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.

Story 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 , where you can see the clothes and decorations of women, as well as medieval castles in 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 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... Abbreviations characteristic of medical prescriptions were also useful here, 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 appear 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-held 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.

Via 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 got to the professor of philosophy University of Pennsylvania Roman Newbold. In the hieroglyphs of the text of the manuscript, Newbould saw the knowledge shorthand and proceeded to decipher, 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 technology 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 valued at $ 160,000. The Voynich manuscript is not given to anyone, but anyone who wants to try their hand at deciphering can download photocopies High Quality 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!

The Voynich Manuscript is a strange book that has been baffling experts for a hundred years, no one has been able to decipher its text... until now.

In February 2014, the University of Bedfordshire announced that Applied Linguistics Professor Stephen Wach had "followed in the footsteps of Indiana Jones by cracking the code of a 600-year-old manuscript reputed to be the most mysterious document in the world."

The object of interest of Professor Bax - the Voynich manuscript - is a handwritten book in a small format. 240 parchment pages are filled with incomprehensible letters, sketches of plants, star streams and mysterious groups of dancing and bathing naked nymphs. Ever since Wilfred Voynich, a Polish-American revolutionary and bibliophile (and husband of Ethel Lilian Voynich, author of The Gadfly), acquired the manuscript in Italy in 1912, this book has haunted scholars. Some claimed that it was written in natural language, others - in cipher, later the scientific community was inclined to think that it was dealing with a talented hoax. Bax's new translation has again drawn attention to the controversy about the nature of this extraordinary book.

Bax learned about the manuscript a couple of years ago from a radio broadcast dedicated to the British mathematician and occultist John Dee (1527-1608), whose name has long been associated with the manuscript. Voynich believed that his find was written by the monk Roger Bacon (XIII century), who wrote a lot in scientific topics. According to Voynich, the book fell into the hands of John Dee, who sold it to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II for 600 ducats (about 2 kg of gold). This claim is based on a letter found with the manuscript and dated 1665.

Bucks joined a long line of people trying to solve the mystery of the manuscript. Voynich himself did not achieve anything, but nine years after the discovery of the manuscript, he was presented with an alleged translation of part of the text, made by Professor William Newbold of the University of Pennsylvania.

For a while, Newbold basked in the glory. He decided that the real content was conveyed by tiny icons above the letters, which he claimed were analogous to handwritten ancient Greek. But in order to make his "translation", Newbold had to consider pairs of these icons as one letter, and then compose anagrams from them. With such complex manipulations, you can subtract anything. And then, besides, it turned out that the icons are only cracks on the surface of the ink.

For some time the manuscript was thought to contain a transliteration of an existing language. Then came the idea that the text could be a cipher. However, the understanding quickly came that if this was so, then we should be talking about a much more complex cipher than any other used in the Middle Ages. Finally, there was speculation that the book might just be nonsense. But why such efforts for the sake of mystification?

Like many predecessors, Professor Bax highlighted the opening words on pages containing drawings of plants. These words, as a rule, are not used in other parts of the text, that is, they can correspond to the names of these plants. So, one of the illustrations depicts something similar to a cornflower (Centaurea), similar to a thistle.

As was done when deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, Bax identified the letters that make up the word kantairon, roughly corresponding to the medieval spelling of the plant's name, by finding an almost identical word on the same page, differing only in the last letter.

Another clue turned out to be a kind of zodiac depicting a wheel with constellations between the spokes. Bax identified the group of seven stars with the Pleiades, hoping that the adjacent word denoted the constellation Taurus. This is a much weaker move, since the Pleiades cluster has a distinct shape that these stars do not repeat. Moreover, although the Pleiades are the Seven Sisters in Greek mythology, there are nine more in this cluster big stars, including two named after the sisters' parents. The Pleiades cluster is located in the constellation Taurus, but establishing such a connection would be a strong stretch.

Based on his word matching, Bax transcribed 14 letters, more than half of the alphabet of the Voynich manuscript, and has since identified a couple more plants - castor bean and marshmallow. He reasoned that the language might otherwise be an unwritten West Asian dialect. Other researchers have pointed out obvious inconsistencies in the new transliteration, since, according to it, the names of a large number of plants begin with the Latin letters C or K. Similarly, in the text resulting from the application of this transliteration to one page of the main text, about half of the words ended in R ( partly because Bax translated as R the three letters of the Voynich alphabet) and many into N, an unusual distribution for any known language.

Shortly after the University of Bedfordshire published its report, Dr. Gordon Parr (Gordon Rugg) from the University of Keele (UK) questioned these supposed achievements. Parra is well prepared to analyze the Voynich manuscript.

A linguist by training, he took up experimental psychology, and then the theory of computers. Parra has two complaints about Bax's statement. The first is that after the 1940s, this technique has already been tried many times and always to no avail, and the second is that Rugg himself considers the text of the manuscript not a language at all, but only a fake.

Could Kelly have produced such a complex manuscript? To create such a document, you need a mechanism for generating non-existent words. Using pen and parchment, Rugg showed how easy it was to do this by using a large table of word parts and combining them with a grid of cut out holes to avoid consecutive repetitions. Using this technique, drawing by hand, Rugg reproduced a page with a plant drawing in about two hours, which means that the book could take 10 weeks to complete - quite a long time. The technique could also pass a 2013 statistical test applied to the manuscript by Marcelo Montemurro of the University of Manchester, which contradicted a 2007 Austrian statistical analysis that declared the manuscript to be nonsense. The Manchester technique, which defines "highly informative words," indicates that the Voynich manuscript makes sense, but it can also work with a forgery made according to the Parra method.

In principle, such a forgery could have been created at any point in history, although the use of such grids in the creation of ciphers (which makes them a natural technique for creating a fake language) did not begin until the 1550s. The obvious move seems to be the use of radiocarbon dating, and in 2010 a group from the University of Arizona announced that the parchment was most likely created between 1404 and 1438, well before 1586. However, this does not rule out the thread and is always inconclusive, and the second is that Rugg himself considers the text of the manuscript not a language at all, but only a fake.

Using John Dee-era technology, Rugg showed that it would be relatively easy to create a fake Voynich manuscript. Dee's entourage deserves special attention, as his assistant, Edward Kelly, coined the language known as angelic. Dee used several "magic crystal readers" or mediums, including Kelly, to communicate with the spirits. It was Kelly who apparently gave Dee the ability to use the language of the angels, and Kelly collaborated with Dee at the time he is believed to have visited Rudolf II.

Could Kelly have produced such a complex manuscript? To create such a document, you need a mechanism for generating non-existent words. Using pen and parchment, Rugg showed how easy it was to do this by using a large table of word parts and combining them with a grid of cut out holes to avoid consecutive repetitions. Using this technique, drawing by hand, Rugg reproduced a page with a plant drawing in about two hours, which means that the book could take 10 weeks to complete - quite a long time.

The technique could also pass a 2013 statistical test applied to the manuscript by Marcelo Montemurro of the University of Manchester, which contradicted a 2007 Austrian statistical analysis that declared the manuscript to be nonsense. The Manchester technique, which defines "highly informative words," indicates that the Voynich manuscript makes sense, but it can also work with a forgery made according to the Parga method.

In principle, such a forgery could have been created at any point in history, although the use of such grids in the creation of ciphers (which makes them a natural technique for creating a fake language) did not begin until the 1550s. The obvious move seems to be the use of radiocarbon dating, and in 2010 a group from the University of Arizona announced that the parchment was most likely created between 1404 and 1438, well before 1586. However, this does not rule out Kelly's authorship. It was considered quite common practice to keep parchment for decades before using it for writing, and it would not be difficult to take an old, partially written book, remove the pages with text and use all the rest. To hide this, the manuscript could then be rebound so that all the lost pages did not end up at the beginning of the book. And what's interesting is that the Voynich manuscript really looks like it's been rebound with rearranged pages. If old parchment was used, this allows for the even bolder assumption that Voynich himself was the creator of the forgery.

This is what Richard Santa CoIoma suggested. He believes that Voynich found the letter providing the book's origin story and produced the corresponding manuscript. If it were nothing more than a forgotten catalog of plants it wouldn't be worth the effort, but here we have a combination of intriguing cryptic language and a supposed connection to Roger Bacon, who was widely reported in the press in 1912 on the eve of his 700th birthday - the connection , which Voynich himself emphasized. This allowed the bookseller to value the manuscript at $100,000.

HOAX?
There are other arguments in favor of the counterfeit theory. The manuscript contains unusual repetitions of words. One phrase, for example, transliterated into familiar characters, according to the convention used by Voynich manuscript scholars, reads "qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy" (qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy). Conversely, there is very little in the text of the commonly used two- or three-word phrases found in most languages.

Further, it is completely error-free. But in any manuscript you expect to see strikethroughs, and even the best medieval books contain corrections. When a scribe made a mistake, he waited for the ink to dry, then carefully scraped it off the parchment before writing a few new letters. But no matter how careful he is, this action leaves marks on the surface of the material. A few years ago, an examination was made of copies of several pages of the manuscript, made in extremely high resolution and giving much more detail than is visible to the naked eye, and yet there was no sign of even a single correction.

It is impossible to give a definite answer about the Voynich manuscript until there is a complete transcript. Stephen Bax's translation is of interest, but he has not yet indicated what language he thinks the manuscript is in, and has not been able to apply his transliteration to the text as a whole.

The forgery hypothesis proposed by Gordon Rugg, on the other hand, seems attractive, but it can only be proven if supporting evidence can be found relating to the period when the forgery was made.

In the meantime, we have before us a fascinating riddle that will no doubt prove as attractive in the next hundred years as it was in the previous one.

IS VOYNICH'S MANUSCRIPT A FAKE?
Stephen Bax, Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Bedfordshire (UK):
“Personally, I was attracted by the unusual nature of the letter and the hope of deciphering this document. Many researchers have dismissed the possibility that we are dealing here with natural language. I have carefully studied it, keeping in mind everything they say, and as a linguist I think that it may well be natural language.

Gordon Rugg, Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at Keele
“The key assumption that everyone makes is that complex structures cannot be generated in a simple way. There are complex structures in the Voynich manuscript, so everyone thought it couldn't be fake, since the structures are so complex... But very simple causes can lead to very complex consequences.”

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. Way 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 many pools with a complex water supply system.
• 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, after changing 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 considers the Voynich Manuscript 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 opinion of most of the previous owners of the book and has no evidence. 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 has great value: 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 filled in sheets of parchment. Corrections are not required. Compressing the text to complete the thought disappears in the absence of a semantic load.

The "complete nonsense" theory of the Voynich Manuscript has only one objection: If the document does not make sense, then it is very high-quality nonsense that exceeds the amateur level. The Voynich manuscript has been repeatedly analyzed by different computer methods, by different researchers and 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 two specific "languages" of the book in 1970, 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 different areas 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 robes of a naturopath, the energy diagrams of top-level yogis, and the online-purchased titles of "doctor" by alternative medicine specialists of various currents.

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

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 owner of the manuscript was the then German Emperor Rudolf II. 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. Initially, it consisted of 116 sheets of parchment, fourteen of which are on this moment are 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 the early 17th 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 a large amount of property from the Church, 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 a 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 the syllable-table grids from the Voynich manuscript, Rugg compiled a language with many, though not all, hallmarks 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 University of Pennsylvania philosophy professor Romain Newbould. Newbould, who recently turned 54, had broad interests, many of which had an element of mystery. In the hieroglyphs of the text of the manuscript, Newbould saw microscopic shorthand signs and proceeded to decipher them, translating them into letters of the Latin alphabet. The result is secondary text using 17 different letters. Then Newbould doubled all the letters in the words, except for the first and last, and subjected to a special replacement words containing one of the letters "a", "c", "m", "n", "o", "q", "t" , "u". In the resulting text, Newbould replaced pairs of letters with a single letter, in a rule he never made public.

In April 1921, Newbould announced the preliminary results of his work to a scientific audience. These results characterized Roger Bacon as the greatest scientist of all times and peoples. According to Newbould, Bacon actually created a microscope with a telescope and with their help made many discoveries that anticipated the discoveries of scientists in the 20th century. Other statements from Newbold's publications concern the "mystery of new stars".

“If the Voynich manuscript really contains the secrets of new stars and quasars, it is better for it to remain undeciphered, because the secret of an energy source that surpasses the hydrogen bomb and is so easy to handle that a 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 technologies, the medieval puzzle remains unsolved. And it is not known whether scientists will ever be able to fill this gap and read the results of many years of work of one of the forerunners of modern science.

Now this one-of-a-kind creation is stored in the Yale University Rare and Rare Book Library and is valued at $160,000. The manuscript is not given to anyone: anyone who wants to try their hand at transcribing can download high-quality photocopies from the university website.

There are mysteries in the world that have not been solved for centuries, despite the efforts of hundreds or even thousands of specialists. One of these secrets is probably the most amazing treatise in the world - the Voynich manuscript. Whoever undertook to decipher it, whatever versions the researchers offered - all in vain: the text of the mysterious manuscript has stubbornly kept its secret for more than five hundred years.

However, a rather interesting version of the decoding of the manuscript was proposed by the famous writer, paleoethnographer Vladimir DEGTYAREV.

- Vladimir Nikolaevich, so what does the Voynich manuscript tell about? What are the opinions on this?

Someone says that this is an encrypted alchemical text that figuratively describes ways to prolong life. Others call this document a medical treatment for a certain European ruler. Well, still others generally believe that this manuscript is just someone's mockery, which contains a set of meaningless graphic characters. By the way, it is not difficult to see the text of the manuscript itself, it has long been placed on the World Wide Web - the Internet.

- And yet it has not yet been deciphered ...

The manuscript was tried by high-level specialists - CIA and NSA cryptographers. For this purpose, even the most powerful computer in the world was connected. But in vain. Let me remind you: the book has four illustrated sections. The color drawings depict plants, naked women, the insides of the human body, some schemes and even a map of a section of the starry sky. In fact, half of the information is clear enough because it is illustrated.

- What do these drawings, diagrams mean? What is the book ultimately about?

REFERENCE: The Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious book written about 600 years ago by an author whose name history has not preserved. The text of the book is either encrypted or written in an unknown language using an unknown alphabet. As a result of radiocarbon analysis of the manuscript, it was precisely established that the book was written between 1404 and 1438. The Voynich manuscript has been repeatedly tried to decipher, but so far to no avail. The book got its name from the bibliophile from Kaunas, Wilfrid Voynich, who bought it in 1912. Today, the manuscript is in the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.

The illustrations tell about a person, more precisely, about how a person can live no less than 120 years measured by God. Of course, one cannot claim more, but it is possible to live 120 years in perfect health, in mind and memory. This is written in an ancient manuscript. More precisely, this is one of the “storylines” of this completely scientific work.

Moreover, the “plot” of the book suggests a possible extension of life up to three hundred years ... Why such a figure was chosen, I will not say, but the formula “To be the elder of the family in twenty generations” directly speaks of the number 300. The time when the manuscript was created was different from ours by the fact that one generation was considered a period of 15 years. Today we think differently: one generation - 25 years.

Do you mean to say that you have read the manuscript? Or just made such an approximate conclusion based on the universal desire of people for longevity?

I read only a few pages of the manuscript, selected at random from the Internet, because I needed to get some information about the plants of interest to me. More precisely, about the line of plants that is depicted at the beginning of the manuscript.

- In what language is the Voynich manuscript written, if you managed to read it?

It turns out that the manuscript was written not in any, but in common language. This is the proto-language of our civilization, and it is already hundreds of thousands of years old. It is important to remember that 600 years ago the book was not born - it was copied onto paper from linen scrolls or from layers of dressed leather. And on the same skins or linen scrolls, it was also rewritten - probably from clay tables or from palm leaves, and this happened around the 1st century according to the current chronology.

I sensed that the rhythm of the writing did not fit the 1/6 folio sheets of paper on which the current text of the manuscript was transferred. After all, the style of writing, even of a strictly documentary nature, always depends on the size of the writing material. And the Voynich manuscript is not a strict document. This is, most likely, a scientific essay, a kind of diary of the development of the action according to the scenario of a certain scientific search. It seems that much earlier the text of this manuscript was executed on sheets of material stretched in length, and not in height.

So what is this text all about?

Today, a popular hypothesis is that someone in the 15th century sat over three hundred blank sheets of expensive parchment and diligently wrote various meaningless curls on them with no less expensive ink. Then he painted almost a thousand pictures and decorations with different, also extremely expensive paints. However, there were no futurists, imagists and abstractionists in that era - if they did appear, they quickly went to the fires of the Inquisition.

So hardly anyone would be able to create an abstraction of such a high class. From time immemorial, people have written a lot. Don't think that after Flood illiteracy was all over the place and it continued until the 19th century. For example, in the 17th century, a simple Belarusian merchant of an average hand wrote in Old Slavonic, but ... in Arabic letters. And nothing. His cash receipt for one hundred and fifty thalers was considered honest and accepted into business ...

I will not accurately describe the process of decoding the three pages of this manuscript - because of the complexity of the explanations. I can only talk about my general impression. Three languages ​​were used in the manuscript: Russian, Arabic and German. But they are written in a certain one alphabet, unknown in the world of scientists. Although in fact this alphabet is much more common than you might think.

Last year, I specifically talked with people who speak African dialects. In the conversation, I cited two words from the Voynich manuscript: "unkulun-kulu" and "gulu". I was translated that it is “he who came first” and “heaven”. This is a modern interpretation of very ancient East African concepts, the original meaning of which is “one who stands above all (slaves)” and “blue doom”. In general - "God" and "Death". The last term "gulu" (Si Gulu) denotes uranium, the same one that is stuffed with nuclear charges.

- But the book depicts plants. What does uranium have to do with the exotic flower or fungus ergot?

A solution or infusion of ergot, in very small quantities, apparently acted as an antidote. People in those days lived very far from London and Paris. And in the Sahara, the dust carried radioactive particles, a kind of "blue salt" that erases the skin from a person. So ergot could well be used as an ointment against ulcers that occur on the body ... Do you know what was the most precious knowledge in Egypt, China, Europe at all times? Not a Fibonacci number, not an electric battery, not a way to get kerosene from oil. The secret of longevity - that's what cost a lot of money. People paid big money even for the most fantastic recipe. Imagine what will happen if you give the world this elixir of youth. No, it's better to keep it a secret.