Last week, the weekly Times Literary Supplement published an article claiming to have deciphered the text of the famous Voynich manuscript. Allegedly, the text of the book consists of Latin abbreviations. As evidence, the author - historian Nicholas Gibbs (Nicolas Gibbs) - cited the text of two lines of the manuscript deciphered by him. However, other researchers were not convinced by his results. According to them, Gibbs' decision is a mixture of known facts and claims that he was unable to prove.
The illustrated manuscript (or manuscript) of Voynich was written by an unknown author in an unknown language. The parchment on which the book is written dates from 1404-1438, although this does not mean that the text could not have been inscribed on it much later. The manuscript was named after the Polish bibliophile and antiquary Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it in 1912 from the Jesuits in a place near Rome. The manuscript is now in the Yale University Library.
The book has 240 pages (at least 32 pages have been lost) and almost every page has illustrations. Although the drawings did not help decipher the text, they did allow the book to be divided into several sections. For example, each page of the "botanical" section has a drawing of one or more plants. In the "astronomical" section there are diagrams depicting the Moon, the Sun and the signs of the zodiac. In the "biological" section, the text "wraps around" images of people, mostly naked women bathing. the "pharmaceutical" section consists of signed drawings of plant parts and apothecary vessels.
Page from the "botanical" section of the manuscript
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University
Since the First World War, many amateur cryptographers and professional cryptographers have tried to decipher the text of the manuscript, but so far no one has succeeded. One of the first to propose his theory was the American cryptographer William Newbold in 1921. He believed that the visible text of the manuscript had no meaning, but that each letter was made up of tiny characters that were only visible when magnified. Later, another researcher, John Stojko, claimed that the manuscript was written in Ukrainian, which did not contain vowels. Already in the 21st century, James Finn suggested that the manuscript is a visually encoded Hebrew text.
A new attempt to decipher the text was made by the historian (as he calls himself) Nicholas Gibbs. He claimed that the manuscript is a manual for the treatment of women's diseases, and the text in it is abbreviations in Latin. In support of his hypothesis, he presented a "decoding" of two lines of text. However, experts who knew medieval Latin were not convinced by his arguments. According to the director of the American Academy of the Middle Ages, Lisa Fagin Davis, the “deciphered” text was grammatically incorrect and consisted of meaningless phrases.
Page from the "biological" section of the manuscript
Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University
Gibbs suggested that somewhere in the text of the manuscript there should have been an index that could serve as a key to decipher the abbreviations. At the same time, the historian believes that the index was on the lost pages of the manuscript. He did not provide any other evidence for the existence of such a pointer.
Perhaps the Voynich manuscript is indeed a treatise on women's health, as Gibbs suggested, but even then he cannot be called a pioneer. Other researchers and cryptographers, linking images of plants, bathing women and astrological charts, have previously put forward this hypothesis. Gibbs' hypothesis is not credible by the fact that before the publication of his article, he was unknown to either professional researchers of the Voynich manuscript, or in the community of amateur cryptologists who decipher the manuscript.
And in general, Gibbs is known to the general public not as a scientist, but as the author of manuals for writing television scripts or staging a show. The author's description on Amazon lists his profession as a script editor who has taught screenwriting workshops and is currently working on two independent television dramas. Maybe the study of the Voynich manuscript will form the basis of another scenario?
This was the name of a manuscript in a previously unknown language with certain knowledge of a specialist in various fields of 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 the irregular shapes of plants are associated with the style of the picture.
Modern researchers believe that the mysterious text was written in phonetic language, and the symbols were invented by the author himself.
The manuscript was written by the same hand, but at different times. 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 either in clean or in 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 rarity, the so-called Voynich Manuscript. On the Internet, many sites are devoted to this document, it is often called the most mysterious esoteric manuscript in the world.
The manuscript is named after its former owner, the American bookseller W. Voynich, husband of the famous writer Ethel Lilian Voynich (author of The Gadfly). The manuscript was bought in 1912 in one of the Italian monasteries. It is known that in the 1580s. The then German Emperor Rudolf II became the owner of the manuscript. The encrypted manuscript with numerous color illustrations was sold to Rudolf II by the famous English astrologer, geographer and explorer John Dee, who was very interested in getting the opportunity to freely leave Prague for his homeland, England. Therefore, Dee is said to have exaggerated the antiquity of the manuscript. According to the features of paper and ink, it is attributed to the 16th century. However, all attempts to decipher the text over the past 80 years have been in vain.
This book, measuring 22.5 x 16 cm, contains coded text, in a language that has not yet been identified. It originally consisted of 116 sheets of parchment, fourteen of which are currently considered lost. Written in a fluent calligraphic handwriting with a quill pen and ink in five colors: green, brown, yellow, blue and red. Some letters are similar to Greek or Latin, but are mostly hieroglyphs that have not yet been found in any other book.
Almost every page contains drawings, based on which the text of the manuscript can be divided into five sections: botanical, astronomical, biological, astrological and medical. The first, by the way the largest section, includes more than a hundred illustrations of various plants and herbs, most of which are unidentifiable or even phantasmagoric. And the accompanying text is carefully divided into equal paragraphs. The second, astronomical section is similarly designed. It contains about two dozen concentric diagrams with images of the Sun, Moon and various constellations. A large number of human figures, mostly female, decorate the so-called biological section. It seems that it explains the processes of human life and the secrets of the interaction of the human soul and body. The astrological section is replete with images of magical medallions, zodiacal symbols and stars. And in the medical part, probably, recipes for the treatment of various diseases and magical advice are given.
Among the illustrations are more than 400 plants that have no direct analogues in botany, as well as numerous figures of women, spirals of stars. Experienced cryptographers, in trying to decipher a text written in unusual scripts, most often acted as was customary in the 20th century - they conducted a frequency analysis of the occurrence of various characters, choosing the appropriate language. However, neither Latin, nor many Western European languages, nor Arabic didn't fit. The bust continued. We checked Chinese, Ukrainian, and Turkish ... In vain!
The short words of the manuscript are reminiscent of some of the languages of Polynesia, but nothing came of it either. Hypotheses about the extraterrestrial origin of the text have appeared, especially since the plants are not similar to those familiar to us (although they are very carefully drawn), and the spirals of stars in the 20th century reminded many of the spiral arms of the Galaxy. It remained completely unclear what the text of the manuscript was talking about. John Dee himself was also suspected of a hoax - he allegedly composed not just an artificial alphabet (there really was one in Dee's works, but has nothing to do with that used in the manuscript), but also created a meaningless text on it. In general, the research has come to a standstill.
History of the manuscript.
Since the alphabet of the manuscript has no visual resemblance to any known writing system and the text has not yet been deciphered, the only "clue" to determine the age of the book and its origin is the illustrations. In particular, the clothes and decorations of women, as well as a couple of castles in the diagrams. All details are typical for Europe between 1450 and 1520, so the manuscript is most often dated to this period. This is indirectly confirmed by other signs.
The earliest known owner of the book was George Baresch, an alchemist who lived in Prague in early XVII century. Baresh, apparently, was also puzzled by the mystery of this book from his library. Upon learning that Athanasius Kircher, a well-known Jesuit scholar of the Collegio Romano, had published a Coptic dictionary and deciphered (as it was then believed) Egyptian hieroglyphs, he copied part of the manuscript and sent this sample to Kircher in Rome (twice), asking help decipher it. Baresch's 1639 letter to Kircher, discovered in modern times by Rene Zandbergen, is the earliest known reference to the Manuscript.
It remains unclear whether Kircher responded to Baresh's request, but it is known that he wanted to buy the book, but Baresh probably refused to sell it. After Baresh's death, the book passed to his friend, Johannes Marcus Marci, rector of the University of Prague. Marzi allegedly sent it to Kircher, an old friend of his. His cover letter from 1666 is still attached to the Manuscript. Among other things, the letter claims that it was originally purchased for 600 ducats by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, who considered the book to be the work of Roger Bacon.
The further 200 years of the fate of the Manuscript are unknown, but it is most likely that it was kept along with the rest of Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Roman College (now the Gregorian University). The book probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal States to the Kingdom of Italy. The new Italian authorities decided to confiscate from the Church a large number of property, including the library. According to the research of Xavier Ceccaldi and others, before this, many books from the university library were hastily transferred to the libraries of the university staff, whose property was not confiscated. Kircher's correspondence was among these books, and also, apparently, there was a Voynich manuscript, since the book still bears the bookplate of Petrus Beckx, at that time the head of the Jesuit order and the rector of the university.
Bex's library was moved to Villa Mondragone in Frascati (villa Borghese di Mondragone a Frascati) - a large palace near Rome, acquired by the Jesuit society in 1866.
In 1912, the College of Rome needed funds and decided in the strictest confidence to sell some of its property. Wilfried Voynich acquired 30 manuscripts, including the one that now bears his name. In 1961, after Voynich's death, the book was sold by his widow Ethel Lilian Voynich (author of The Gadfly) to another bookseller, Hanse P. Kraus. Unable to find a buyer, in 1969 Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University.
So, what do our contemporaries think about this manuscript?
For example, Sergey Gennadyevich Krivenkov, Ph.D. in Biology, a specialist in computer psychodiagnostics, and Klavdiya Nikolaevna Nagornaya, a leading software engineer at the IGT of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation (St. apparently, recipes, which, as you know, have a lot of special abbreviations, which ensures short "words" in the text. Why encrypt? If these are recipes for poisons, then the question disappears ... Dee himself, for all his versatility, was not an expert on medicinal herbs, so he hardly wrote the text. But then the fundamental question is: what kind of mysterious "unearthly" plants are depicted in the pictures? It turned out that they are ... composite. For example, the flower of the well-known belladonna is connected to a leaf of a lesser known, but equally poisonous plant called hoof. And so it is in many other cases. As you can see, aliens have nothing to do with it. Among the plants there were also rose hips and nettles. But also… ginseng.
From this it was concluded that the author of the text went to China. Since the vast majority of plants are still European, I traveled from Europe. Which of the influential European organizations sent its mission to China in the second half of the 16th century? The answer is known from history - the order of the Jesuits. By the way, their major residency closest to Prague was in the 1580s. in Krakow, and John Dee, together with his partner, the alchemist Kelly, first also worked in Krakow, and then moved to Prague (where, by the way, the emperor was pressured through the papal nuncio to expel Dee). So the paths of a connoisseur of poisonous recipes, who first went on a mission to China, then sent back by courier (the mission itself remained in China for many years), and then worked in Krakow, could well intersect with the paths of John Dee. Competitors, in a nutshell...
As soon as it became clear what many of the pictures of the “herbarium” meant, Sergey and Claudia began to read the text. The assumption that it mainly consists of Latin and occasionally Greek abbreviations was confirmed. However, the main thing was to reveal the unusual cipher used by the compiler of the recipes. Here I had to recall many differences in both the mentality of the people of that time, and the features of the then encryption systems.
In particular, at the end of the Middle Ages, they did not at all create purely digital keys to ciphers (there were no computers then), but very often numerous meaningless symbols (“blanks”) were inserted into the text, which generally devalues the use of frequency analysis when deciphering a manuscript. But here we managed to find out what is a “dummy” and what is not. The compiler of the recipes of poisons was not alien to "black humor". So, he obviously did not want to be hanged as a poisoner, and the symbol with an element resembling a gallows, of course, is not readable. Numerology techniques typical of that time were also used.
Ultimately, under the picture with belladonna and hoof, for example, it was possible to read the Latin names of these particular plants. And advice on preparing a deadly poison ... Here, both the abbreviations characteristic of recipes and the name of the god of death in ancient mythology (Thanatos, brother of the god of sleep Hypnos) came in handy. Note that when deciphering, it was possible to take into account even the very malicious nature of the alleged compiler of the recipes. So the study was carried out at the intersection of historical psychology and cryptography, we also had to combine pictures from many reference books on medicinal plants. And the casket opened...
Of course, for a complete reading of the entire text of the manuscript, and not its individual pages, the efforts of a whole team of specialists would be required. But the “salt” here is not in the recipes, but in the disclosure of the historical mystery.
What about stellar spirals? It turned out that we are talking about the best time to collect herbs, and in one case, that mixing opiates with coffee, alas, is very unhealthy.
So, apparently, galactic travelers are worth looking for, but not here ...
And the scientist Gordon Rugg from the University of Keely (Great Britain) came to the conclusion that the texts of the strange book of the 16th century may well turn out to be abracadabra. Is the Voynich Manuscript a sophisticated forgery?
Mysterious 16th-century book may be elegant nonsense, says computer scientist. Rugg used Elizabethan espionage techniques to reconstruct the Voynich manuscript that had puzzled codebreakers and linguists for nearly a century.
Using espionage techniques from the time of Elizabeth I, he was able to create a semblance of the famous Voynich manuscript, which has intrigued cryptographers and linguists for more than a hundred years. “I think fakery is a very likely explanation,” says Rugg. “Now it’s the turn of those who believe in the meaningfulness of the text to give their explanation.” The scientist suspects that the English adventurer Edward Kelly made the book for the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Other scientists consider this version plausible, but not the only one.
“Critics of this hypothesis have noted that the “Voynich language” is too complicated for nonsense. How could a medieval fraudster produce 200 pages of written text with so many subtle patterns in the structure and distribution of words? But it is possible to replicate many of these wonderful Voynich characteristics using a simple 16th-century encoder. The text generated by this method looks like Voynich, but is pure nonsense, with no hidden meaning. This discovery does not prove that the Voynich manuscript is a hoax, but it does support the long-standing theory that the document may have been concocted by the English adventurer Edward Kelly to fool Rudolf II.
In order to understand why it took so much time and effort of qualified specialists to expose the manuscript, it is necessary to tell a little more about it. If we take a manuscript in an unknown language, then it will differ from a deliberate forgery by a complex organization that is noticeable to the eye, and even more so during computer analysis. Without going into detailed linguistic analysis, it can be noted that many letters in real languages occur only in certain places and in combination with certain other letters, and the same can be said about words. These and other features of real language are indeed inherent in the Voynich manuscript. Scientifically speaking, it is characterized by low entropy, and it is almost impossible to forge a text with low entropy by hand - and we are talking about the 16th century.
No one has yet been able to show whether the language in which the text is written is cryptography, a modified version of some existing language, or nonsense. Some features of the text are not found in any of the existing languages - for example, the repetition of the most common words two or three times - which confirms the nonsense hypothesis. On the other hand, the distribution of word lengths and the way letters and syllables are combined are very similar to those of real languages. Many people think that this text is too complicated to be a simple fake - it would take some crazy alchemist many years to achieve such correctness.
However, as Rugg showed, such a text is quite easy to create using a cipher device invented around 1550 and called the Cardan lattice. This lattice is a table of symbols, the words of which are formed by moving a special stencil with holes. Empty cells of the table provide the compilation of words of different lengths. Using grids with syllable tables from the Voynich manuscript, Rugg compiled a language with many, though not all, of the hallmarks of the manuscript. It took him only three months to create a book like a manuscript. However, in order to irrefutably prove the meaninglessness of the manuscript, the scientist needs to recreate a sufficiently large passage from it using this technique. Rugg hopes to achieve this through grid and table manipulation.
It seems that attempts to decipher the text fail, because the author was aware of the peculiarities of encodings and compiled the book in such a way that the text looked plausible, but did not lend itself to analysis. As noted by NTR.Ru, the text contains at least the appearance of cross-references, which is what cryptographers are usually looking for. The letters are written in such a variety of ways that scientists can never establish how large the alphabet is in which the text is written, and since all the people depicted in the book are naked, this makes it difficult to date the text by clothing.
In 1919, a reproduction of the Voynich manuscript came to the professor of philosophy University of Pennsylvania Roman Newbold. Newbould, who recently turned 54, had broad interests, many of which had an element of mystery. In the hieroglyphs of the text of the manuscript, Newbould saw microscopic icons shorthand and proceeded to decipher, translating them into letters of the Latin alphabet. The result is secondary text using 17 different letters. Then Newbould doubled all the letters in the words, except for the first and last, and subjected to a special replacement words containing one of the letters "a", "c", "m", "n", "o", "q", "t" , "u". In the resulting text, Newbould replaced pairs of letters with a single letter, in a rule he never made public.
In April 1921, Newbould announced the preliminary results of his work to a scientific audience. These results characterized Roger Bacon as the greatest scientist of all times and peoples. According to Newbould, Bacon actually created a microscope with a telescope and with their help made many discoveries that anticipated the discoveries of scientists in the 20th century. Other statements from Newbold's publications concern the "mystery of new stars".
“If the Voynich manuscript really contains the secrets of new stars and quasars, it is better for it to remain undeciphered, because the secret of an energy source that surpasses the hydrogen bomb and is so easy to handle that a person of the thirteenth century could figure it out is exactly the secret in the solution of which our civilization does not need, - the physicist Jacques Bergier wrote about this. - We somehow survived, and even then only because we managed to contain the tests of the hydrogen bomb. If there is an opportunity to release even more energy, it is better for us not to know, or not to know yet. Otherwise, our planet will very soon disappear in a blinding flash of a supernova.”
Newbold's report caused a sensation. Many scientists, although they refused to express an opinion about the validity of their methods of transforming the text of the manuscript, considering themselves incompetent in cryptanalysis, readily agreed with the results. One famous physiologist even stated that some of the drawings in the manuscript were probably depicting epithelial cells magnified 75 times. The general public was fascinated. Entire Sunday supplements to reputable newspapers were devoted to this event. One poor woman walked hundreds of miles to ask Newbould to use Bacon's formulas to drive out the evil tempting spirits that had taken possession of her.
There were also objections. Many did not understand the method used by Newbold: people could not use his method to compose new messages. After all, it is quite obvious that a cryptographic system must work in both directions. If you own a cipher, you can not only decrypt messages encrypted with it, but also encrypt a new text. Newbold becomes more and more obscure, less accessible. He died in 1926. His friend and colleague Roland Grubb Kent published his work in 1928 under the title The Roger Bacon Cipher. American and English historians who studied the Middle Ages treated it more than with restraint.
However, people have revealed much deeper secrets. Why hasn't anyone figured this one out?
According to one Manley, the reason is that “decryption attempts hitherto have been made on the basis of false assumptions. In fact, we do not know when and where the manuscript was written, what language the encryption is based on. When the correct hypotheses are worked out, the cipher will perhaps appear simple and easy ... ".
It is interesting, based on which version of the above, they built a research methodology in the US National Security Agency. After all, even their specialists became interested in the problem of the mysterious book and in the early 80s worked on deciphering it. Frankly speaking, I can't believe that such a serious organization was engaged in the book purely out of sporting interest. Perhaps they wanted to use the manuscript to develop one of the modern encryption algorithms for which this secret agency is so famous. However, their efforts were also unsuccessful.
It remains to state the fact that in our era of global information and computer technology the medieval puzzle remains unsolved. And it is not known whether scientists will ever be able to fill this gap and read the results of many years of work of one of the forerunners of modern science.
Now this one-of-a-kind creation is stored in the Yale University Rare and Rare Book Library and is valued at $160,000. The manuscript is not given to anyone in the hands: everyone who wants to try their hand at deciphering can download photocopies High Quality from the university website.
Scientists of various directions have been struggling to unravel the contents of the mysterious Voynich Manuscript for more than a century. Recently, professor of linguistics from the University of Bedfordshire Stephen Bucks, as well as American botanist Arthur Tucker from the University of Delaware and programmer Rexford Tolbert managed to lift the veil on the mystery.
The manuscript, according to some reports, was acquired by the famous antiquary and second-hand book dealer Mikhail-Wilfried Voynich (husband of the writer Ethel Lilian Voynich, author of the famous Russian "Gadfly") from the Italian Jesuits. After the death of the Voynich spouses, she ended up in the Yale University Library, where she is still.
The manuscript consists of 246 parchment pages measuring 17 by 24 centimeters, filled with calligraphic handwriting, contains rather carelessly done color illustrations, as well as images of stars and zodiac symbols. The book contains about 400 colored drawings of various plants, but until recently none of them could be identified. But most importantly, no one could say in which language the book was written!
From the cover letter it followed that the manuscript was bought at the end of the 16th century by the King of Bohemia (now the Czech Republic) Rudolf II, who was fond of occult sciences. After that, she changed hands more than once until she ended up with Voynich.
Since then, many researchers have struggled to decipher the texts of the medieval manuscript, but to no avail ... Although somehow the contents of the book still managed to be systematized. So, judging by the drawings, the manuscript consists of five parts. The first is dedicated to botany, the second to cosmology, the third to human biology, the fourth to pharmaceuticals, and the fifth to astrology.
The texts are written in a font in which, according to various sources, there are from 19 to 28 letters. Although it contains signs similar to Greek and Latin letters, Hebrew hieroglyphs, and Arabic numerals, it is not possible to attribute the text to any known alphabet or sign system.
Professional cryptographers tried to read the text, and they were of a very high class. But the "keys" they found did not fit the book as a whole. Therefore, a version was put forward that the text was not just encrypted, but was originally created in different languages.
The English linguist Stephen Bax tried to identify proper names in the book. He considered that they were coded under the guise of mysterious plants and stars. Previously, some Egyptian hieroglyphs were identified in the same way. The scientist tried to use the received "names" to decipher the remaining letters. So, Bax announced, he managed to identify in the text the name of the constellation Taurus, as well as the word "Kantairon", which, as he assures, the author designated the medieval herb centaury.
And researchers Arthur Tucker and Rexford Tolbert came to the conclusion that the manuscript contains fragments in the Aztec language and tells about the flora and fauna of the New World. By the way, a similar assumption was put forward before. So, in 1944, a botanist named Hugh O'Neill "discovered" images of American sunflowers and red peppers on the pages of the book. From this, he concluded that the manuscript was written no earlier than 1493, when Christopher Columbus brought the first sunflowers from the New World to the Old seeds ... But later it turned out that in fact the "red" pepper was green, and the "sunflower" had an oval shape. Apparently, the "researcher" had bad eyes...
As for Tucker and Tolbert, they decided to compare the images of plants in the book with drawings from several so-called "floristic codes" of the New World, compiled in mid-sixteenth- early XVII century. Thus, on one of the pages of the Voynich Manuscript, a plant with a flat rhizome from which claw-like processes extend, and white flowers with a tubular corolla, is almost identical to a plant from the Cruz-Badianus codex of 1552. Both of them resemble in appearance the bindweed Ipomoea murucoides. Also, one of the drawings, according to the authors of the study, depicts a leaf or fruit of a cactus, most likely Opuntia ficus-indica. Yes, and the signature under it is similar to "nahuatl" ("cactus" in Aztec).
In total, scientists say, they managed to identify 37 of the 303 plants presented in the manuscript, as well as six animals and one mineral, which turned out to be boleite. They suggest that the book is actually a description of some medieval botanical garden or reserve, possibly located in central Mexico. So, there is nothing particularly mysterious in it ...
Canadian AI experts say they have finally identified the language in which a mysterious 600-year-old manuscript is written that has baffled generations of cryptographers and linguists. What is the Voynich manuscript and was it really possible for a computer to do again what a human could not do?
What book are you talking about?
The Voynich Manuscript is a medieval document without a cover, the meaning and purpose of which is so vague that some conspiracy theorists claim that it was written by aliens. One of the main versions: the manuscript was created for the purpose of drawing and is written in a non-existent language. 240 pages of handwritten text in it are illustrated with images of plants, including species that are not similar to known science, strange astronomical charts and bathing women. The text of the manuscript is written from left to right, using about 20–25 "letters" (a few dozen more characters appear once or twice) and without visible punctuation marks.
Traditionally, the manuscript is divided into six sections devoted respectively to herbs, astronomy, biology (which contains images of women), cosmology and pharmaceuticals - and the sixth section is usually called "stars" because of the star drawings in the margins of a very dense text.
The manuscript was given the name by which it became famous, after the Polish rare books dealer and writer Ethel Woynich's husband, Wilfred, who bought it from a Jesuit library in 1912 and actively sought out a specialist who could decipher it.
Using the method of radiocarbon dating, which is used to determine the age of fossil remains and ancient artifacts, the manuscript was attributed to the beginning of the 15th century. It is now kept in the Beinecke Library of Yale University, to which it was donated in 1969 by another bookseller, Hans Kraus, who was unable to find a next buyer for the mysterious manuscript.
In 2016, the Spanish publishing house Siloe, which specializes in making copies of manuscripts, bought the rights to print 898 exact copies of the Voynich manuscript for between 7,000 and 8,000 euros apiece, with approximately 300 copies not yet completed.
Who tried to reveal the secret of the manuscript?
The Voynich Manuscript is, without exaggeration, one of the main cryptographic mysteries of mankind. It is believed that even its first known owners unsuccessfully tried to decipher it - depending on the source, this is either a Prague alchemist of the first half of the 17th century named Georg Baresh, or the court pharmacist of Emperor Rudolf II Jakub Gorzhchitsky. The manuscript baffled, for example, cryptographers from the British Bletchley Park, who cracked the ciphers of the German "Enigma" in the Second world war. A popular and very detailed book about him, Mary d'Imperio's Voynich Manuscript: A Graceful Enigma, written in 1978, can now be found in the public domain on the US National Security Agency (NSA) website.
Many scholars have tried to understand "Voynichi", as the mysterious language of the manuscript has come to be called. One of the first documented speculations about what the Voynich manuscript might be was in 1921 by philosophy professor William Newbold, who saw tiny lines in the letterforms that, in his opinion, betrayed cursive ancient Greek. Newbold announced that the manuscript was compiled in the 14th century by the scientist and philosopher Roger Bacon, and it is actually dedicated to scientific discoveries like the invention of the microscope. However, this version did not last long: Newbold's critics quickly showed that the microscopic lines he found were just cracks in the ink.
Some experts believe that this is a text in some European or other language, encrypted using some algorithm (and some indicate that there may be two of these languages - for example, they think at the M.V. Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics RAS). As candidate languages, not only the relatively banal Latin, but also the Tibetan dialect and even Ukrainian language from which the vowels were removed. The last idea was expressed in 1978 by an amateur philologist and Canadian Ukrainian origin John Stoyko, but his version of the translation, with sentences like "emptiness is what the eye of the baby god fights for" turned out to be extremely meaningless. According to other versions, the Voynich manuscript can be written using a book code, that is, the meaning for each word in it must be looked up in a special dictionary - writing and reading such texts is extremely laborious, but theoretically it is possible.
In addition, a manuscript may be written in shorthand or steganography, where non-obvious details (say, only the number of letters in each line) are used to convey meaning. No less interesting are the hypotheses that the manuscript could be written in a little-known natural or artificial language, - latest version the famous cryptographer William Friedman, "the father of American cryptology" held for some time, although the earliest references known to us to the idea of an artificially constructed language are two centuries later than the supposed time of the manuscript's creation.
Finally, the Voynich manuscript may be deliberate nonsense. For example, Gordon Rugg of the University of Keele in England wrote a note in Scientific American in 2004 suggesting that the author could have used the Cardano lattice, a method invented in 1550 by the Italian mathematician Gerolamo Cardano, to create deliberately meaningless text that only superficially resembles a cipher. . The Cardano grille is a card with holes cut in it, overlaying it on a specially prepared and seemingly harmless text, you can read a hidden message in the holes. With a properly made card, Rugg, he says, was able to produce text that was very similar in properties to the text of the Voynich manuscript.
Opponents of this hypothesis point to the fact that the text of the manuscript obeys the so-called Zipf's law: this law describes how often certain words occur in a sufficiently long text in a natural language, that is, a manuscript cannot be complete rubbish after all. True, in response to this, Rugg wrote an article in 2016 in which he showed that with the help of the Cardano lattice it is possible to convincingly simulate a "text" that is not inferior to meaningful from the point of view of Zipf's law.
And journalists Jerry Kennedy and Rob Churchill, in their 2004 book, even admit that the manuscript is an example of glossolalia (a speech consisting of meaningless words, but having some signs of meaningful speech): according to their assumption, its author could "simply" record a stream consciousness dictated to him by the voices in his head.
The most recent high-profile story with the "decoding" of the manuscript happened in September 2017, when the British historian and television screenwriter Nicholas Gibbs announced that, according to him, the manuscript is a textbook-instruction on the treatment of gynecological diseases for a wealthy lady, written by the author's Latin ligatures (ligature is a combination of two letters for convenience and speed of writing, for example, the ampersand sign, &, is formed from the ligature et).
Gibbs was immediately criticized by numerous specialists in medieval and Latin studies, who accused him of appropriating other people's ideas about the medical nature of the manuscript and unsubstantiated theses. The director of the American Academy of Medieval Studies, Lisa Fagin-Davies, told The Atlantic at the time that if Gibbs had shown his findings even to the librarians of Yale, where the manuscript is stored, they would have been instantly refuted.
What happened this time?
Last week, the Canadian media suddenly discovered a study by Professor Greg Kondrak from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of the University of Alberta and his graduate student Bradley Hauer, published back in 2016. These scientists trained the program to correctly determine the language of the text in 97% of cases, using as material for "training" the translation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights into 380 languages. Previously, the laboratory of Kondrak and Hauer introduced the Cepheus computer program, which is capable of beating professional players in a form of Texas hold'em, one of the most complex types poker.
Having applied their algorithm to the Voynich manuscript, the Canadians came to the conclusion that the Voynich manuscript was written in ancient Hebrew with alphagrams - anagrams, in which letters are sorted alphabetically. Other scientists have also suggested alphagrams, and Kondrak and Bradley, using algorithms to decipher them, "recognized" Hebrew words in 80% of the words of the manuscript. After clarifications in spelling, Google Translate translated the first sentence of the manuscript as follows: "She gave recommendations to the priest, the owner of the house, me and other people." Canadians believe that the manuscript is a pharmacopoeia, a set of rules for the manufacture, storage and prescription of medicines.
The work of scientists was published in the journal Transactions of the Association of Computational Linguistics. The first professional reactions to this topic appeared, apparently, long before journalists began to refer to the work, so for the time being, the hypothesis is treated very cautiously. Kondrak himself told the Canadian press that the experts on the Voynich manuscript received his work coolly, and noted that, in his opinion, these experts "are unfriendly towards such research, perhaps they are afraid that computers will replace them." At the same time, he agrees that one cannot do without a person: only a living scientist can understand the syntax and meaning of words so far.
Olga Dobrovidova
