For almost 100 years, experts and amateur researchers have tried to
solve the riddle of a handwritten book, referred to as the “Voynich
manuscript,” composed in an unknown script. The numerous theories about this
remarkable document are contradictory and range from plausible to adventurous.
The facts regarding the Voynich manuscript can be told quickly. It is a
handwritten book of 246 pages containing numerous illustrations and
approximately 170,000 characters. What is special about it? The script employed
is utterly unknown and therefore illegible. According to a radiocarbon analysis
conducted in 2009 by the University of Arizona, the manuscript was created in
the first half of the fifteenth century (probably between 1404 and 1438). So
far, there is no written publication on this analysis, but one of the
scientists involved in the examination confirmed by e-mail that a paper is
scheduled for 2011.
The modern history of the Voynich manuscript began in 1912. At that
time, a bookseller and book collector named Wilfried Voynich found it in an
Italian Jesuit college. Further information is provided in a letter dated 1666,
which-according to Voynich-was enclosed with the manuscript. This document
names some other previous owners who had all lived in the first half of the
seventeenth century, thus indicating that the manuscript had been written
before then. On the basis of this letter, Voynich favored the English monk and
Renaissance man Roger Bacon (1214–1294) as the book's author. However, this
theory is now considered very improbable.
Not many more historic facts are known about the Voynich manuscript
(Kennedy and Churchill 2005). In particular, it is unclear who wrote the book,
what it contains, and what its purpose was. In light of the meager evidence,
I-as a skeptic and member of GWUP (the German counterpart of CSI)-am not
surprised at the great number of speculative theories about the mysterious
script. I will present the most important ideas here.
A good point of entry into a Voynich analysis is certainly the script of
the document itself. The author of the manuscript wrote from left to right-this
can be discerned from the left-aligned formatting. The typeface and size of the
characters are inconspicuous, which is not altered by the fact that the text
contains no punctuation marks, because this is unexceptional for old texts.
Thus it is evident to a layman, even before inspection of the illustrations,
that the Voynich manuscript has its origins in European culture. Moreover, it
is apparent that the author was quite accurate: there are no visible
corrections in the text. Unfortunately, the Voynich text itself is not divided
into chapters; there are no subheadings.
Approximately 220 of the 246 Voynich pages are illustrated. Some of the
pages can be unfolded, revealing illustrations that extend to several page
lengths. Because, unlike the text, the illustrations can be divided into
different sections, six chapters of the Voynich manuscript can be distinguished:
the botanical chapter (with large plant illustrations), the astronomical
chapter (with charts containing celestial bodies and the zodiac signs), the
balneological chapter (with nude female figures in tubs), the cosmological
chapter (with circles and rosettes), the pharmaceutical chapter (with plants,
parts of plants, and pots), as well as a chapter with food recipes (without
illustrations).
Unfortunately, none of the 126 plant illustrations can be definitively
identified. However, the plant pictures at least enabled certain conclusions
regarding the date of origin, before the radiocarbon dating was performed.
Comparisons of artistic styles showed that the manuscript presumably did not
originate before the fourteenth century, which was, of course, later confirmed.
Not confirmed, however, was a theory stated by the botanist Hugh O'Neill
(O'Neill 1944). He considered two plant illustrations as representing
sunflowers and identified another one as capsicum. Because both plants spread
in Europe only after the “discovery” of America, their identification appeared
to narrow down the period of origin. However, the two identifications O'Neill
made are not precisely compelling, and thus O'Neill's conclusion-like so many
others in connection with the manuscript-is just speculation.
It is hardly more illuminating to take a look at the astronomical and
the cosmological sections, which contain pictures that can be identified as the
Zodiac signs still familiar today (Aries, Taurus, Libra, and so forth).
Scarcely another illustration in the Voynich manuscript is as unambiguous.
Unfortunately, this observation does not result in further insight into the
book's origin. The celestial bodies illustrated in the astronomical section
cannot be identified and probably are only figments of imagination. Some
Voynich researchers believe they recognize in these pictures the Andromeda fog
or the Pleiades, but this again is just speculation.
The hairstyles and clothing of the people pictured in the book, as well
as the style of the illustrations, were usually dated to the period 1450–1520,
which proved reasonably compatible with the radiocarbon dating (between 1404
and 1438). In most cases, the pictured persons are naked women in big tubs
filled with water, which makes conclusive interpretation of these illustrations
in the context of fashion impossible.
Taking all facts into account, it is astonishing how little the numerous
illustrations reveal about the Voynich manuscript. Does this make an argument
for the whole document being meaningless? Or did the author intentionally
choose ambiguous illustrations to prevent inferences about the encrypted (and
therefore secret) text? I consider both explanations to be possible.
Cryptological Analyses
A glance at the pictures in the manuscript is indeed interesting, but as
a cryptologist I am naturally more interested in the Voynich text. It is
unclear whether it is an encrypted message or simply a text composed of unknown
letters. This is irrelevant for cryptological analysis, because the use of
unknown letters is also a form of encryption. For the analysis of an encrypted
text, cryptology provides quite a number of statistical methods-for example the
determination of letter frequencies. Some of these analyses indicate that the
Voynich manuscript is composed in a usual language but written in unknown
letters. There are between fifteen and twenty-five different letters in the
manuscript, but in many cases it is not clear whether identical or different symbols
have been used. For this same reason, letter frequency cannot be determined
clearly. Nevertheless, the language of the manuscript can be brought in line
with European languages, because the average word length is four or five
letters. Following this line of consideration, arguments can be put forward
that Greek, Latin, or one of several other European languages was used to
compose the Voynich manuscript. It is a pity that this approach does not
implicate a specific language.
However, the language of the manuscript does not correspond to any
European language because the Voynich has no two-letter words or words with
more than ten characters. Moreover, it is curious that some words are repeated
successively up to five times. The distribution of the letters within each word
also does not answer known language patterns. Looking at the text as a whole,
far fewer recurring words turn up than would be expected. Such arguments reveal
with a high probability that-against all appearance to the contrary-we are not
dealing with a simple substitution of letters. There also is no clear evidence
that other simple encryption methods were used.
A study by the philosopher William Newbold took another direction.
Newbold declared he had solved the Voynich mystery in 1921 (Newbold 1928). He
considered as relevant not the letters themselves but the small, barely visible
marks applied to them. These marks supposedly formed Greek characters, making
up a text that could be decoded into a meaningful message. The result seemed to
be sensational: the produced message not only confirmed Roger Bacon as the
manuscript's author, but it reputedly also revealed that Bacon already had a
telescope at his disposal and knew the spiral structure of the Andromeda
galaxy-either of which would revolutionize the history of science. But as
expected, Newbold's decryption came across as largely arbitrary and moreover
only worked for a short section of the text. Therefore Newbold's theory could
not prevail.
In 1943, the lawyer Joseph Feely published a cryptological paper
regarding the Voynich manuscript. Feely, too, presented as a direct result of
his research the supposed solution of the Voynich encryption (Feely 1943). By
means of statistical analyses, he had come to the conviction that the manuscript
was composed in Latin and contained numerous abbreviations and abbreviated
sentences. With this basis, Feely translated a forty-one-line section of the
manuscript. Unfortunately, Feely's approach made no sense at all and therefore
quickly turned out to be a further dead end in Voynich research.
The U.S. cryptologist William Friedman (1891–1969) was considerably more
competent. He is regarded as the most successful code-cracker of all ages; his
name guarantees cryptological quality. In the course of his forty-year career,
Friedman examined thousands of encryption methods during his service for the
U.S. military and solved almost all of them. Unfortunately, despite all the
texts he successfully analyzed, he had to surrender in the case of the Voynich
manuscript. He therefore could not bequeath more to posterity than an educated
guess. Friedman considered the text to be a treatise composed in an artificial
language.
More Current Studies
The next Voynich studies worth mentioning originate with Robert Brumbaugh,
a professor of the philosophy of the Middle Ages. He holds that the unknown
characters are numerals that are each assigned several letters of the Latin
alphabet (Brumbaugh 1978). However, the decryption provided by Brumbaugh did
not make any sense. Another dispensable Voynich analysis was published by the
physician Leo Levitov in 1987 (Levitov 1987). He, too, believed that he had
decrypted the text. According to Levitov, the book is composed in an old form
of Flemish that assimilated German and French words. Levitov supposed that in
this manner a literary language emerged that served as an alternative to the
Latin language common at that time. According to Levitov, the manuscript turned
out to be written by the Cathari in the Middle Ages. However, Levitov's paper
is so full of speculative assumptions that it can barely be taken seriously.
The British linguist Gordon Rugg is among the most reputable Voynich
researchers. He conducted a most interesting cryptological experiment. For his
experiment, Rugg generated a table with random combinations of characters that
he used as prefixes, roots, or suffixes of new words. He positioned a quadratic
stencil, like the ones used for encryption in the sixteenth century, over the
table. In this manner he obtained a sequence of letters that bore great
resemblance to the text of the Voynich manuscript. Rugg's experiment supports
the hypothesis that the manuscript is nothing but a compilation of meaningless
lines of letters (the hoax hypothesis) (Rugg 2004). The hoax hypothesis is
backed by a text analysis by the Austrian physicist Andreas Schinner. Schinner
discovered unnatural regularities in the word order of the manuscript that do
not occur in any known language. He therefore also came to the conclusion that
the Voynich manuscript is a fraud's artful fabrication, containing merely
meaningless nonsense (Schinner 2007).
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