In 1912, a famous antiquarian and bibliophile Wilfrid Michael Voynich, incidentally, the husband of the author of a very popular at one time in our novel “Gadfly” Ethel Lillian Voynich, bought on occasion from the Jesuits amazing book from the collection of a famous medieval scholar and Jesuit monk Athanasius Kircher (Athanasius Kircher).
At first glance, the book was unremarkable, the cover had no pictures or inscriptions, however, opening the book, Voynich found that it was written in an unknown language, using an unknown alphabet, the illustrations were quite strange - outlandish images of plants, astronomical bodies, natural phenomena and people. The book also contained an accompanying letter from Johannes Marcus Marci, a 17th-century Czech scholar and rector of the University of Prague. Marci reported that the book came to him from his friend Jiří Bares, a Prague alchemist, and that it allegedly belonged to the famous English philosopher and naturalist, Franciscan monk of the XIII century Roger Bacon, and that it was bought by Emperor Rudolf II for 600 ducats, that is, for 2 kilograms of gold, which is not cheap for that time. Who sold the book to the emperor remains a mystery. Perhaps it was John Dee, a mathematician and astrologer at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, or his companion alchemist-self-taught Edward Kelly, who claimed to know the language of angels - history is silent. Whether there was a sale is also unclear.
One way or another, the mysterious manuscript ended up in Voynich's hands, and he made several copies and sent them to famous cryptographers. Since then, the world's most, most, most famous cryptographers have been struggling to decipher this mysterious book to no avail. For example, William Friedman, who famously cracked the code of the Japanese Foreign Ministry in 1940. Or the staff of the U.S. National Security Agency.
The book is written in goose quill with gallic acid ferruginous ink on parchment that was carved according to radiocarbon analysis between 1404 and 1438. The handwriting is clear and steady, indicating that the unknown author knew the language well and that it was familiar and understandable to him. There are 240 pages in the book, but originally there were supposedly 272 pages - some were lost before Voynich acquired the book. The alphabet consists of 20-30 letters, totaling 170000 characters, but there is also so-called extraneous writing, written in Latin letters and other unknown characters different from the main text.
Presumably the text is divided into 6 sections: Botanical, Astronomical, Biological, Cosmological, Pharmaceutical and Prescription. For example, the Botanical section contains images of 303 plants, among which only 37 could be identified, such as pansy eyes, adiantum fern, lily, thistle, juniper, coriander, frost, cornflower, cornflower, and blueberry. In the Pharmaceutical, the same plants, but with missing parts, instead of which strange details are drawn. Many plants seem to be composed of parts of different plants, for example, roots from one plant, leaves from another, flowers from a third. In the Biological section there are images of people, mostly women, bathing in ponds and channels, some with crowns on their heads. All these figures are bizarrely connected by a special conduit, taking in some places the form of various body organs. The Astronomical section is also curious, consisting of 12 diagrams, with one of the diagrams depicting the known signs of the zodiac.
There are a few basic theories about the contents of this book. Most likely this book has to do with alchemy and medicine, perhaps it is a herbalist, or a pharmaceutical book with recipes for making medicines and ways of using herbs to treat various organs. And the astronomical section suggests in what period it is necessary to collect these herbs. But this is just an assumption, since the mysterious author encrypted not only the language, but also the plants. There is even a hypothesis that the book gives recipes for poisons. That is why the unknown author is so encrypted.
As for the language, there are also quite a few verso. The main ones are: 1. Encrypted text written in one of the existing languages; 2. Artificially created language; 3. Abracadabra, which has no meaning, hoax, specially created to confuse, but only by whom; 4. Unknown language, lost to mankind. There is even a version that it was written by a mentally ill person under the influence of voices. Here, too, there are many unanswered questions.
Most likely it is not abracadabra, because the text analysis showed that the mysterious language has strictly logical linguistic structures and obeys Zipf's law, i.e. the empirical regularity of word frequency distribution in natural language. If this language was invented by someone, he was undoubtedly a genius of geniuses, because even in our time, taking into account modern computer algorithms to generate such a language few people can, what to speak of the XV century.
In general, the Voynich Manuscript is still a mystery of mysteries, which was beyond the grasp of any scientist of either the past or modern times. The book is kept in the library of Yale University, on hands it is not given to anyone. However, from the website of the university you can download a photocopy of the highest quality. So everyone can dare to decipher the book.
What versions do you have? Perhaps this book was written in an existing but little known and lost language. It could have been written by a person not only involved in medicine, but also in magic and alchemy, otherwise why encrypt it. It could have been a woman or a man. And maybe there is a mysterious caste of people, some mysterious order, to whom the content of this book is known and understandable, as well as the language in which it is written. I would very much like to hope that sooner or later this mystery will be solved.
