Voynich Manuscript The Most Unknown Coded
The Voynich Manuscript was discovered by Polish book dealer Wilfried M. Voynich, in an Italian monastery in 1912. The Voynich Manuscript is generally considered the world’s most mysterious tome due to its handwritten and the coded text is an unknown writing system. The vellum on which it is written has been carbon dated in the early 15th century (1404–1438). It may have been composed in Northern Italy during the Italian Renaissance.
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| The piece of Voynich manuscript |
The Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II, but no living person has ever understood it. Nobody can decode the language that is written in it. It also has no title and no author.
The manuscript measures 23.5 cm by 16.2cm by 5 cm with the total number around 240 pages. The manuscript was written in brown ink, accompanied by strange diagrams and paintings of plants. Every page in it contains text mostly in an unknown language and the writing will not be decipherable to you. The letters loop prettily, and the text runs from left to right, top to bottom. Below, the characters appearing in Voynich manuscript:
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| Characters Appear in Voynich Manuscript |
The Voynich manuscript filled with six sections and their conventional names:
- Herbal (112 folios), each page displays one or two plants and a few paragraphs of text, a format typical of European herbals of the time.
- Astronomical (2 folios), contains astronomy or astrology, some of them with suns, moons, and stars.
- Biological (21 folios), a dense continuous text interspersed with figures, mostly showing small nude women, some wearing crowns, bathing in pools or tubs connected by an elaborate network of pipes.
- Cosmological (13 folios), More circular diagrams but of an obscure nature.
- Pharmaceutical (34 folios), drawings of isolated plant parts (roots, leaves, etc.) and a few text paragraphs.
- Recipes (22 folios), full pages of text broken into many short paragraphs, each marked with a star in the left margin.
The book itself has been remade multiple times, with a changing page count, order, and binding. So, any potential confusion is far greater without a guide to the original arrangement of its contents. This single, original manuscript encourages us to sit with the concept of truth and to remember that there are ineluctable mysteries at the bottom of things whose meanings we will never know. For a closer look, you can head over to Yale University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library.