A mysterious voynich manuscript. Mysterious Voynich Manuscript Unknown Manuscripts

The Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious book written about 500 years ago by an unknown author, in an unknown language, using an unknown alphabet.

They tried to decipher the Voynich manuscript many times, but so far without any success. It has become the Holy Grail of cryptography, but it is not at all excluded that the manuscript is just a hoax, an incoherent set of signs.

The book is named after the American bookseller of Lithuanian origin Wilfried Voynich (husband of the famous writer Ethel Lilian Voynich, author of The Gadfly), who acquired it in 1912. It is now housed in the Beinecke Rare Book And Manuscript Library at Yale University.

Description

The book contains about 240 pages of thin parchment. There are no inscriptions or drawings on the cover. The page size is 15 by 23 cm, the thickness of the book is less than 3 cm. Gaps in the page numbering (which is apparently younger than the book itself) indicate that some of the pages were lost by the time Wilfried Voynich acquired the book. The text was written with a bird's pen and illustrations were made by him. The illustrations are crudely colored, possibly after the book was written.

Illustrations

Except for the closing part of the book, there are pictures on all the pages. Judging by them, the book has several sections, different in style and content:

"Botanical". Each page contains an image of one plant (sometimes two) and several paragraphs of text - a manner common to the books of European herbalists at the time. Some parts of these figures are enlarged and sharper copies of the pharmaceutical section sketches.

"Astronomical". Contains circular diagrams, some of them with the moon, sun and stars, presumably of astronomical or astrological content. One series of 12 diagrams depicts the traditional symbols of the zodiac constellations (two Pisces for Pisces, a bull for Taurus, a soldier with a crossbow for Sagittarius, etc.). Each symbol is surrounded by exactly thirty miniature female figures, most of which are nude, each holding an inscribed star. The last two pages of this section (Aquarius and Capricorn, or, relatively speaking, January and February) were lost, and Aries and Taurus are divided into four paired diagrams with fifteen stars each. Some of these diagrams are located on nested pages.

"Biological". A dense, unbreakable text flowing around images of bodies, mostly naked women, bathing in ponds or ducts, connected by a meticulously thoughtful pipeline, some "pipes" clearly take the form of body organs. Some women have crowns on their heads.

"Cosmological". Other pie charts, but not clear meaning. This section also has subpages. One of these six-page attachments contains something like a map or diagram with six "islands" connected by "dams," with castles and possibly a volcano.

"Pharmaceutical". Many signed drawings of plant parts with images of pharmaceutical vessels in the margins of the pages. This section also has a few paragraphs of text, possibly with recipes.

"Prescription". A section consists of short paragraphs separated by flowery (or star) markings.

Text

The text is definitely written from left to right, with a slightly "ragged" right margin. Long sections are divided into paragraphs, sometimes with a paragraph start in the left margin. There is no usual punctuation in the manuscript. The handwriting is stable and clear, as if the alphabet was familiar to the scribe, and he understood what he was writing.

The book contains over 170,000 characters, usually separated from each other by narrow spaces. Most characters are written with one or two simple pen strokes. An alphabet of 20-30 letters of the manuscript can be used to write the entire text. The exception is several dozen special characters, each of which appears 1-2 times in the book.

Wider spaces divide the text into approximately 35,000 “words” of varying length. They seem to obey some phonetic or spelling rules. Some characters have to appear in every word (like vowels in English), some characters never follow others, some can double in a word (like two n in a long word), some don't.

Statistical analysis of the text revealed its structure, which is typical for natural languages. For example, the repetition of words follows Zipf's law, and the dictionary entropy (about ten bits per word) is the same as in Latin and of English language... Some words appear only in certain sections of the book, or only on a few pages; some words are repeated throughout the text. There are very few repetitions among about a hundred captions for illustrations. In the "Botanical" section, the first word of each page appears only on this page and is possibly the name of a plant.

On the other hand, the language of the Voynich manuscript is in some ways quite different from existing European languages. For example, in a book there are almost no words longer than ten "letters" and almost no one- and two-letter words. Inside the word, the letters are also distributed in a peculiar way: some characters appear only at the beginning of the word, others only at the end, and some always in the middle - the arrangement is inherent in the Arabic letter (cf. also variants of the Greek letter sigma), but not in the Latin or Cyrillic alphabet.

The text looks more monotonous (in a mathematical sense) compared to the European text. There are some examples when the same word is repeated three times in a row. Words that differ by only one letter are also unusually common. The entire "lexicon" of the Voynich manuscript is less than the "normal" word set of an ordinary book should be.

History

Since the alphabet of the manuscript has no visual similarity with any known writing system and the text has not yet been deciphered, the only "clue" for determining the age of the book and its origin is illustrations. In particular, there are the clothes and decorations of women, as well as a couple of locks in the diagrams. All the details are characteristic of Europe between the years 1450 and 1520, so that the manuscript most often dates from this period. This is indirectly confirmed by other signs.

The earliest known owner of the book was Georg Baresch, an alchemist who lived in Prague in the early 17th century. Bares also appears to have been puzzled by the mystery of this book from his library. Upon learning that Athanasius Kircher, a renowned Jesuit scholar from the Collegio Romano, had published a Coptic dictionary and deciphered (what 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 our time 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 the death of Bares, the book passed to his friend, Johannes Marcus Marci, rector of the University of Prague. Marzi supposedly sent it off to Kircher, a longtime friend of his. His cover letter from 1666 is still attached to the Manuscript. Among other things, the letter claims that it was originally bought for 600 ducats by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, who believed 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 together with the rest of Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Collegium of Rome (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 State 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 research by Xavier Ceccaldi and others, many books from the university library had previously been hastily transferred to the libraries of university staff, whose property was not confiscated, according to research by Xavier Ceccaldi and others. Kircher's correspondence was among these books, and apparently there was also a Voynich manuscript, as the book still bears the ex-libris of Petrus Beckx, then the head of the Jesuit order and rector of the university.

The Bex Library was moved to the Villa Borghese di Mondragone a Frascati - a large palace near Rome, acquired by the Jesuit society in 1866.

In 1912, the Collegium of Rome needed funds and decided to sell part of its property in the strictest confidence. Wilfried Voynich acquired 30 manuscripts, among other things, 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. Finding no buyer, Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University in 1969.

Roger Bacon

Marzi's cover letter to Kircher from 1665 states that, according to his deceased friend Raphael Mnishovsky, the book was once purchased by Emperor Rudolph II (1552-1612) for 600 ducats (several thousand dollars in modern money). According to this letter, Rudolph (or perhaps Raphael) believed that the author of the book was the famous and versatile Franciscan monk Roger Bacon (1214-1294).

Although Marzi wrote that he "abstains from judgment" (suspending his judgment) regarding the statement of Rudolph II, but it was taken quite seriously by Voynich, who rather agreed with him. His belief in this strongly influenced most attempts at deciphering over the next 80 years. However, researchers who studied the Voynich manuscript and are familiar with the work of Bacon strongly deny this possibility. It should also be noted that Raphael died in 1644 and the deal had to take place before the abdication of Rudolph II in 1611 - at least 55 years before Marci's letter.

John Dee

The assumption that Roger Bacon was the author of the book led Voynich to the conclusion that the only person who could sell the manuscript to Rudolph was John Dee, a mathematician and astrologer at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, also known for having a large library of Bacon manuscripts. ... Dee and his scrier (an assistant medium who uses a crystal ball or other reflective object to summon spirits) Edward Kelly are associated with Rudolph II by the fact that they lived in Bohemia for several years, hoping to sell their services to the emperor. However, John Dee meticulously kept diaries, where he did not mention the sale of the manuscript to Rudolph, so this deal seems rather unlikely. One way or another, if the author of the manuscript is not Roger Bacon, then the possible connection of the history of the manuscript with John Dee is very illusory. On the other hand, Dee himself might have written the book and spread rumors that it was Bacon's work in the hopes of selling it.

Theories about the language of the manuscript

Many theories have been put forward about the language used by the manuscript. Below are some of them.

Letter cipher

According to this theory, the Voynich manuscript contains a meaningful text in some European language, which was deliberately translated into unreadable form by displaying it in the manuscript's alphabet using some kind of coding - an algorithm that operated on individual letters.

This was the working hypothesis for most deciphering attempts throughout the 20th century, including an informal group of cryptanalysts at the United States National Security Agency (NSA) led by William Friedman in the early 1950s. The simplest ciphers based on character substitution can be ruled out as they are very easy to crack. Therefore, the efforts of the codebreakers were directed towards the polyalphabetic ciphers invented by Alberti in the 1460s. This class includes the famous Vigenere cipher, which may have been enhanced by the use of non-existent and / or similar characters, letter swapping, false spaces between words, etc. Some researchers suggest that vowels were removed prior to encoding. There have been several decryption claims based on these assumptions, but they have not received widespread acceptance. Primarily because the proposed decryption algorithms were based on so many guesses that they could be used to extract meaningful information from any random sequence of characters.

The main argument in favor of this theory is that the use of strange symbols by a European author can hardly be explained other than by an attempt to hide information. Indeed, Roger Bacon knew about ciphers, and the supposed period of the manuscript's creation roughly coincides with the birth of cryptography as a systematized science. Against this theory is the observation that the use of a polyalphabetic cipher was supposed to destroy the "natural" statistical properties that are observed in the text of the Voynich manuscript, such as Zipf's law. Also, although the polyalphabetic cipher was invented around 1467, its varieties did not become popular until the 16th century, which is somewhat later than the supposed time of the manuscript's writing.

Codebook cipher

According to this theory, the words in the text of the manuscript are actually codes that are decoded in a special dictionary or code book. The main argument for the theory is that the internal structure and distribution of word lengths are similar to those used in Roman numerals, which would have been a natural choice for this purpose at the time. However, coding based on codebooks is only satisfactory when writing short messages, as it is very cumbersome to write and read.

Visual cipher

James Finn suggested in his book Pandora's Hope (2004) that the Voynich manuscript is actually a visually encoded Hebrew text. After the letters in the manuscript have been correctly transcribed into the European Voynich Alphabet (EAB, or EVA in English), many words in the manuscript can be represented as Hebrew words that are repeated with various distortions to mislead the reader. For example, the word AIN from the manuscript is the Hebrew word for “eye” that is repeated as a distorted version of “aiin” or “aiiin”, which gives the impression of several different words when in fact they are the same word. The possibility of using other visual coding methods is assumed. The main argument in favor of this theory is that it can explain the unsuccessful outcomes of other decoding attempts that relied more on mathematical methods decryption. The main argument against this point of view is that with such an approach to the nature of the manuscript cipher, a heavy burden of different interpretations of the same text falls on the shoulders of a single decoder due to the many alternative possibilities of visual encoding.

Micrography

After rediscovery in 1912, one of the earliest attempts to uncover the secret of the manuscript (and undoubtedly the first among the premature deciphering claims) was made in 1921 by William Newbold, a renowned cryptanalyst and professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. of Pennsylvania), as well as a collector of old books. His theory was that visible text is meaningless, but each character that makes up the text is a collection of tiny dashes that can only be seen when magnified. These lines presumably formed the second level of reading the manuscript, which contained meaningful text. At the same time, Newbold relied on the ancient Greek method of cursive writing, which used a similar system of conventions. Newbold argued that, based on this premise, he was able to decipher an entire paragraph that proved the authorship of Bacon and testified to his outstanding abilities as a scientist, in particular, his use of a complex microscope four hundred years before Anthony van Leeuwenhoek.

However, after Newbold's death, cryptologist John Manly of the University of Chicago noted serious flaws in this theory. Each dash contained in the symbols of the manuscript allowed several interpretations when deciphered without a reliable way to identify among them the "correct" option. William Newbold's method also required rearranging the "letters" of the manuscript until a meaningful Latin text was obtained. This led to the conclusion that using the Newbold method, you can get almost any desired text from the Voynich manuscript. Manley argued that these lines were the result of ink cracking when it dries on rough parchment. Currently, Newbold's theory is hardly considered in the transcript of the manuscript.

Steganography

This theory is based on the assumption that the text of the book is mostly meaningless, but contains information hidden in subtle details, for example, the second letter of each word, the number of letters in each line, etc. The coding technique called steganography is very old. and was described by Johannes Trithemius in 1499. Some researchers suggest that the usual text was passed through something like a Cardano lattice. This theory is difficult to confirm or disprove, as stegotext can be difficult to crack without any clues. The argument against this theory may be that the presence of a text in an incomprehensible alphabet conflicts with the purpose of steganography - to hide the very existence of a secret message.

Some researchers suggest that meaningful text could be encoded in the length or shape of individual pen strokes. Indeed, there are examples of steganography from that time that use letterforms (italic or upright) to hide information. However, after examining the text of the manuscript at high magnification, the pen strokes appear quite natural, and much of the variation in lettering is due to the uneven surface of the parchment.

Exotic natural language

Linguist Jacques Guy suggested that the Voynich manuscript could be written in one of the exotic natural languages, using an invented alphabet. The structure of words is indeed similar to that found in many language families of East and Central Asia, primarily Sino-Tibetan (Chinese, Tibetan, Burmese), Austro-Asian (Vietnamese, Khmer) and, possibly, Thai (Thai, Lao, etc.). In many of these languages, "words" (the smallest linguistic units with a specific meaning) have only one syllable, and syllables have a fairly rich structure, including tonal components (based on the use of up and down to distinguish meaning).

This theory has some historical plausibility. These languages ​​had their own non-alphabetic writing system, and their writing systems were difficult for Europeans to understand. This gave impetus to the emergence of several phonetic writing systems, mainly based on the Latin alphabet, but sometimes original alphabets were also invented. Although the known examples of such alphabets are much younger than the Voynich manuscript, historical documents speak of many researchers and missionaries who could create a similar writing system - even before the travel of Marco Polo in the 13th century, but especially after the discovery of the sea route to the East countries of Vasco da Gama in 1499. The author of the manuscript could also be a native of East Asia who lived in Europe or was educated in a European mission.

The main argument in favor of this theory is that it is consistent with all the statistical properties of the Voynich text that have been discovered to date, including doubled and tripled words (which occur in Chinese and Vietnamese texts with approximately the same frequency as in the manuscript) ... It also explains the apparent lack of numbers and the lack of syntactic features inherent in Western European languages ​​(such as articles and linking verbs), and the general mystery of the illustrations. Another possible clue to researchers is the two large red symbols on the first page, which were seen as an upside-down and inaccurately copied book title, typical of Chinese manuscripts. In addition, the division of the year into 360 days (instead of 365), combined into groups of 15 days, presumably presented in the manuscript, and the beginning of the year from the sign of fish are properties of the Chinese agricultural calendar. The main argument against this theory is that in reality no one (including scientists from the Academy of Sciences in Beijing) could find a reliable reflection of Eastern symbolism or Eastern science in the illustrations of the Voynich manuscript.

In late 2003, Zbigniew Banasik from Poland suggested that the plain text of the manuscript was in Manchu and provided an unfinished translation of the first page of the manuscript. Links to this translation:

Multilingual text

In Solution of the Voynich Manuscript: A liturgical Manual for the Endura Rite of the Cathari Heresy, the Cult of Isis 1987, Leo Levitov ) stated that the plain text of the manuscript is a transcription of the "oral language of the polyglot." So he called "a book language that could be understood by people who do not understand Latin, if they read what is written in this language." He proposed a partial decoding in the form of a mixture of medieval Flemish with many borrowed Old French and Old High German words.

According to Levitov's theory, the endura ritual was nothing more than a suicide committed with someone's help: as if such a ritual was adopted by the Cathars for people whose death is close (the actual existence of this ritual is in question). Levitov explained that the fictional plants in the illustrations of the manuscript did not in fact depict any representatives of the flora, but were secret symbols of the Cathar religion. The women in the pools, together with a bizarre system of channels, depicted the very ritual of suicide, which, he believed, was associated with bloodletting - opening the veins and then draining blood into the bath. Constellations that have no astronomical counterparts displayed stars on Isis' cloak.

This theory is questionable for several reasons. One of the inconsistencies is that the Cathars' faith, in a broad sense, is Christian Gnosticism, in no way connected with Isis. Another is that the theory places the book in the 12th or 13th centuries, which is much older than even the adherents of the Roger Bacon theory of authorship. Levitov did not provide evidence of the veracity of his reasoning apart from his translation.

Artificial language

The peculiar internal structure of the "words" of the Voynich manuscript led William Friedman and John Tiltman, independently of each other, to the conclusion that the plain text could have been written in an artificial language, in particular in a special "philosophical language." In languages ​​of this type, the vocabulary is organized according to a system of categories, so that the general meaning of a word can be determined by analyzing the sequence of letters. For example, in the modern synthetic language Ro (Ro), the prefix "bofo-" is a color category, and every word starting with bofo- will be a color name, so red is bofoc and yellow is bofof. Very roughly, this can be compared with the book classification system used by many libraries (at least in the West), for example, the letter "P" can be responsible for the section of languages ​​and literature, "RA" for the Greek and Latin subsections, "PC" for the Romance languages, etc.

This concept is quite old, as evidenced by the 1668 book Philosophical Language by the scholar John Wilkins. In most of the known examples of such languages, categories are also subdivided by adding suffixes, therefore, a particular subject may have many words associated with it with a repeated prefix. For example, all plant names begin with the same letters or syllables, as well as, for example, all diseases, etc. This property could explain the monotony of the text of the manuscript. However, no one was able to convincingly explain the meaning of this or that suffix or prefix in the text of the manuscript, and, moreover, all known examples of philosophical languages ​​belong to a much later period, the 17th century.

Hoax

The bizarre properties of the Voynich manuscript text (such as double and triple words) and the suspicious content of the illustrations (fantastic plants, for example) have led many people to conclude that the manuscript may in fact be a hoax.

In 2003, Dr. Gordon Rugg, professor at the University of Keele (England) showed that text with characteristics identical to the Voynich manuscript can be created using a three-column table: with dictionary suffixes, prefixes and roots, which would be selected and combined using overlaying on this table of several cards with three cut out windows for each component of the "word". Cards with fewer windows could be used to get short words and to diversify the text. A similar device, called a Cardano grid, was invented as a coding tool in 1550 by the Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardano, and was intended to hide secret messages within another text. However, the text created as a result of Rugg's experiments does not have the same words and the same frequency of their repetition as are observed in the manuscript. The similarity of Rugg's text to the text in the manuscript is only visual, not quantitative. Likewise, one can “prove” that English (or any other) language does not exist by creating random nonsense that will be similar to English, just like Rugg's text to the Voynich manuscript. So this experiment is not convincing.

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, the husband of the famous writer Ethel Lilian Voynich (author of the novel The Gadfly). The manuscript was purchased in 1912 from one of the Italian monasteries. It is known that in the 1580s. the owner of the manuscript was the then German emperor Rudolph II. The encrypted manuscript with numerous color illustrations was sold to Rudolph II by the famous English astrologer, geographer and researcher 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 characteristics of paper and ink, it belongs to the 16th century. However, all attempts to decipher the text over the past 80 years have been in vain.

This book, measuring 22.5x16 cm, contains encoded 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 fluent calligraphic handwriting using 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 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 all kinds of constellations. A large number of human figures, mostly female, adorn 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, there are probably recipes for the treatment of various diseases and magical advice.

Among the illustrations are more than 400 plants that have no direct analogues in botany, as well as numerous figures of women, spirals from stars. Experienced cryptographers in attempts to decipher the text written in unusual letters, most often acted as was customary in the 20th century - they carried out a frequency analysis of the occurrence of various symbols, choosing the appropriate language. However, neither Latin, nor many Western European languages, nor Arabic came up. The search 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. Hypotheses about the extraterrestrial origin of the text have appeared, especially since the plants are not similar to those we know (although they are very carefully drawn), and spirals from stars in the XX century reminded many of the spiral arms of the Galaxy. It remained completely unclear what the text of the manuscript is 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 the one used in the manuscript), but also created a meaningless text on it. In general, research has reached a dead end.

History of the manuscript.

Since the alphabet of the manuscript has no visual similarity with any known writing system and the text has not yet been deciphered, the only "clue" for determining the age of the book and its origin is illustrations. In particular - the clothes and decoration of women, as well as a couple of locks in the diagrams. All the details are characteristic of Europe between the years 1450 and 1520, so that the manuscript most often dates from this period. This is indirectly confirmed by other signs.

The earliest known owner of the book was Georg Baresch, an alchemist who lived in Prague in the early 17th century. Bares also appears to have been puzzled by the mystery of this book from his library. Upon learning that Athanasius Kircher, a renowned Jesuit scholar from the Collegio Romano, had published a Coptic dictionary and deciphered (what 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 our time 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 the death of Bares, the book passed to his friend, Johannes Marcus Marci, rector of the University of Prague. Marzi supposedly sent it off to Kircher, a longtime friend of his. His cover letter from 1666 is still attached to the Manuscript. Among other things, the letter claims that it was originally bought for 600 ducats by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, who believed 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 together with the rest of Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Collegium of Rome (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 State 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 research by Xavier Ceccaldi and others, many books from the university library had previously been hastily transferred to the libraries of university staff, whose property was not confiscated, according to research by Xavier Ceccaldi and others. Kircher's correspondence was among these books, and apparently there was also a Voynich manuscript, as the book still bears the ex-libris of Petrus Beckx, then the head of the Jesuit order and rector of the university.

The Bex Library was moved to the Villa Borghese di Mondragone a Frascati - a large palace near Rome, acquired by the Jesuit society in 1866.

In 1912, the Collegium of Rome needed funds and decided to sell part of its property in the strictest confidence. Wilfried Voynich acquired 30 manuscripts, among other things, 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. Finding no buyer, Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University in 1969.

So, what do our contemporaries think of this manuscript?

For example, Sergei Gennadievich Krivenkov, a candidate of biological sciences, a specialist in computer psychodiagnostics, and Klavdia Nikolaevna Nagornaya, a leading software engineer at the IHT of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation (St. apparently, formulations in which, as is known, there are many special abbreviations, which provides short "words" in the text. Why encrypt? If these are formulations of poisons, then the question disappears ... Dee himself, with all his versatility, was not an expert on medicinal herbs, so he hardly composed the text. But then the fundamental question is: what kind of mysterious "unearthly" plants are shown in the pictures? It turned out that they are ... composite. For example, the flower of the well-known belladonna is connected to the leaf of a lesser-known, but equally poisonous plant called the clefthoof. And so - in many other cases. As you can see, aliens have nothing to do with it. Among the plants were found both rose hips and nettles. But also ... ginseng.

From this it was concluded that the author of the text traveled to China. Since the vast majority of plants are still European, I traveled from Europe. Which influential European organization sent its mission to China in the second half of the 16th century? The answer from history is known - the order of the Jesuits. By the way, their closest major station to Prague was located in the 1580s. in Krakow, and John Dee, together with his partner, the alchemist Kelly, first worked also in Krakow, and then moved to Prague (where, by the way, the emperor was pressured through the papal nuncio in order 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 word ...

As soon as it became clear what many of the pictures of the "herbarium" meant, Sergei and Klavdia 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 discover the unusual cipher used by the recipe writer. Here I had to recall the many differences in both the mentality of the people of that time, and the peculiarities of the then encryption systems.

In particular, at the end of the Middle Ages, they were not at all involved in creating purely digital keys to ciphers (then there were no computers), but they very often inserted numerous meaningless symbols ("blanks") into the text, which generally devalues ​​the use of frequency analysis when decrypting a manuscript. But we managed to find out what is a "dummy" and what is not. The compiler of the formulation of poisons was not alien to "black humor". So, he clearly did not want to be hanged as a poisoner, and the symbol with an element resembling a gallows is, of course, not readable. The techniques of numerology typical of that time were also used.

Ultimately, under the picture with a belladonna and a hoof, for example, it was possible to read the Latin names of these particular plants. And advice on the preparation of a deadly poison ... Here, 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 decoding, 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, and I also had to combine pictures from many reference books on medicinal plants. And the chest opened ...

Of course, a complete reading of the entire text of the manuscript, and not of its individual pages, would require the efforts of a whole team of specialists. But the "salt" is not in the recipes, but in the disclosure of the historical riddle.

And the 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 Keely University (Great Britain) came to the conclusion that the texts of a strange book of the 16th century may well turn out to be gibberish. Is the Voynich Manuscript a sophisticated forgery?

A mystery book from the 16th century can turn out to be elegant nonsense, says the computer scientist. Rugg used Elizabethan-era espionage techniques to recreate the Voynich manuscript that has puzzled codebreakers and linguists for nearly a century.

With the help of spy technology from the time of Elizabeth the First, he was able to create a semblance of the famous Voynich manuscript, which has intrigued cryptographers and linguists for over a hundred years. “I believe a fake is a plausible explanation,” says Rugg. "Now it is the turn of those who believe in the meaningfulness of the text to give their explanation." The scientist suspects that the book was made for the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire Rudolph II by the English adventurer Edward Kelly. Other scientists believe this version is plausible, but not the only one.

“Critics of this hypothesis noted that the 'Voynich language' is too complicated for nonsense. How could a medieval swindler produce 200 pages of written text with so many subtle patterns in the structure and distribution of words? But it is possible to reproduce many of these remarkable characteristics of Voynichsky using a simple coding device that existed in the 16th century. The text generated by this method looks like "voynich", but it is pure nonsense, without any 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 deceive Rudolph II. "
In order to understand why it took so much time and efforts 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, noticeable to the eye, and even more so in computer analysis. Without going into a detailed linguistic analysis, it can be noted that many letters in real languages ​​are found only in certain places and in combination with certain other letters, and the same can be said about words. These and other features of the 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 manually - and this is 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 one of the existing languages, or nonsense. Some features of the text are not found in any of the existing languages ​​- for example, two or three repetitions 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. This text is considered by many to be too complex to be a mere fake - it would have taken some crazy alchemist many years to get it right.

However, as Rugg has shown, such a text is quite easy to create with the help of a cipher device, invented around 1550 and called the Cardan lattice. This lattice is a table of symbols, words from which are formed by moving a special stencil with holes. Empty table cells provide words of different lengths. Using lattices with tables of syllables from the Voynich manuscript, Ragg 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, a scientist needs to use this technique to recreate a sufficiently large excerpt from it. Rugg hopes to achieve this through the manipulation of lattices and tables.

It seems that attempts to decipher the text fail because the author was aware of the peculiarities of the encodings and composed 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 that cryptographers usually look for. The letters are written so diversely that scientists cannot establish how large the alphabet with 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 went to the professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, Romain Newbould. Newbould, who recently turned 54, had broad interests, many with an element of mystery. In the hieroglyphs of the text of the manuscript, Newbould spotted microscopic signs of shorthand writing and proceeded to decipher them, translating them into letters of the Latin alphabet. The result is a secondary text using 17 different letters. Then Newbould doubled all letters in words except 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 one letter, following a rule he never made public.

In April 1921 Newbould announced the preliminary results of his work to an academic audience. These results characterized Roger Bacon as the greatest scientist of all time. According to Newbould, Bacon actually created a microscope with a telescope and with their help made many discoveries that anticipated the findings of scientists in the 20th century. Other statements from Newbold's publications deal with 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 a hydrogen bomb and is so simple to use that a person of the 13th century could figure it out is exactly the secret which our civilization does not need to solve, - wrote the physicist Jacques Bergier about this. - We somehow survived, and even then only because we managed to hold back the trials hydrogen bomb... If there is an opportunity to release even more energy, it is better for us not to know it, or not yet. Otherwise, our planet will very soon disappear in a blinding supernova explosion. "

Newbould's report caused a sensation. Many scientists, although they refused to express an opinion about the validity of the methods used by him for transforming the text of the manuscript, considering themselves incompetent in cryptanalysis, readily agreed with the results obtained. One famous physiologist even stated that some of the drawings in the manuscript probably depicted epithelial cells enlarged 75 times. The general public was fascinated. Whole Sunday supplements to reputable newspapers were dedicated to this event. One poor woman walked hundreds of kilometers to ask Newbould, using Bacon's formulas, to expel the evil tempting spirits that possessed her.

There were also objections. Many did not understand Newbold's method: people were unable to 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 new text. Newbold is becoming more and more obscure, less and less accessible. He died in 1926. His friend and colleague Roland Grubb Kent published his work in 1928 as The Roger Bacon Code. American and English historians who studied the Middle Ages were more than restrained in their attitude to it.

However, people have revealed much deeper secrets. Why hasn't anyone figured this one out?

According to one Manly, the reason is that “attempts at decryption have so far been made on the basis of false assumptions. We actually do not know when and where the manuscript was written, what language is the basis of encryption. When the correct hypotheses are worked out, the cipher, perhaps, will appear simple and easy ... ".

It is interesting, on the basis of which of the above version, they built the research methodology in the American 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, it is hard to believe that such a serious organization was engaged in the book purely out of sports interest. Perhaps they wanted to use the manuscript to develop one of the modern encryption algorithms for which this secret department 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 kept in the library of rare and rare books at Yale University and is estimated at $ 160,000. The manuscript is not given to anyone in the hands of anyone: everyone who wants to try their hand at deciphering can download high quality photocopies from the university website.

The Voynich manuscript is one of the most mysterious medieval manuscripts. Neither its author, nor its content, nor even the language in which it is written is known for certain. This richly illustrated code has changed hands, and for decades researchers have speculated about the origin of this text. The Voynich manuscript is the subject of special attention of cryptographers, which remains undeciphered today.

Description of the Voynich manuscript

The Voynich manuscript is a handwritten codex measuring 23.5 by 16.2 cm and 5 cm thick. It has about 240 pages, some of which are folding, that is, they are larger in width than others. Some of the sheets of the manuscript have been lost. The document contains text in an unknown language and illustrations to it. It is not known exactly who and when compiled this manuscript.

According to research carried out in 2009 using methods of physicochemical analysis, its text and drawings were applied using a bird's pen, using the same iron-gallic ink in black-brown, and illustrations are colored in blue, green, white and red-brown paints based on natural ingredients. Some illustrations also contain traces of faded yellow paint. The pagination of the manuscript and the Latin alphabet on its first page are drawn using other inks that also differ in composition. The data from the same analysis confirm that the manuscript was made in Europe, but not outside of it. The text was written by several people, at least two, and illustrations were also done by several authors.

Pages 34 and 74 from the Voynich manuscript

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The material from which the manuscript is made is parchment. However, this is not a palimpsest. Radiocarbon analysis of several fragments of this material from different parts of the manuscript makes it possible to date the time of its creation to the first half of the 15th century. Moreover, the text and drawings also date from this era. This does not exclude the possibility that the parchment produced during this period could have been used later, but there is no conclusive evidence of this.

According to its content, the Voynich manuscript is conventionally divided into several chapters - this includes the so-called "herbarium", which depicts plants and explanations to them, "astronomy" with drawings resembling some constellations, "cosmology" with pie charts, "signs of the Zodiac" , "Biology", which shows people, mostly naked women while bathing, "pharmaceuticals", which shows fragments of vessels resembling pharmaceutical equipment and plant fragments. Some of the closing pages of the manuscript are not illustrated.

Owners of the manuscript

The data of radiocarbon and paleographic analysis of the manuscript do not allow to reliably determine the place of its creation. Region of its possible origin researchers different countries they define it in different ways, calling it the homeland either Italy, then Germany, then Spain, then the Czech Republic or France.

The origin and history of this manuscript also still have many ambiguities and are more or less reliably documented only in the twentieth century. The manuscript received its current name, under which it acquired worldwide fame, from one of its owners, Mikhail (Wilfred) Voynich (1865–1930), a Polish revolutionary. Having escaped from Russia in connection with the persecution for his political activity Voynich abandoned revolutionary ideas and went into the trade of antique books and manuscripts, first in the UK and then in the United States. In 1915, he published a medieval manuscript, which he bought, according to him, three years earlier in Italy, at the Villa Mondragone from the Jesuit monks. After Voynich's death, the manuscript belonged to his wife, the writer Ethel L. Voynich (1864-1960), and then was bought by the antiquary Hans-Peter Kraus for $ 24,500. Kraus tried to resell the manuscript further for 160 thousand dollars, but failed and donated it to the Beinecke Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts at Yale University in 1969. Currently, the manuscript is available for study to everyone in the form of a digitized copy on the website of this library and in the form of a facsimile edition, published in 2016.

Mikhail-Wilfred Voynich

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Origin and authorship of the manuscript

Voynich believed that the author of the manuscript was the English medieval philosopher Roger Bacon (1214? –1292), and thus he believed that it was created in the century. He got this assumption from a letter from 1665/6 of the Czech scholar Jan M. Marci (1595-1667) to his German colleague, the Jesuit monk Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), whose help he sought to decipher the manuscript. Marzi claimed that earlier the manuscript belonged to the German emperor Rudolph ΙΙ Habsburg (1576-1612), who, as a great lover of various rarities, acquired this manuscript for 600 ducats. Based on the known data on the biography of Marci, Voynich also suggested that after the emperor the owner of the manuscript was the Czech alchemist Georg Barsh (or Bares), who left his library to Marci. In addition to him, Voynich considered Jacob Horchicki (1575-1622), the emperor's doctor and gardener, to be another owner of the manuscript. Voynich relied on the fact that there was a signature on the manuscript, which he subjected to chemical analysis and considered his own.

Roger Bacon

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Currently, well-known sources on the composition of the book and manuscript collections of Rudolph ΙΙ do not confirm Marci's assertion, and the version about the authenticity of Horcicki's signature was convincingly refuted by the Czech historian J. Khurich, who found the autographs of this doctor. However, at the same time, other letters from Marzi to Kircher, as well as the correspondence of their acquaintances, revealed in the 1990s in the Czech National Library and the Library of the Duke Augustus in Wolfenbüttel, indicate that the manuscript really belonged to Georg Barsh at one time, and then through Marzi. passed to Kircher. In the 2000s, R. Sandbergen, J. Smolka and F. Neal, who studied these materials, thus traced the transition of the manuscript from Marzi to the Jesuits, from whom Voynich acquired it in 1912.

The question of the authorship of the manuscript, however, remains open. In addition to Roger Bacon, the authorship of the manuscript was attributed to the English scientist John Dee (1527-1609), who was fond of alchemy, his friend Edward Kelly (1555-1597), as well as their German colleague Johann Trithemius (1462-1516) and some other authors of the Middle Ages and the early modern time, interested in or practicing cipher business. However, at the present time, since the data of radiocarbon analysis convincingly date this manuscript to the first half of the 15th century, their involvement in its creation is devoid of strong evidence. Voynich himself was also named among the possible authors of the manuscript, believing that the manuscript is his hoax, made for profit. However, this version was also found to be untenable.

Study of the Voynich manuscript

The first attempts to decipher the manuscript were made by the aforementioned Marzi and Kircher in the 17th century. They, like the efforts of Voynich himself, were unsuccessful. Nevertheless, it was with Voynich that the era of scientific study of this manuscript begins, which continues to this day. In this process, two main periods can be distinguished: before the use of computer technology and after it. At the same time, both periods are characterized by attention to the manuscript both from specialists, that is, cryptologists, linguists, historians, mathematicians, programmers, and so on, and from numerous amateurs.

The first period falls on the 1920s – 1960s. At this time, the theory of the American philosopher R. Newbold (1928) appeared, who, like Voynich, considered R. Bacon to be the author. A group of manuscript researchers also formed, including American military cryptographers, one of whom was W. F. Friedman. Friedman prepared the first machine-readable version of the manuscript (1946) based on the assignment of Latin letters and their combinations to the symbols with which its text is written, and, thus, he created the prerequisites for studying it using a computer. The American entrepreneur J. Fabian, one of the private sponsors of this study, hoped that the author of the manuscript was the philosopher F. Bacon (1561-1626), but Friedman convincingly proved that this was not the case.

Fragment of the text of the manuscript

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In the 1970s, this work was continued by P. Carrier, who opened a new era in the study of manuscripts using electronic computers. At this time, the first generalizing studies about the manuscript appeared. In 1978, two works were published at once: R.M.Brumbau suggested that this was a hoax in the style of the Neoplatonists, created to deceive Rudolph ΙΙ, and M.E. D'Imperio was less categorical, simply presenting an overview of the existing versions. In subsequent years, numerous studies by experts from all over the world proposed a variety of versions regarding the possible language of the manuscript, believing that it could be not only one, but also several languages, including non-European ones, including artificial ones. Back in 1976, physicist W. Bennett established that the level of entropy in the language of the book is lower than in any European language, which gave rise to a version of a possible "Polynesian trace" in the manuscript.

In 2016, a group of researchers - A. A. Arutyunov, L. A. Borisov, D. A. Zenyuk, A. Yu. Ivchenko, E. P. Kirina-Lilinskaya, Yu.N. Orlov, K.P. Osminin, S. L. Fedorov, S. A. Shilin - put forward a hypothesis that the text is written in a mixed language without vocalization: 60% of the text is written in one of the languages West Germanic group (English or German), and 40% of the text is in the Romance group language (Italian or Spanish) and / or Latin. A similar hypothesis was put forward back in 1997 by the linguist J. B. M. Guy, who believed that the manuscript was written in two dialects of the same language. However, up to the present time, none of the versions regarding the language (or languages) of the manuscript is fully substantiated, since no one was able to read it.

Pages 29 and 99 from the Voynich manuscript

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A number of researchers have tried to establish which plants are depicted in the manuscript. Thus, A.O. Tucker and R.G. Talbert suggested that the manuscript contains images found in North America, which indicates its creation after the expeditions of Columbus. However, this version has not yet received further confirmation.

V last years Great authority on the problem of deciphering the manuscript is enjoyed by the research of British scientists G. Rugg and G. Tylor, who adhere to the version that the Voynich manuscript is nothing more than a hoax. They prove that the text of the manuscript could have been formed according to the Cardano lattice principle, which made it possible to create the appearance of a meaningful text, which is in fact just gibberish.

The value of the Voynich manuscript for the history of science and the development of cipher business

Opening of the Voynich Manuscript

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For a long time, the manuscript has maintained an interest in the study of the history of scientific knowledge and ways of protecting information. At the same time, due to the fact that her "mystery of the Voynich manuscript cipher" has not yet been solved, she did not have a direct impact on the development of the cipher business anywhere. The difficulties that any researchers of this manuscript face are due, among other things, to the fact that a team of specialists of different nature, that is, mathematicians, historians, linguists, programmers, and so on, is not always assembled, which would allow a simultaneous multidisciplinary study of this manuscript. The veil of secrecy that has formed around this manuscript also attracts laymen to it, who from time to time make loud statements in the media, creating a buzz around it.

How do I keep track of research on the Voynich manuscript?

To keep abreast of the latest trends in the study of this manuscript, you must at least master the English language and regularly read the magazine Cryptologia, as well as keep track of updates on the Beinecke Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts at Yale University. Regular updates regarding this manuscript are also published on the blog of the oldest online research group of this manuscript and on the website of R. Sandbergen.

The Voynich manuscript is a strange book that has baffled 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 "followed in the footsteps of Indiana Jones by cracking the code of a 600-year-old manuscript that is reputed to be the most mysterious document in the world."

Professor Bucks' object of interest - the Voynich manuscript - is a small-format handwritten book. 240 parchment pages are filled with incomprehensible writing, sketches of plants, stellar streams and mysterious groups of dancing and bathing naked nymphs. Ever since Wilfred Voynich, the 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 argued that it was written in natural language, others - that it was in code, later the scientific community was inclined to think that it was dealing with a talented hoax. Bucks' new translation has drawn attention again to controversy over the nature of this extraordinary book.

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

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

For a while, Newbold was bathed in glory. He decided that the actual content was conveyed by tiny signs over the letters, which he claimed were analogous to handwritten ancient Greek. But in order to make his "translation", Newbold had to consider the pairs of these symbols 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 were just cracks on the surface of the ink.

For some time it was believed that the manuscript contained a transliteration of the existing language. Then came the idea that text could be a cipher. However, the understanding quickly came that if this was so, then we should talk about a much more complex cipher than any other used in the Middle Ages. Finally, it was suggested that the book might just be nonsense. But why such efforts for the sake of a hoax?

Like many of his predecessors, Professor Bucks has highlighted the opening words on the 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 that looks like a cornflower (Centaurea), similar to a thistle.

As was done when decoding Egyptian hieroglyphs, Bucks identified the letters that make up the word kantairon, roughly corresponding to the medieval spelling of the name of this plant, thanks to the fact that he found on the same page an almost identical word, differing only in the last letter.

Another clue turned out to be a kind of zodiac, depicting a wheel with constellations between the spokes. Bucks identified the group of seven stars with the Pleiades in the hope that the word nearby denotes 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 other large stars in this cluster, including two named after the sisters' parents. The Pleiades Cluster is located in the constellation Taurus, but it would be a stretch to establish such a connection.

Guided by his collation of words, Bax compiled transliterations of 14 letters, which is more than half of the alphabet of the Voynich manuscript, and has since identified a couple of plants - castor oil plant and marshmallow. He reasoned that the rest of the language could be an unwritten West Asian dialect. Other researchers 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 applying this transliteration to one page of the main text, about half of the words ended in R ( partly because Bucks translated three letters of the Voynich alphabet as R) and many in N - an unusual distribution for any known language.

Shortly after the University of Bedfordshire published its report, Dr. Gordon Rugg of Keele University in the UK questioned these alleged accomplishments. 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 Bucks' claim. 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 Ragg himself considers the text of the manuscript not to be 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 nonexistent words. Using pen and parchment, Ragg showed how easy it was to do this by using a large table of word parts and combining them with a lattice with cut holes to avoid repetition. Using this technique, by hand, Ragg reproduced a page with a drawing of a plant in about two hours, which means that the book could take 10 weeks - quite a long time. This technique can also pass a statistical test applied to a manuscript in 2013 by Marcelo Montemurro of the University of Manchester, who gave results that contradict the one done in 2007 in Austria. statistical analysis, who declared the manuscript to be nonsense. The Manchester Methodology defining "highly informative words" indicates that the Voynich manuscript makes sense, but it can work just as well with a forgery made by the Parra method.

As a matter of fact, such a forgery could have been created at any point in history, although the use of such lattices 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 at the University of Arizona announced that the parchment was most likely created between 1404 and 1438, much earlier than 1586. However, this does not exclude a thread and is always ineffectual, and the second is that Ragg himself considers the text of the manuscript not to be a language at all, but only a fake.

Using technology from the days of John Dee, 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, invented a language known as angelic. Dee used several "magic crystal diviners" or mediums, including Kelly, to communicate with the spirits. It was Kelly who apparently gave Dee the ability to use the language of angels, and Kelly collaborated with Dee while he is believed to have traveled to Rudolph II.

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

This technique may also pass a statistical test applied to a manuscript in 2013 by Marcelo Montemurro of the University of Manchester, who produced results that contradict a 2007 Austrian statistical analysis that declared the manuscript to be nonsense. The Manchester Methodology, which defines "highly informative words," indicates that the Voynich manuscript makes sense, but it can work just as well with a forgery made by the Pagga method.

As a matter of fact, such a forgery could have been created at any point in history, although the use of such lattices 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 at the University of Arizona announced that the parchment was most likely created between 1404 and 1438, much earlier than 1586. However, this does not exclude Kelly's authorship. It was considered quite common practice to store parchment for decades before using it for writing, and it would be easy to take an old, partially written book, remove the pages of text and use all the rest. To hide this, the manuscript could then be bound again so that all the lost pages do not end up at the beginning of the book. And what's interesting is that the Voynich manuscript really looks like a re-bound manuscript with rearranged pages. If old parchment was used, this allows us to make an even more daring assumption that the Voynich himself was the creator of the forgery.

This was suggested by Richard Santa CoIoma. He believes that Voynich found a letter providing the book with an origin story and produced a corresponding manuscript. If it were nothing more than a forgotten catalog of plants, it wouldn't have been worth the effort, but here we have a combination of intriguing, mysterious language and an alleged connection to Roger Bacon, about whom the press wrote extensively in 1912 in the run-up to his 700th birthday. , which was emphasized by Voynich himself. This allowed the bookseller to value the manuscript at $ 100,000.

HOAX?
There are more arguments in favor of the counterfeiting theory. There are unusual repetitions of words in the manuscript. One phrase, for example, translated into familiar characters, according to the convention used by researchers of the Voynich manuscript, reads qokedy qokedy dal qokedy qokedy. Conversely, there is very little in the text of frequently used phrases of two or three words, which is found in most languages.

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

It is impossible to give a definite answer about the Voynich manuscript until there is a complete transcript. Stephen Bucks' translation is interesting, 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 counterfeiting hypothesis proposed by Gordon Rugg seems attractive, but it can only be proven if corroborating evidence is found dating back to the period when the forgery was made.

In the meantime, we have a fascinating mystery that will undoubtedly turn out to be as attractive in the next hundred years as it was in the previous one.

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

Gordon Rugg, Senior Lecturer in Computer Theory at Keeles
“The key assumption everyone makes is that complex structures cannot be generated in a simple way... There are complex structures in the Voynich manuscript, so everyone thought that it could not be fake, since these structures are so complex ... But very simple reasons can lead to very complex consequences. "

Except for the closing part of the book, there are pictures on all the pages. Judging by them, the book has several sections, different in style and content:

• "Botanical"... Each page contains an image of one plant (sometimes two) and several paragraphs of text - a manner common to the books of European herbalists at the time. Some parts of these figures are enlarged and sharper copies of the pharmaceutical section sketches.
• "Astronomical"... Contains circular diagrams, some of them with the moon, sun and stars, presumably of astronomical or astrological content. One series of 12 diagrams depicts the traditional symbols of the zodiac constellations (two Pisces for Pisces, a bull for Taurus, a soldier with a crossbow for Sagittarius, etc.). Each symbol is surrounded by exactly thirty miniature female figures, most of which are nude, each holding an inscribed star. The last two pages of this section (Aquarius and Capricorn, or, relatively speaking, January and February) were lost, and Aries and Taurus are divided into four paired diagrams with fifteen stars each. Some of these diagrams are located on nested pages.
• "Biological"... A dense, unbreakable text flowing around images of bodies, mostly naked women, bathing in ponds or ducts, connected by a meticulously thought-out pipeline, some "pipes" clearly take the form of body organs. Some women have crowns on their heads.
• "Cosmological"... Other pie charts, but not clear meaning. This section also has subpages. One of these six-page attachments contains something like a map or diagram with six "islands" connected by "dams" with castles and possibly a volcano.
• "Pharmaceutical"... Many signed drawings of plant parts with images of pharmaceutical vessels in the margins of the pages. This section also has a few paragraphs of text, possibly with recipes.
• "Prescription"... A section consists of short paragraphs separated by flowery (or star) markings.

Text

The text is definitely written from left to right, with a slightly "ragged" right margin. Long sections are divided into paragraphs, sometimes with a paragraph start in the left margin. There is no usual punctuation in the manuscript. The handwriting is stable and clear, as if the alphabet was familiar to the scribe, and he understood what he was writing.

Page from the "Biological" section

The book contains over 170,000 characters, usually separated from each other by narrow spaces. Most characters are written with one or two simple pen strokes. An alphabet of 20-30 letters of the manuscript can be used to write the entire text. The exception is several dozen special characters, each of which appears 1-2 times in the book.

Wider spaces divide the text into approximately 35,000 “words” of varying length. They seem to obey some phonetic or spelling rules. Some characters must appear in every word (like vowels in English), some characters never follow others, some can double in a word (like two n in the word long), some are not.

Statistical analysis of the text revealed its structure, which is typical for natural languages. For example, word repetition follows Zipf's law, and dictionary entropy (about ten bits per word) is the same as in Latin and English. Some words appear only in certain sections of the book, or only on a few pages; some words are repeated throughout the text. There are very few repetitions among about a hundred captions for illustrations. In the "Botanical" section, the first word of each page appears only on this page and is possibly the name of a plant.

The text looks more monotonous (in a mathematical sense) compared to the European text. There are some examples when the same word is repeated three times in a row. Words that differ by only one letter are also unusually common. The entire "lexicon" of the Voynich manuscript is less than the "normal" word set of an ordinary book should be.

The illustrations in the "biological" section are linked by a network of channels

History

The further 200 years of the fate of the Manuscript are unknown, but it is most likely that it was kept together with the rest of Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Collegium of Rome (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 State 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 research by Xavier Ceccaldi and others, many books from the university library had previously been hastily transferred to the libraries of university staff, whose property was not confiscated, according to research by Xavier Ceccaldi and others. Kircher's correspondence was among these books, and apparently there was also a Voynich manuscript, as the book still bears the ex-libris of Petrus Beckx, then the head of the Jesuit order and rector of the university.

The Bex library was moved to the Villa Borghese di Mondragone a Frascati - a large palace near Rome, acquired by the Jesuit society in.

Guesses about authorship

Roger Bacon

Roger Bacon

Marzi's cover letter to Kircher from 1665 states that, according to his deceased friend Raphael Mnishovsky, the book was once purchased by Emperor Rudolph II (1552-1612) for 600 ducats (several thousand dollars in modern money). According to this letter, Rudolph (or perhaps Raphael) believed that the author of the book was the famous and versatile Franciscan monk Roger Bacon (1214-1294).

Although Marzi wrote that he "abstains from judgment" (suspending his judgment) regarding the statement of Rudolph II, but it was taken quite seriously by Voynich, who rather agreed with him. His belief in this strongly influenced most attempts at deciphering over the next 80 years. However, researchers who studied the Voynich manuscript and are familiar with the work of Bacon strongly deny this possibility. It should also be noted that Raphael died in 1917 and the deal had to take place before the abdication of Rudolph II in 1611 - at least 55 years before Marci's letter.

John Dee

The suggestion that Roger Bacon was the author of the book led Voynich to the conclusion that the only person who could sell the manuscript to Rudolph was John Dee, a mathematician and astrologer at the court of Queen Elizabeth I, also known for having a large library of Bacon manuscripts. ... Dee and him scrier(an assistant medium who uses a crystal ball or other reflective object to summon spirits) Edward Kelly is associated with Rudolph II by the fact that they lived in Bohemia for several years, hoping to sell their services to the emperor. However, John Dee meticulously kept diaries, where he did not mention the sale of the manuscript to Rudolph, so this deal seems rather unlikely. One way or another, if the author of the manuscript is not Roger Bacon, then the possible connection of the history of the manuscript with John Dee is very illusory. On the other hand, Dee himself might have written the book and spread rumors that it was Bacon's work in the hopes of selling it.

Edward Kelly

Edward Kelly

The personality and knowledge of Marzi were adequate for this task, and Kircher, this "Doctor I-know-everything" who, as we know now, was "famous" for obvious mistakes, not brilliant achievements, was an easy target. Indeed, Georg Bares's letter bears a certain resemblance to the joke that the orientalist Andreas Muller once played on Athanasius Kircher. Müller fabricated a meaningless manuscript and sent it to Kircher with a note that the manuscript came to him from Egypt. He asked Kircher for a translation of the text, and there is information that Kircher provided it immediately.

It is interesting to note that the only confirmation of the existence of Georg Bares are three letters sent to Kircher: one sent by Bares himself in 1639, the other two to Marci (about a year later). It is also curious that the correspondence between Marzi and Athanasius Kircher ends in 1665, with the "cover letter" of the Voynich manuscript. However, Marci's secret hostility to the Jesuits is just a hypothesis: a devout Catholic, he himself studied to be a Jesuit and, shortly before his death in 1667, was awarded an honorary membership in their order.

Raphael Mniszowski

Marzi's friend, Raphael Mniszowski, who was the purported source of the Roger Bacon story, was himself a cryptographer (among many other occupations) and, around 1618, allegedly invented a cipher that he believed was unbreakable. This led to the emergence of the theory that he was the author of the Voynich manuscript, which was needed for a practical demonstration of the above-named cipher - and made poor Baresh a "guinea pig". After Kircher published his book on deciphering the Coptic language, Raphael Mniszowski, according to this theory, decided that to confuse Athanasius Kircher with a clever cipher would be a much more tasty trophy than to lead Bares to a dead end. To do this, he could convince George Baresch to ask for help from the Jesuits, that is, from Kircher. To motivate Baresh to do this, Rafael Mniszowski could invent the story of Roger Bacon's mysterious encrypted book. Indeed, doubts about Raphael's story in the cover letter of the Voynich manuscript could mean that Johann Marcus Marzi suspected a lie. However, there is no clear evidence for this theory.

Anthony Eskem

Dr. Leonell Strong, a cancer researcher and amateur cryptographer, also tried to decipher the manuscript. Strong believed that the solution to the manuscript lies in "a special double system of arithmetic progressions of numerous alphabets." Strong claimed that according to the text he decoded, the manuscript was written by the 16th century English author Anthony Ascham, whose works include A Little Herbal, published in 1550. Although the Voynich manuscript contains sections similar to the herbalist, the main argument against this theory is that it is not known where the author of The Herbalist could have acquired such literary and cryptographic knowledge.

Theories about content and purpose

The overall impression created by the remaining pages of the manuscript suggests that it was intended to serve as a pharmacopoeia or as separate themes for a book of medieval or earlier medicine. However, the confusing details of the illustrations feed many theories about the book's origins, the content of its text, and the purpose for which it was written. Several such theories are outlined below.

Herbalistics

We can say with a great deal of confidence that the first part of the book is devoted to herbs, but attempts to compare them with real samples of herbs and with stylized drawings of herbs of that time have generally failed. Only a couple of plants, pansies and maidenhair fern can be identified accurately enough. Those drawings from the "botanical" section, which correspond to the sketches from the "pharmaceutical" section, give the impression of their exact copies, but with missing parts, which are supplemented by implausible details. Indeed, many plants seem to be composite: the roots of some specimens are linked to leaves from others and to flowers from others.

Sunflowers

Brumbaugh believed that one of the illustrations depicts a New World sunflower. If this were the case, it could help determine the time of writing the manuscript and reveal the intriguing circumstances of its origin. However, the similarities are very slight, especially when comparing the drawing to real wild specimens, and since its scale is not determined, the plant depicted may be another member of this family, which includes dandelion, chamomile and other species around the world.

Alchemy

The ponds and canals in the "biological" section may indicate a connection with alchemy, which could be significant if the book contained instructions for preparing medicinal elixirs and mixtures. However, alchemical books of that time are characterized by a graphical language, where processes, materials and components were depicted in the form of special pictures (eagle, frog, a man in a grave, a couple in bed, etc.) or standard text symbols (a circle with a cross, etc.) etc.). None of these can be convincingly identified in the Voynich manuscript.

Alchemical herbalistics

Sergio Toresella, an expert on paleobotany, noted that the manuscript could have been alchemical herbalistics, which actually had nothing to do with alchemy, but was a fake herbalist book with fictional pictures that a charlatan healer could carry with him in order to impress customers. Presumably, there was a network of home workshops producing such books somewhere in northern Italy, just at the time of the supposed writing of the manuscript. However, such books differ significantly from the Voynich manuscript in both style and format, in addition, they were all written in ordinary language.

Astrological botany

However, after Newbold's death, cryptologist John Manly of the University of Chicago noted serious flaws in this theory. Each dash contained in the symbols of the manuscript allowed several interpretations when deciphered without a reliable way to identify the "correct" option among them. William Newbold's method also required rearranging the "letters" of the manuscript until a meaningful Latin text was obtained. This led to the conclusion that using the Newbold method, you can get almost any desired text from the Voynich manuscript. Manley argued that these lines were the result of ink cracking when it dries on rough parchment. Currently, Newbold's theory is hardly considered in the transcript of the manuscript.

Steganography

This theory is based on the assumption that the text of the book is mostly meaningless, but contains information hidden in subtle details, for example, the second letter of each word, the number of letters in each line, etc. The coding technique called steganography is very old. and was described by Johannes Trithemius c. Some researchers suggest that ordinary text was passed through something like a Cardano lattice. This theory is difficult to confirm or disprove, as stegotext can be difficult to crack without any clues. The argument against this theory may be that the presence of a text in an incomprehensible alphabet contradicts the purpose of steganography - to hide the very existence of a secret message.

Some researchers suggest that meaningful text could be encoded in the length or shape of individual pen strokes. Indeed, there are examples of steganography from that time that use letterforms (italic or upright) to hide information. However, after examining the text of the manuscript at high magnification, the pen strokes appear quite natural, and much of the variation in lettering is due to the uneven surface of the parchment.

Exotic natural language

Multilingual text

In Solution of the Voynich Manuscript: A liturgical Manual for the Endura Rite of the Cathari Heresy, the Cult of Isis 1987, Leo Levitov ) stated that the plain text of the manuscript is a transcription of the "oral language of the polyglot." So he called "a book language that could be understood by people who do not understand Latin, if they read what is written in this language." He proposed a partial decoding in the form of a mixture of medieval Flemish with many borrowed Old French and Old High German words.

According to Levitov's theory, the endura ritual was nothing more than a suicide committed with someone's help: as if such a ritual was adopted by the Cathars for people whose death is close (the actual existence of this ritual is in question). Levitov explained that the fictional plants in the illustrations of the manuscript did not in fact depict any representatives of the flora, but were secret symbols of the Cathar religion. The women in the pools, together with a bizarre system of channels, depicted the very ritual of suicide, which, he believed, was associated with bloodletting - opening the veins and then draining blood into the bath. Constellations that have no astronomical counterparts displayed stars on Isis' cloak.

This theory is questionable for several reasons. One of the inconsistencies is that the Cathars' faith, in a broad sense, is Christian Gnosticism, in no way connected with Isis. Another is that the theory places the book in the 12th or 13th centuries, which is much older than even the adherents of the Roger Bacon theory of authorship. Levitov did not provide evidence of the veracity of his reasoning apart from his translation.

Artificial language

The peculiar internal structure of the "words" of the Voynich manuscript led William Friedman and John Tiltman, independently of each other, to the conclusion that the plain text could have been written in an artificial language, in particular in a special "philosophical language." In languages ​​of this type, the vocabulary is organized according to a system of categories, so that the general meaning of a word can be determined by analyzing the sequence of letters. For example, in the modern synthetic language Ro, the prefix "bofo-" is a color category, and every word starting with bofo- will be a color name, so red is bofoc and yellow is bofof. Very roughly, this can be compared with the book classification system used by many libraries (at least in the West), for example, the letter "P" can be responsible for the section of languages ​​and literature, "RA" for the Greek and Latin subsections, "PC" for the Romance languages, etc.

This concept is quite old, as evidenced by the 1668 book Philosophical Language by the scholar John Wilkins. In most of the known examples of such languages, categories are also subdivided by adding suffixes, therefore, a particular subject may have many words associated with it with a repeated prefix. For example, all plant names begin with the same letters or syllables, as well as, for example, all diseases, etc. This property could explain the monotony of the text of the manuscript. However, no one was able to convincingly explain the meaning of this or that suffix or prefix in the text of the manuscript, and, moreover, all known examples of philosophical languages ​​belong to a much later period, the 17th century.

Hoax

The bizarre properties of the Voynich manuscript text (such as double and triple words) and the suspicious content of the illustrations (fantastic plants, for example) have led many people to conclude that the manuscript may in fact be a hoax.

In 2003, Dr. Gordon Rugg, professor at the University of Keele (England) showed that text with characteristics identical to the Voynich manuscript can be created using a three-column table: with dictionary suffixes, prefixes and roots, which would be selected and combined using overlaying on this table of several cards with three cut out windows for each component of the "word". Cards with fewer windows could be used to get short words and to diversify the text. A similar device, called a Cardano grid, was invented as a coding tool in 1550 by the Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardano, and was intended to hide secret messages within another text. However, the text created as a result of Rugg's experiments does not have the same words and the same frequency of their repetition as are observed in the manuscript. The similarity of Rugg's text to the text in the manuscript is only visual, not quantitative. Likewise, one can “prove” that English (or any other) language does not exist by creating random nonsense that will be similar to English, just like Rugg's text to the Voynich manuscript. So this experiment is not convincing.

Influence on popular culture

There are several examples that the Voynich manuscript influenced, at least indirectly, some examples of popular culture.

• In the work of Howard Lovecraft there is a certain sinister book "Necronomicon". Despite the fact that Lovecraft was likely unaware of the existence of the Voynich manuscript, Colin Wilson (eng. Colin wilson) published in 1969 the story "The Return of Loigor", where the character reveals that the Voynich manuscript is an unfinished "Necronomicon".
• Contemporary writer Harry Veda presented a literary-fiction explanation of the origin of the Voynich manuscript in the story "Corsair".
• The Codex Seraphinianus is a contemporary work of art inspired by the Voynich manuscript.
• The contemporary composer Hanspeter Kyburz wrote a short piece of music based on the Voynich manuscript, reading part of it as a musical score.
• Drawings and typefaces reminiscent of the Voynich manuscript can be seen in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indian jones and the Last crusade ).
• The plot of "Il Romanzo Di Nostradamus" by Valerio Evangelisti presents the Voynich manuscript as a work of adherents of black magic, with which the famous French astrologer Nostradamus fought all his life.
• In a computer game in the style of the quest "Broken Sword 3: Sleeping Dragon" (eng. Broken Sword III: The Sleeping Dragon ) from DreamCatcher, the Voynich manuscript text transcribes