondence was among these books, and also, apparently, there was a mysterious manuscript, since the book has an ex-libris of the rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University, Petrus Beks (Petrus Beckx), at that time the head of the Jesuit order.

Library Pontifical Gregorian University with ex-libris of PetrusBecks was moved to a large palace near Rome, Villa Mondragon in Frascati (villa Borghese di Mondragone a Frascati), which was acquired by the Jesuit society back in 1866.

In 1912 the College of Rome needed funds and decided in the strictest confidence to sell part of her property. Bookseller Wilfried Voynich bought 30 manuscripts , among other things, and 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 Hans Kraus (Hanse P. Kraus). Not finding a buyer in 1969, Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University in the United States.

Secrets of the Voinich Manuscript.

Initially the manuscript, measuring 22.5x16 cm, consisted of 116 sheets parchment, fourteen sheets of the book are considered lost today. The handwritten text of the book is written with a quill pen, in a fluent calligraphic hand, using five colors of ink - blue, red, brown, yellow and green.

To determine the age of the book, a paper and ink analysis - they belong to XVI century. About the age of the book they tell her illustrations , on which you can see the clothes and decorations of women, as well as medieval castles on the diagrams. All details in the illustrations are typical for Western Europe between 1450 and 1520. This is indirectly confirmed by other historical information.

Almost every page of the Voynich Manuscript contains drawings that allow divide the entire text of the book into five sections: botanical, astronomical, biological, astrological and medical.

Botanical section of the book the largest includes more than 400 illustrations of plants and herbs that have no direct analogues in botany, and unknown to science. The text accompanying the drawings of plants is carefully divided into equal paragraphs.

Astronomical section of the book contains about two dozen concentric diagrams with images of the Sun, Moon and astronomical constellations.

Biological section of the book contains a large number of human figures, mostly female, presented in various stages of childbearing. Perhaps, in the biological section of the book, descriptions of the processes of human life and the secrets of the interaction of the human soul and body are given.

Astrological section of the book replete with images of magical medallions, zodiacal symbols and stars.

In the medical section of the book , probably given alchemical recipes for the treatment of various diseases and magical occult advice.

The alphabet of the texts of the manuscript Voynich bears no resemblance to any known writing system, unknown to science hieroglyphs that hide the meaning of the text have not yet been deciphered.

All attempts to determine the language and decipher the text of the Voynich Manuscript have so far been in vain. Experienced cryptographers of the 20th century tried to decipher text by the method of frequency analysis of the use of various symbols. However, neither Latin nor many Western European and Oriental languages ​​helped to decipher the text of the manuscript, research has come to a standstill.

What do modern scholars think of this manuscript?

Candidate of Biological Sciences, specialist in the field of computer psychodiagnostics Sergei Gennadievich Krivenkov and Leading Software Engineer at IGT of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation Claudia Nikolaevna Nagornaya, from Petersburg, they consider as a working hypothesis that the compiler of the texts of the Voynich manuscript was one of John Dee's rivals in intelligence activities, who apparently encrypted recipes for the preparation of potions, poisons, medicines, in which, as you know, there are many special abbreviations, which and provides short words of text.

Why encrypt? If these are recipes for poisons, then the question disappears ... John Dee himself, for all his versatility, was not an expert on medicinal herbs, so he could hardly have compiled this text on his own.

What kind of mysterious "unearthly" plants are depicted in the illustrations of the book? It turned out that all the depicted plants are composite. For example, the well-known belladonna flower is drawn with a leaf of the equally poisonous plant hoof . And so in many other cases, illustrations of plants depict wild rose, nettle, and even ginseng. Perhaps the author of the illustrations and text traveled to China from Western Europe, since the vast majority of plants are still European.

Which of the influential European organizations sent its mission to China in the second half of the 16th century? The answer from history is known - order of the Jesuits. B The nearest major residency of the Jesuit order to Prague was in the 1580s. in Krakow and John Dee along with his partner, the alchemist Kelly at first he also worked in Krakow, and then moved to Prague. The paths of a connoisseur of poisonous recipes, who first went on a mission to China and then worked in Krakow, could well have crossed paths with John Dee.

Once it became clear what many of the "herbarium" pictures mean, Sergei Krivenkov and Claudia Nagornaya began to study the text. The assumption that the text of the Voinich manuscript mainly consists of Latin and Greek abbreviations was confirmed.

However, the main goal of the study was to uncover an 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 and the use of numerology techniques typical of that time. At the end of the Middle Ages they did not at all create purely digital keys to ciphers, but very often they inserted numerous meaningless symbols (“blanks”) into the text, which generally devalues ​​the use of frequency analysis when deciphering the manuscript. But researchers have not yet been able to figure out what is "dummy" and what is not.

Under plant illustration belladonna - " belladonna» and hoof(lat. Ásarum) researchers managed to read the Latin names of these particular plants. Illustrations of plants accompany tips for preparing deadly poison... Here, the characteristic medical prescriptions abbreviations, mentioning the name of the god of death in ancient mythology - Thanatos (ancient Greek Θάνατος - "death"), the brother of the god of sleep Hypnos (ancient Greek Ὕπνος - "sleep").

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 main thing here is not in the recipes, but in revealing the historical mystery.

Astranomic illustrations of stellar spirals seem to indicate the best time to gather herbs, and the incompatibility of certain plants.

Is the Voynich Manuscript a sophisticated forgery?

English scientist Gordon Rugg from the University of Keely (Great Britain) came to the conclusion that the texts of an old book of the 16th century may well turn out to be abracadabra.

Mysterious 16th-century book may be elegant nonsense, says computer scientist. Gordon Rugg used the spy methods of the era of Elizabeth the First to recreate the new text of the Voynich manuscript, and he succeeded!

“I believe that a fake is a very likely explanation,” says Gordon 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 King of Germany Rudolf II. Other scientists consider this version quite plausible, but not the only one.

« Critics of this hypothesis have pointed out that the language of the Voynich manuscript is too complex for nonsense. How could a medieval swindler produce 200 pages of handwritten text with such knowledge of many subtle patterns in the structure and distribution of words? But it is possible to reproduce many of these wonderful characteristics of text using a simple encoder that existed in the 16th century. The text produced by this method looks like the manuscript text of the Voynich Manuscript, but is nonsense nonsense. This discovery does not prove that the Voynich manuscript is a hoax, but it does support the long-standing theory that the document is a medieval forgery."

Without going into a detailed linguistic analysis, it can be noted that the text and illustrations of the manuscript have a complex structure and organization, many letters and words are repeated in a certain sequence. These and others the features of a real-life language are indeed inherent in the Voynich manuscript. Scientifically speaking, the Voynich manuscript is different low entropy (from the Greek. entropia - turn, transformation) part of the internal energy of a closed system , and forging a low-entropy text by hand is almost impossible, especially in the 16th century.

No one has yet been able to show whether the language of the manuscript is cryptography (from other Greek κρυπτός - hidden and γράφω - I write) , a modified version of some of the existing languages, or nonsense. Some features of the text are not found in any of the existing languages ​​- for example, two and three times repetition of the most common words - which confirms the hypothesis of nonsense. 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. - some crazy alchemist would need many years to achieve such a correct construction of the text.

However, as shown Gordon Rugg , such text is quite easy to create with using an encryption device invented around 1550 and called the Cardano lattice. The Cardano lattice is a tool for encryption and decryption, which is a special rectangular or square card table, some of the cells of which are cut out. A table-card of a special stencil with holes is moved, writing down the words of the text. At the same time, the closed cells of the table are filled with an arbitrary set of letters, which turns the text into a secret message.

By using gratingsCardano computer scientist Gordon Rugg compiled a language similar to the Voynich manuscript, for this it took him only three months.

Attempts to decipher the text of the Voynich Manuscript in the 20th century.

It seems that attempts to decipher the text are failing, 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. 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 reproduction Voynich Manuscript was a professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Roman Newbold. In the hieroglyphs of the text of the manuscript, Newbould saw the knowledge of shorthand writing and proceeded to decrypt it, translating them into letters of the Latin alphabet.

In April 1921 Roman Newbould published the preliminary results of his work before the academic council of the university. The report of Roman Newbould created a sensation. Many scientists, although they refused to express an opinion on the validity of the methods they used to transform 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 probably represent epithelial cells magnified 75 times. The general public was fascinated. Entire Sunday supplements to reputable newspapers were devoted to this event.

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 cryptographic system should work in both directions. If you own a cipher, you can not only decrypt messages encrypted with it, but also encrypt new text. Romain Newbold became more obscure, less accessible, and died in 1926. his friend and colleague Roland Grubb Kent published his work in 1928. entitled "The Roger Bacon Cipher". American and English historians who studied the Middle Ages treated her more than reservedly and with great doubt.

We don't actually know exactly 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 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 texts of the Voynich manuscript, stored in the Yale University Rare and Rare Books Library and estimated at $ 160,000. The Voynich manuscript is not given to anyone, but anyone who wants to try their hand at deciphering can download high-quality photocopies from the site Yale University USA.

Fresh "fake news" from Canada.

Artificial intelligence helped scientists from University of Alberta (Canada) discover the mystery of the famous Voynich manuscript.
Algorithm was worked out on the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" , translated into 380 languages. Artificial intelligence succeeded recognize 97% of the text "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" , after which the algorithm was applied to the text of the Voynich manuscript.

The researchers now have confidence in the language of the document and even know how to translate the first sentence. It turned out that the Voynich manuscript was written in Hebrew - the order of letters in words is changed, vowels are completely omitted. The first sentence of the Voynich manuscript translates like this: “She made recommendations to the priest, the head of the house, me and the people.” Yes, yes!

William R. Newbold, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, was a renowned and respected scientist. During World War I, he worked for the US government deciphering military codes and was considered one of the leading cryptanalysts.

In 1919, he took on the main cryptogram of his life, which could lead him to world fame. Newbold was engaged in deciphering the mysterious document until the end of his days, but he failed.

The mystery to which Newbold devoted the last seven years of his life to unraveling is the so-called Voynich manuscript. The book takes its name from Wilfrid M. Voynich, a professional antiques dealer who discovered it in 1912 in a Jesuit estate south of Rome.

The manuscript immediately caught the attention of Voynich. More than two hundred pages were filled with text in an unknown language, not a word or even a symbol of which was known to the bookseller. In addition to the text, the book contained many no less mysterious drawings. Not surprisingly, Voynich bought the book from the Jesuits, and with it several others.

Professor Newbold was perhaps one of the best-placed figures of his day to unravel the mystery of the manuscript. In addition to his professional activities - cryptanalysis and the study and teaching of philosophy - Newbold, like Voynich, was a passionate collector of old books (however, unlike Voynich, Newbold acquired books for personal use, and not for resale). In particular, the professor's collection was decorated with the first editions of the works of Giordano Bruno, Spinoza and Descartes. In addition, Newbold was a recognized expert in the occult sciences.

In 1921, after two years of labor, Newbold published his solution. Perhaps the impeccable reputation of the professor, coupled with the painful expectation of a solution, was the reason that Newbold's decoding was accepted immediately, almost without meeting criticism.

The approach, or rather the combination of approaches, that Newbold took was hardly something he had used before in the analysis of military ciphers. Newbold decided that the line on the last page was the key to the text. Although it has a font similar to the rest of the text, it is clearly written in a different, less accurate handwriting, thus suggesting that this is just an attempt by one of the book's owners to write something in the "original language". Newbold had his own explanation. He considered that the line was written in Latin, although modified. Newbold took the beginning of the phrase - "Michiton oladabas multos te tccr cerc portas", threw out unnecessary characters from there; reading the word "multos" with a magnifying glass, changed "o" to "a", which gave "Michi dabas multas portas" (in Latin: "you gave me many doors"). "Doors", according to Newbold, is the designation of combinations of two letters in Hebrew in the teachings of Kabbalah. Based on the code phrase, Newbold created a cipher in which two-letter combinations correspond to one letter of the Latin alphabet.

Having examined the code phrase to the smallest detail with a magnifying glass, he came to the conclusion that each of its letters consists of strokes. Letters that seem the same to the naked eye are actually made up of separate dashes and carry different meanings, being combinations of several characters at once. Newbold duplicated all the characters in these combinations, except for the first and last. The combinations modified in this way were divided into letter pairs, each of which was replaced by a certain letter of the Latin alphabet. At the same time, Newbold treated substitutions freely, substituting, if necessary, various letters corresponding to similar sounds - d and t for example.

But that's not all. To get to the goal, Newbold applied the anagram method to the text obtained after all the transformations, that is, rearranging the letters in places, and received the final text in Latin. Newbold named the result of the decipherment the Opus Magnum of Roger Bacon (not to be confused with Francis Bacon, a famous figure of the Renaissance), a Franciscan friar and scholar who lived in the thirteenth century. According to Newbold, Roger Bacon had knowledge that was several centuries ahead of its time. The text described the structure of human internal organs, cells, spermatozoa, as well as the eclipse of the Sun and the structure of the Andromeda nebula.

The result was sensational, and the solution extraordinarily complex, confusing and strange. And most importantly, it was contradictory and contained many poorly argued assumptions and assumptions. Newbold himself admitted that each time he deciphered the text again, he came to a new result. The collapse of the study came in 1931, five years after Newbold's death. British cryptologist John Manly, who initially supported the American's decision, published an article in which he argued that the small strokes that seemed to Newbold as carriers of a hidden meaning appeared due to aging and the accompanying cracking of the ink.

In addition, Manley demonstrated that the proposed decryption mechanism allows the Voynich text to be converted into virtually any desired message. As an example, Manley "deciphered" one of the passages of the text as "Paris is lured into loving vestals", which can be translated as "Paris is seduced by maidens in love."

After the appearance of Manley's article, Newbold's decision was rejected, and he himself began to be considered an eccentric obsessed with the manuscript. However, to date, Newbold's publication remains the only thoroughly developed transcript of the entire text with a meaningful result, and it has its adherents.

Newbold was not the first person to "try the teeth" of the Voynich manuscript. After acquiring the book, the collector sent copies of it to several experts for deciphering. Among them was Manley, who served in American intelligence and during the First World War, like Newbold, proved himself from the best side. Another famous cryptologist who tried to find a solution was Herbert O. Yardley, the American expert who directed Manly. Yardley is famous for deciphering the Japanese diplomatic code. However, the efforts of these and other no less worthy gentlemen were in vain.

The complexity of the task that the Voynich manuscript set for cryptanalysts can be appreciated by comparing two stories of the 20th century: the story of the successes of outstanding cryptanalytic talents in the intelligence struggle during both world wars and the story of unsuccessful attempts to decipher the manuscript. Often the winners and the losers were the same people.

The solution to the Japanese code PURPLE is one of the most famous episodes of the cryptological confrontation of World War II. The head of the group of American cryptanalysts was William F. Friedman, a native of Chisinau, who is called one of the most prominent cryptologists in history. By the end of the war, he even managed to create a copy of the Japanese cipher machine, never having seen it.

In 1944, when the main military tasks had already been completed, Friedman organized a special working group. After the end of the working day, he, along with some of his colleagues, worked on deciphering the Voynich manuscript. Alas, the group did not manage to get close to the solution. Her biggest achievement was the transcription of the text into the Latin alphabet and the preparation of a machine-readable version of the text on punched cards. However, these punched cards were buried in the archives of intelligence and came to light only half a century later. Already in the 1950s, Friedman published an important conclusion: the text was written in an artificial language with a clear logical structure. He came to this conclusion on the basis of an analysis of the dictionary of the text - it turned out to be rather meager, and two or even three words often go in a row; Often there are repeated words that differ by only one letter. On the other hand, there are practically no words consisting of one or two letters in the text. Here Friedman saw similarities with other artificial languages ​​- in particular, with the "philosophical language" created in the 17th century by the scientist John Wilkins. Its concept is based on the fact that a certain syllable is assigned to a generalized category, and this syllable, usually as a prefix or suffix, is part of any word that means an object, phenomenon or concept within this category.

Another codebreaker who devoted his life to deciphering the manuscript was John H. Tiltman, considered the best British cryptanalyst of all time. During World War II, he led the British intelligence decryption center and personally participated in breaking the codes of the German Lorenz cipher machine. The story of capturing and decoding messages from the Enigma machine is better known (a merit of the same center), but Lorenz was a more advanced machine and was used to encode high command messages.

Regardless of Friedman, Tiltman concluded that the manuscript was written in a synthetic language. However, neither the two luminaries nor other researchers were able to explain the meaning of prefixes and suffixes in the text.

With the advent of available computing power and the translation of the manuscript into a machine-readable form, text research has mainly focused on finding statistical patterns between characters, parts of words, words, phrases and their location in a paragraph, on a page, or in a book as a whole. Despite the fact that many such patterns have been found, very few significant conclusions have been drawn from them.

In particular, in 1976, Prescott Currier showed, based on counting pairs of characters and words, that the text was written in two different languages ​​or dialects, or two different encryption algorithms were used. Moreover, each of the pages is written entirely in either one or another language: they were called Currier A and Currier B. He also demonstrated that the text was written in two different handwritings, completely corresponding to two different languages. True, the Courier made his conclusion on the basis of an analysis of only part of the book. Doctor of Engineering Rene Zandbergen, who works at the European Space Agency and studies the manuscript in free time, later showed that the text is more diverse and that the two languages ​​are closely "intertwined" in the book with each other. This conclusion, however, is disputed by some scholars.

Another important conclusion was made after the text was checked against the so-called Zipf's law. After analyzing texts in many languages, including extinct ones, in the 40s of the last century, a scientist at Harvard University, George K. Zipf, built a descending distribution of the frequency of occurrence of words for each of them. All curves constructed in this way had the form of a hyperbola. This was the basis for the conclusion that such a distribution is a characteristic and distinctive feature of natural languages.

As it turned out, the text of the Voynich manuscript also obeys Zipf's law. This result became an argument in support of the fact that the manuscript is not gibberish, but really a ciphered message. However, since Zipf's law is empirical in nature, the result obtained cannot serve as proof of the meaningfulness of the text.

Several exotic solutions have been proposed in recent decades. In 1978, John Stojko published a book in which he transcribed the Voynich manuscript. His version boiled down to the fact that the text is a collection of letters written in Ukrainian without the use of vowels. However, the content of the letters explained by Stoiko diverges from the well-known history of Ancient Russia (Stoiko describes the manuscript as a collection of letters from the ruler of Kievan Rus named Ora to the Khazar leader named Manya Koza, written during the war between Russia and the Khazars). Moreover, it is difficult to understand even the meaning of individual phrases, not to mention the text as a whole (although if Russia sent ambassadors to Ukraine back in the Middle Ages, the version would not look so implausible), despite the multiplicity, as in Newbold's decision, options decryption.

In 1987, another person with a Slavic surname, Leo Levitov, put forward an equally original version - the book describes the endura ritual of the Catharist religious movement that existed in Europe in the Middle Ages. Endura is suicide in the form of death starvation practiced in Catharism. In the version of Levitov, endura is suicide in any form, designed to alleviate the suffering of a seriously ill patient.

In addition to inconsistencies in the meaning of the deciphered text with known information about the sect, the solution itself also turned out to be untenable. It was based on the fact that the text was written in a distorted Flemish language, with an original writing system specially invented for writing the manuscript. This hypothesis has been refuted by linguists.

Decades of unsuccessful attempts have led many researchers to the version that the Voynich manuscript is a fake, presenting it as an alchemist's ciphertext, although in fact there is no meaning in it (some people even believed that the book was written by Voynich himself in order to profit from the sale mysterious book, but this version is refuted by historical references to the book from various sources). Just a few months ago, the version of the fake received wide publicity.

In January 2004, Dr. Gordon Rugg, professor at the University of Keele (England), published an article in the journal Cryptologia. In it, he described how a forger of the Middle Ages could produce the Voynich manuscript without the use of intellectual methods or technical means unknown at that time.

Rugg used the so-called Cardano lattice, a well-known steganographic tool (and its modification - a rotary lattice), named after the inventor, Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardano, and designed to hide encoded messages inside text of other content. The Cardano grille is a card with several windows cut out, much like a punched card. When a card is overlaid on ciphertext, a hidden message appears in its windows. Thus, it is possible to encrypt and read the source text with the same card.

According to Rugg, the creator of the Voynich manuscript used the grid in a different way. First, the alphabet of the text was invented. After that, combinations were made from fictional letters that became prefixes, suffixes or middle parts of words. All these combinations were recorded in a table divided into three columns corresponding to different parts of the words. After that, the author took a card with windows and with its help began to choose combinations of letters from the table, adding them into words. To diversify the text, spaces were left in place of many parts of words in the table, thus creating shorter words. Of course, such a large text as the Voynich manuscript, created using a single grid option, would have a very poor "vocabulary" and would be easily opened. Therefore, according to Rugg, the author used several different grids. To create a manuscript, according to the scientist, seven were enough.

In addition to his version of how the manuscript was created, Rugg also points to its possible authorship. In his opinion, the document was created by Edward Kelly (Edward Kelley), a famous alchemist and hoaxer of his time. Kelly is known to have used the Cardano grids and was an associate of the scientist and alchemist John Dee, one of the supposed early owners of the manuscript. Kelly has long been "under suspicion" as the creator of the manuscript.

Articles about Rugg's work were published in 2004 in several popular magazines, and it gained wide acclaim. First of all, due to active popularization, at the moment the version of Ragg is considered the main one, at least by the general public. It is not surprising, meanwhile, that the conclusions of the scientist met with a flurry of criticism from researchers who have devoted their time to finding the solution to the mysterious book for many years. And Ragg has yet to prove the viability of his hypothesis.

One of the most active opponents of the Rugga theory is the manuscript researcher Jacques Guy, a doctor of linguistics and a polyglot (it is interesting that the first language that Jacques learned at the age of nine (!) was Russian), now living in Australia. Here is how he sums up Rugg's conclusions: Eat, eat, eat with a car, invite a candle. Abracadabra, isn't it? However, for someone who does not know Russian, this text looks like it was written in Russian, right? This is exactly what Rugg did - he created a text that vaguely resembles the text of the Voynich manuscript, but at the same time does not make sense. And on this basis, he concludes that the Voynich manuscript is nonsense. I produced a text that vaguely resembles Russian, and, of course, is meaningless. Therefore ... everything written in Russian is nonsense. The argument Rugg puts forward is exactly the same."

As René Zandbergen explains, the prefix-mid-suffix rule that Rugg based his method on was discovered at the time by another researcher, the Brazilian Jorge Stolfi, but it only correlates with one part of the document written by in language B. The words of language A, in which the "botanical" part is written, are constructed according to a different principle and cannot be obtained by the "Rugg method".

Dr. Rugg does not hide the fact that his conclusions are far from final and cannot serve as proof of the version of falsification, but only demonstrate a possible, albeit most likely, in his opinion, mechanism for creating the text. Rugg does not believe that the manuscript is too linguistically complex to be a hoax. At the moment, he is working on the development of his version and intends to select lattices with which you can create a text that repeats all the structures described so far and has the statistical properties found in the manuscript. If Ragg succeeds, the falsification version will gain additional support. On the other hand, the study of the manuscript continues, and perhaps new characteristics will be discovered that Rugg will need to reproduce again.

Currently, dozens of volunteers around the world are working on deciphering the manuscript, united in an online community by a mailing list at www.voynich.net. Everything is studied - text, drawings, pagination, the book itself - ink, parchment - and, of course, the origin of the manuscript. I dare to suggest that there are still an uncountable number of singles in the world who are looking for a clue, and do not advertise their work. If there are such people among you, or you are intrigued by the mystery of the manuscript, the community members will be glad to have new comrades-in-arms.

Despite significant efforts, last years no significant progress has been made.

New theories appear, new characteristics of the structure of the text and words, previously unnoticed details of drawings and text are discovered. But the answer is still far away.

One of the notable recent theories is the hypothesis proposed by Jacques Guy and developed by Georges Stolfi. It is based on an analysis of the lengths of words and syllables and the word structure of the manuscript. Similarities were found between the language of the Voynich text and East Asian languages, in particular Chinese and Vietnamese, suggesting that the text was written in a related language. Stolfi lists the following similarities between Chinese and manuscript language:

• the most common words consist of one syllable;
• there are no punctuation marks;
• spaces separate syllables, not words formed from them;
• word wrap can be carried out after any syllable;
• the lengths of different syllables differ slightly from each other;
• there are only about four hundred phonetically distinct syllables;
• very similar words often have completely different meanings;
• the same word is part of different complex formations, with different meanings;
• the repetition of words is widespread;
• words do not change form;
• numbers look like ordinary words;
• syllables have a strict internal structure;
• syllables have three phonetic components;
• there are about 4, 25 and 30 different variations of these components, respectively.

But this is still only a hypothesis. However, the word structure of the manuscript discovered by Stolfi is considered one of the major achievements in manuscript research for recent times. According to Rene Zandbergen, it is the one who explains this structure that will receive the key to unraveling the manuscript.

At the same time, the search for the author of the book continues. Surprisingly, so far no books have been found related to the Voynich manuscript with similar content, or documents that could be attributed to the same author. So far, it has not been possible to significantly narrow the search context - as researcher Luis Velez, a certified lawyer from Venezuela, now living in the United States, says, the author could be "any European who lived in the late 15th - early 16th centuries." Any reference or similarity to another book can lead to significant research progress.

High hopes are pinned on recently published high-resolution scanned copies of the pages of the manuscript by the Yale University Library on the Internet - after all, most researchers working in their spare time have never even seen the original. According to English-based manuscript researcher Nick Pelling, a computer game creator by profession, this has already resolved many long-standing questions. In particular, the hypothesis that the book was bound in the wrong order was confirmed. Nick, who focused his research on the iconology and iconography of the book (that is, on trying to understand the meaning of the book without deciphering the text), based on new, better images, came to the conclusion that most likely in the original version the book was mostly one-color and additional coloring was done later by those who numbered the pages of the manuscript.

Pelling believes that now, with good images, it is important to determine the correct sequence of pages and determine in what order the various elements of the book were created. There is already evidence that many of the drawings and letters were retouched decades after the book was written, with some of the original text distorted. According to Luis Velez, for further research it is important to create an unambiguous, with a minimum number of errors, computer version of the text. Currently, several versions are used, created by different researchers at different times and often noticeably different from each other.

The Voynich Manuscript is unique in every way. First of all, the fact that more than ninety years have passed since its discovery, and there is still no acceptable interpretation of the contents of the book, with all the achievements of modern cryptanalysis and the intellectual power of scientists who participated in deciphering the manuscript. There is no answer to any of the important questions about the origin of the book - who, where and when it was written. But despite the complexity and scale of the task, anyone can try to contribute to its solution - enough access to the Internet. The Voynich Manuscript is a chance to feel like Champollion without leaving home. And the fact that the key to the puzzle has not yet been found does not mean that the task is impossible. It only means that the most interesting is yet to come.

Reference:

About the Voynich manuscript

The Voynich Manuscript is a book measuring 6 by 9 inches and about one inch thick. The pages and cover of the book are made of parchment. There are no inscriptions or drawings on the cover itself. The text is written in an unknown alphabet. On almost every page there are drawings of unknown plants, naked women, constellations, interweaving of pipes and vessels through which liquid flows. Neither the drawings nor the alphabet of the text of the manuscript are found in any other book (of course, unless it is a modern copy or imitation of the Voynich manuscript). Most of the drawings are in color.

The text is still undecipherable. There are symbols in the book that were not created in the writing system of the main text, but their meaning is not clear either. The only legible inscriptions made in Latin are the designations of the signs of the Zodiac in the drawings and the signature of Jacob Horcicki, one of the owners of the book.

The book consists of 204 pages, but the manuscript bought by Voynich was incomplete - part of it was lost. In addition, some of the pages disappeared later - probably around the time Voynich died. Presumably, at the moment the book is missing 28 pages. Some of the pages have a format that differs from the standard, such pages are folded along a horizontal or vertical fold line. Some pages are numbered, most likely not by the author, but by one of the later owners of the book. There are drawings on almost every page, many of them are signed. In accordance with the themes of these drawings, the book is usually divided into several parts: "botanical", with drawings of plants, for the most part not known to science (this part makes up almost half of the book); "astronomical", illustrated with images of the Sun, Moon, stars and signs of the Zodiac; "biological", which contains drawings of naked women inside strange systems of vessels filled with liquid; "cosmological", with circular drawings of unknown content; and the “pharmaceutical” part, with painted containers, next to which are drawings of various plants and a short text, presumably recipes.
The manuscript was found along with a cover letter written in 1665 or 1666. The letter was signed by the rector of the University of Prague, Johannes Marcus Marci, and addressed to his friend and teacher Athanasius (Athanasius) Kircher, a famous medieval scholar who was then living in Rome. Marzi wrote that a close friend of his gave him an unusual book written in an unknown language. He asked Kircher to decipher this book, because, in his opinion, Kircher is the only one who can do it. Marzi also wrote that the book belonged to the Habsburg king Rudolph II, who believed that it was written by Roger Bacon.

About Kohau rongorongo

It rarely happens that a discoverer does his best to keep his discovery from becoming public knowledge. However, the wooden tablets found on Easter Island were not so lucky. Missionary Eugene Eyraud was not only not happy when he discovered writing on the Easter Island entrusted to him in 1864, but destroyed all the tables known to him. And very diligently - when four years later the Bishop of Tahiti Tepano Jaussen became interested in the tablets from Easter Island, he managed to find only five of them.

However, it is possible that the efforts of Eugene Ayrault were in vain - by the time the tables were discovered, there were almost no people left on the island who could read them. Eiro himself believed that the islanders forgot writing and kept the tablets out of habit (most likely, only priests could read and write rongorongo, which had almost completely been destroyed or taken to Peru by that time). With great difficulty, Jossan managed to find local resident who claimed to be able to translate ancient texts. The bishop diligently wrote down everything that the native Metoro dictated to him, but was disappointed with the results - the same Metoro sign could be translated in different ways, and the translation as a whole could hardly be called meaningful. The value of Metoro as a translator is doubtful, but he, without a doubt, saved later researchers from having to guess what this or that sign depicts (without knowing its true meaning).

For lack of a better "Jossan list" is still used as a base for almost any attempt to decipher kohau rongorongo. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, several more attempts were made to read the texts with the help of the islanders, but the results were even more discouraging.

In the 1940s a group of Soviet schoolchildren became interested in the tablets, who managed to make an unexpected discovery: it turns out that some of the tablets contained parallel texts. In the late 1950s, perhaps the main research work in the history of kohau rongorongo was published - an article by the German scientist Thomas Bartel, but he also limited himself, by and large, to compiling a "periodic table" of graphemes, accompanying each with a possible pronunciation and interpretation. He also suggested that one of the tables shows the lunar calendar.

Rongorongo has been studied for almost 150 years, but so far scientists have not even come to a consensus on the writing system. Some believe that this is a hieroglyphic system, others see a mnemonic system of signs in rongorongo, others tend to think that the ancient Rapanui script consists of pictograms.

About Voynich

The origin and authorship of the Voynich manuscript are unknown. The first mention of the manuscript refers to its appearance in Prague during the reign of King Rudolf II. An accompanying letter found with the book claims that Rudolf II was one of the owners of the manuscript, but there is no evidence for this. Wilfried Voynich believed that the manuscript was sold to Rudolph by the alchemists John Dee or Edward Kelly, although their possession of the book has not been confirmed.

The first known owner of the book was Jakob Horczycki. He served as a chemist, physician and alchemist at the court of Rudolph II, and we can see his signature on the very first page. How the book got to him is not yet clear. Another clearly identified owner of the book is the "close friend" mentioned in Marzi's letter. Initially, he was considered Dionysius Misseroni, a jeweler from the famous Milanese dynasty at that time, who was really friendly with Martzi. However, later, after studying Kircher's correspondence, Rene Zandbergen established that he was Georg Baresch, a Czech alchemist. After Baresh's death, the book fell into the hands of Marzi. Although it appears from Marzi's letter that he sent the book to Kircher for deciphering, there is no definite evidence that the book reached Kircher, although this is obviously to be assumed.

From the time of writing the letter to Marzi Kircher until the book was found in the Jesuit possession located in the Villa Mondragone, its exact location is unknown, although there is every reason to believe that the book did come to Kircher, who then handed it over to the Jesuits. In 1912, the Jesuits who owned the villa decided to restore it. It was decided to get funds for the restoration by selling part of the collection of about a thousand old manuscripts. Voynich competed for the right to acquire them with another person, whose name is unknown, and won. In total, he acquired about thirty books. At the same time, one of the conditions of the deal was non-disclosure of information about who the books were bought from. Voynich did keep this information secret from the public, but shared it with his wife.

Throughout the world, the name Voynich is famous primarily due to the mysterious manuscript. However, in the Soviet Union she was known as the surname of the author of "Gadfly" - a literary work from the school curriculum. Ethel Lilian Voynich Boole, the author of the book, was the wife of Wilfried Voynich, and in addition, the daughter of George Boole, the inventor of Boolean algebra named after him.

The origin and biography of Voynich himself are no less interesting. He was born in 1865 in Kaunas in the family of a petty official. Voynich graduated from Moscow University with a degree in chemistry and joined the Narodnaya Volya movement. After moving to Warsaw, he became one of the organizers of the jailbreak of two former members of " People's Will' sentenced to death. The escape failed, and Voynich and the other conspirators were arrested. Voynich was exiled to Irkutsk, from where he managed to escape three years later. He got to London, where after some time he married Ethel Lilian, who also participated in the leftist movement.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Voynichs had moved away from the revolutionary struggle. Wilfried retrained as a bookseller, in which capacity he gained fame.

After Voynich's death, the book was inherited by his wife, and after her death went to Wilfried's secretary and friend Ethel Voynich Ann Neill. She sold the book to the merchant Hans Kraus. He was unable to resell the manuscript and donated it to Yale University, in whose library the book is now kept.

About the Rohonczi Codex

The manuscript owes its name to the Hungarian town in which it was kept until 1907 (presumably the codex was written in the middle of the 16th century, but the exact date of its creation is unknown). In 1907, the then owner of the codex donated his entire library to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the strange 448-page book in an unknown language fell into the hands of scientists for the first time. Hungarian academics involved the German researcher Bernhard Jülg in decoding, who, having failed, declared that the code was filled with nonsense.

It is still unknown what language the manuscript is written in. In addition, the "alphabet" of the code consists of almost two hundred characters, which also does not facilitate the work of researchers.

In no way inferior to the Voynich manuscript in “mysteriousness”, the codex is much less known, since it was mainly Romanian scientists who were engaged in deciphering it. To date, there is only one translation of the code, made in 2001 by the philologist Viorica Enachiu (Viorica Enachiuc), according to which the text tells about the struggle of the Volohs with the Pechenegs and Polovtsy).

Expert opinions on the Voynich manuscript

Gordon Rugg: It is unlikely that this is a text in an unknown language, since it is linguistically very unusual. Previously it was thought that the text was too complicated to be a hoax. If it is a code, then it has turned out to be much more difficult to decipher than any other code from the "pre-computer" era, and its properties are too difficult to correlate with any known coding system.

Jacque Guy: I am convinced that the manuscript is written in a natural language (most likely no longer in existence), and that Georges Stolfi's "Chinese hypothesis" is correct (it is not necessarily Chinese, but the linguistic characteristics of the language of the manuscript are close to Chinese). I find it least improbable (exactly, not most likely) that the manuscript was written by some Italian traveler who learned an obscure (possibly extinct) Chinese dialect and decided to write his secret diary in it, which ensured that no one else can read it. The Voynich manuscript is a reflection of our utter ignorance about what language is, and what makes it so, what distinguishes language from gibberish. We cannot explain it, we cannot understand it, simply because we do not have the necessary knowledge.

Nick Pelling: Although I am cautious in my opinion, I am somewhat certain that the manuscript is a "book of secrets" compiled in the Milan area in the middle of the 15th century, and that the coder Cicco Simonetta participated in its encryption between 1476 and 1480.

Louis Velez: I don't think the manuscript is a modern or medieval hoax. This, however, does not mean that the text necessarily carries a meaning. The manuscript could have been copied by an illiterate scribe from a lost original, the meaning of which he did not understand. Or it could turn out to be glossolalia (ordinary meaningless writing), despite the fact that entropy levels - a measure of the randomness of any piece of information - noted by some researchers indicate that this document has a certain language structure. It may be a unique example of an unknown artificial language, or even an extinct natural language. It could be numbers. It can be prayers, the names of angels. Or perhaps a pharmaceutical guide. Or, as some suggest, information in a known language, but very skillfully encrypted. These are just some of the possible explanations for our inability to break the cipher. My own hunch is that it is a meaningfully encrypted document, possibly by a medical practitioner or scientist. I believe it has something to do with the 15th century alchemical herbalists.

Rene Zandbergen: I consider it highly probable that the manuscript is nonsense. Possibly a hoax, but the document was not created around 1600, as Dr. Rugg believes, but much earlier. It is very likely that it was written by a person with a strange mindset, with no intention of deceiving anyone. To me, this is the only reason why the manuscript has not yet been deciphered, and it is also the only reason why the document can be nonsense.