William R. Newbold, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, was a renowned and respected scientist. During World War I, he worked for the US government deciphering military codes and was considered one of the leading cryptanalysts.

In 1919, he took on the main cryptogram of his life, which could lead him to world fame. Newbold was engaged in deciphering the mysterious document until the end of his days, but he failed.

The mystery to which Newbold devoted the last seven years of his life to unraveling is the so-called Voynich manuscript. The book takes its name from Wilfrid M. Voynich, a professional antiques dealer who discovered it in 1912 in a Jesuit estate south of Rome.

The manuscript immediately caught the attention of Voynich. More than two hundred pages were filled with text on known language, not a word or even a symbol of which was known to the bookseller. In addition to the text, the book contained many no less mysterious drawings. Not surprisingly, Voynich bought the book from the Jesuits, and with it several others.

Professor Newbold was perhaps one of the best-placed figures of his day to unravel the mystery of the manuscript. In addition to his professional activities - cryptanalysis and the study and teaching of philosophy - Newbold, like Voynich, was a passionate collector of old books (however, unlike Voynich, Newbold acquired books for personal use, and not for resale). In particular, the professor's collection was decorated with the first editions of the works of Giordano Bruno, Spinoza and Descartes. In addition, Newbold was a recognized expert in the occult sciences.

In 1921, after two years of labor, Newbold published his solution. Perhaps the impeccable reputation of the professor, coupled with the painful expectation of a solution, was the reason that Newbold's decoding was accepted immediately, almost without meeting criticism.

The approach, or rather the combination of approaches, that Newbold took was hardly something he had used before in the analysis of military ciphers. Newbold decided that the line on the last page was the key to the text. Although it has a font similar to the rest of the text, it is clearly written in a different, less accurate handwriting, thus suggesting that this is just an attempt by one of the book's owners to write something in the "original language". Newbold had his own explanation. He considered that the line was written in Latin, although modified. Newbold took the beginning of the phrase - "Michiton oladabas multos te tccr cerc portas", threw out unnecessary characters from there; reading the word "multos" with a magnifying glass, changed "o" to "a", which gave "Michi dabas multas portas" (in Latin: "you gave me many doors"). "Doors", according to Newbold, is the designation of combinations of two letters in Hebrew in the teachings of Kabbalah. Based on the code phrase, Newbold created a cipher in which two-letter combinations correspond to one letter of the Latin alphabet.

Having examined the code phrase to the smallest detail with a magnifying glass, he came to the conclusion that each of its letters consists of strokes. Letters that seem the same to the naked eye are actually made up of separate dashes and carry different meanings, being combinations of several characters at once. Newbold duplicated all the characters in these combinations, except for the first and last. The combinations modified in this way were divided into letter pairs, each of which was replaced by a certain letter of the Latin alphabet. At the same time, Newbold treated substitutions freely, substituting, if necessary, various letters corresponding to similar sounds - d and t for example.

But that's not all. To get to the goal, Newbold applied the anagram method to the text obtained after all the transformations, that is, rearranging the letters in places, and received the final text in Latin. Newbold named the result of the decipherment the Opus Magnum of Roger Bacon (not to be confused with Francis Bacon, a famous figure of the Renaissance), a Franciscan friar and scholar who lived in the 13th century. According to Newbold, Roger Bacon had knowledge that was several centuries ahead of its time. The text described the structure of human internal organs, cells, spermatozoa, as well as the eclipse of the Sun and the structure of the Andromeda nebula.

The result was sensational, and the solution extraordinarily complex, confusing and strange. And most importantly, it was contradictory and contained many poorly argued assumptions and assumptions. Newbold himself admitted that each time he deciphered the text again, he came to a new result. The collapse of the study came in 1931, five years after Newbold's death. British cryptologist John Manly, who initially supported the American's decision, published an article in which he argued that the small strokes that seemed to Newbold as carriers of a hidden meaning appeared due to aging and the accompanying cracking of the ink.

In addition, Manley demonstrated that the proposed decryption mechanism allows the Voynich text to be converted into virtually any desired message. As an example, Manley "deciphered" one of the passages of the text as "Paris is lured into loving vestals", which can be translated as "Paris is seduced by maidens in love."

After Manley's article appeared, Newbold's decision was rejected, and he himself began to be considered an eccentric obsessed with the manuscript. However, to date, Newbold's publication remains the only thoroughly developed transcript of the entire text with a meaningful result, and it has its adherents.

Newbold was not the first person to "try the teeth" of the Voynich manuscript. After acquiring the book, the collector sent copies of it to several experts for deciphering. Among them was Manley, who served in American intelligence and during the First World War, like Newbold, proved himself from the best side. Another well-known cryptologist who tried to find a solution was Herbert O. Yardley, the American expert who directed Manley. Yardley is famous for deciphering the Japanese diplomatic code. However, the efforts of these and other no less worthy gentlemen were in vain.

The complexity of the task that the Voynich manuscript set for cryptanalysts can be appreciated by comparing two stories of the 20th century: the story of the successes of outstanding cryptanalytic talents in the intelligence struggle during both world wars and the story of unsuccessful attempts to decipher the manuscript. Often the winners and the losers were the same people.

The solution to the Japanese code PURPLE is one of the most famous episodes of the cryptological confrontation of World War II. The head of the group of American cryptanalysts was William F. Friedman, a native of Chisinau, who is called one of the most prominent cryptologists in history. By the end of the war, he even managed to create a copy of the Japanese cipher machine, never having seen it.

In 1944, when the main military tasks had already been completed, Friedman organized a special working group. After the end of the working day, he, along with some of his colleagues, worked on deciphering the Voynich manuscript. Alas, the group did not manage to get close to the solution. Her biggest achievement was the transcription of the text into the Latin alphabet and the preparation of a machine-readable version of the text on punched cards. However, these punched cards were buried in the archives of intelligence and came to light only half a century later. Already in the 1950s, Friedman published an important conclusion: the text was written in an artificial language with a clear logical structure. He came to this conclusion on the basis of an analysis of the dictionary of the text - it turned out to be rather meager, and two or even three words often go in a row; Often there are repeated words that differ by only one letter. On the other hand, there are practically no words consisting of one or two letters in the text. Here Friedman saw similarities with other artificial languages ​​- in particular, with the "philosophical language" created in the 17th century by the scientist John Wilkins. Its concept is based on the fact that a certain syllable is assigned to a generalized category, and this syllable, usually as a prefix or suffix, is part of any word that means an object, phenomenon or concept within this category.

Another codebreaker who devoted his life to deciphering the manuscript was John H. Tiltman, considered the best British cryptanalyst of all time. During World War II, he led the British intelligence decryption center and personally participated in breaking the codes of the German Lorenz cipher machine. The story of capturing and decoding messages from the Enigma machine is better known (a merit of the same center), but Lorenz was a more advanced machine and was used to encode high command messages.

Regardless of Friedman, Tiltman concluded that the manuscript was written in synthetic language. However, neither the two luminaries nor other researchers were able to explain the meaning of prefixes and suffixes in the text.

With the advent of available computing power and the translation of the manuscript into a machine-readable form, text research has mainly focused on finding statistical patterns between characters, parts of words, words, phrases and their location in a paragraph, on a page, or in a book as a whole. Despite the fact that many such patterns have been found, very few significant conclusions have been drawn from them.

In particular, in 1976, Prescott Currier showed, based on counting pairs of characters and words, that the text was written in two different languages ​​or dialects, or two different encryption algorithms were used. Moreover, each of the pages is written entirely in either one or another language: they were called Currier A and Currier B. He also demonstrated that the text was written in two different handwritings, completely corresponding to two different languages. True, the Courier made his conclusion on the basis of an analysis of only part of the book. Doctor of Engineering Rene Zandbergen, who works at the European Space Agency and studies the manuscript in free time, later showed that the text is more diverse and that the two languages ​​are closely "intertwined" in the book with each other. This conclusion, however, is disputed by some scholars.

Another important conclusion was made after the text was checked against the so-called Zipf's law. After analyzing texts in many languages, including extinct ones, in the 40s of the last century, a scientist at Harvard University, George K. Zipf, built a descending distribution of the frequency of occurrence of words for each of them. All curves constructed in this way had the form of a hyperbola. This was the basis for the conclusion that such a distribution is a characteristic and distinctive feature of natural languages.

As it turned out, the text of the Voynich manuscript also obeys Zipf's law. This result became an argument in support of the fact that the manuscript is not gibberish, but really a ciphered message. However, since Zipf's law is empirical in nature, the result obtained cannot serve as proof of the meaningfulness of the text.

Several exotic solutions have been proposed in recent decades. In 1978, John Stojko published a book in which he transcribed the Voynich manuscript. His version boiled down to the fact that the text is a collection of letters written in Ukrainian without the use of vowels. However, the content of the letters explained by Stoiko diverges from the well-known history of Ancient Russia (Stoiko describes the manuscript as a collection of letters from the ruler of Kievan Rus named Ora to the Khazar leader named Manya Koza, written during the war between Russia and the Khazars). Moreover, it is difficult to understand even the meaning of individual phrases, not to mention the text as a whole (although if Russia sent ambassadors to Ukraine back in the Middle Ages, the version would not look so implausible), despite the multiplicity, as in Newbold's decision, possible decryption options.

In 1987, another person with a Slavic surname, Leo Levitov, put forward an equally original version - the book describes the endura ritual of the Catharist religious movement that existed in Europe in the Middle Ages. Endura is suicide in the form of death starvation practiced in Catharism. In the version of Levitov, endura is suicide in any form, designed to alleviate the suffering of a seriously ill patient.

In addition to inconsistencies in the meaning of the deciphered text with known information about the sect, the solution itself also turned out to be untenable. It was based on the fact that the text was written in a distorted Flemish language, with an original writing system specially invented for writing the manuscript. This hypothesis has been refuted by linguists.

Decades of unsuccessful attempts have led many researchers to the version that the Voynich manuscript is a fake, presenting it as an alchemist's ciphertext, although in fact there is no meaning in it (some people even believed that the book was written by Voynich himself in order to profit from the sale mysterious book, but this version is refuted by historical references to the book from various sources). Just a few months ago, the version of the fake received wide publicity.

In January 2004, Dr. Gordon Rugg, professor at the University of Keele (England), published an article in the journal Cryptologia. In it, he described how a forger of the Middle Ages could produce the Voynich manuscript without the use of intellectual methods or technical means unknown at that time.

Rugg used the so-called Cardano lattice, a well-known steganographic tool (and its modification - a rotary lattice), named after the inventor, Italian mathematician Girolamo Cardano, and designed to hide encoded messages inside text of other content. The Cardano grille is a card with several windows cut out, much like a punched card. When a card is overlaid on ciphertext, a hidden message appears in its windows. Thus, it is possible to encrypt and read the source text with the same card.

According to Rugg, the creator of the Voynich manuscript used the grid in a different way. First, the alphabet of the text was invented. After that, combinations were made from fictional letters that became prefixes, suffixes or middle parts of words. All these combinations were recorded in a table divided into three columns corresponding to different parts of the words. After that, the author took a card with windows and with its help began to choose combinations of letters from the table, adding them into words. To diversify the text, spaces were left in place of many parts of words in the table, thus creating shorter words. Of course, such a large text as the Voynich manuscript, created using a single version of the grid, would have a very poor "vocabulary" and would be easily opened. Therefore, according to Rugg, the author used several different grids. To create a manuscript, according to the scientist, seven were enough.

In addition to his version of how the manuscript was created, Rugg also points to its possible authorship. In his opinion, the document was created by Edward Kelly (Edward Kelley), a famous alchemist and hoaxer of his time. Kelly is known to have used the Cardano grids and was an associate of the scientist and alchemist John Dee, one of the alleged early owners of the manuscript. Kelly has long been "under suspicion" as the creator of the manuscript.

Articles about Rugg's work were published in 2004 in several popular magazines, and it gained wide acclaim. First of all, due to active popularization, at the moment the version of Ragg is considered the main one, at least by the general public. It is not surprising, meanwhile, that the conclusions of the scientist met with a flurry of criticism from researchers who have devoted their time for many years to finding the solution to the mysterious book. And Ragg has yet to prove the viability of his hypothesis.

One of the most active opponents of the Rugga theory is the manuscript researcher Jacques Guy, a doctor of linguistics and a polyglot (it is interesting that the first language that Jacques learned at the age of nine (!) was Russian), now living in Australia. Here is how he sums up Rugg's conclusions: Eat, eat, eat with a car, invite a candle. Abracadabra, isn't it? However, for someone who does not know Russian, this text looks like it was written in Russian, right? This is exactly what Rugg did - he created a text that vaguely resembles the text of the Voynich manuscript, but at the same time does not make sense. And on this basis, he concludes that the Voynich manuscript is nonsense. I produced a text that vaguely resembles Russian, and, of course, is meaningless. Therefore ... everything written in Russian is nonsense. The argument Rugg puts forward is exactly the same."

As René Zandbergen explains, the prefix-middle-suffix rule that Rugg based his method on was discovered by another researcher, the Brazilian Jorge Stolfi, but it only correlates with one part of the document written by in language B. The words of language A, in which the "botanical" part is written, are constructed according to a different principle and cannot be obtained by the "Rugg method".

Dr. Rugg does not hide the fact that his conclusions are far from final and cannot serve as proof of the version of falsification, but only demonstrate a possible, albeit most likely, in his opinion, mechanism for creating the text. Rugg does not believe that the manuscript is too linguistically complex to be a hoax. At the moment, he is working on the development of his version and intends to select lattices with which you can create a text that repeats all the structures described so far and has the statistical properties found in the manuscript. If Ragg succeeds, the falsification version will gain additional support. On the other hand, the study of the manuscript continues, and perhaps new characteristics will be discovered that Rugg will again need to reproduce.

Currently, dozens of volunteers around the world are working on deciphering the manuscript, united in an online community by a mailing list at www.voynich.net. Everything is studied - text, drawings, pagination, the book itself - ink, parchment - and, of course, the origin of the manuscript. I dare to suggest that there are still an uncountable number of singles in the world who are looking for a clue, and do not advertise their work. If there are such people among you, or you are intrigued by the mystery of the manuscript, the community members will be glad to have new comrades-in-arms.

Despite significant efforts, significant progress has not been achieved in recent years.

New theories appear, new characteristics of the structure of the text and words, previously unnoticed details of drawings and text are discovered. But the answer is still far away.

One of the notable recent theories is the hypothesis proposed by Jacques Guy and developed by Georges Stolfi. It is based on an analysis of the lengths of words and syllables and the word structure of the manuscript. Similarities were found between the language of the Voynich text and East Asian languages, in particular Chinese and Vietnamese, suggesting that the text was written in a related language. Stolfi lists the following similarities between Chinese and manuscript language:

• the most common words consist of one syllable;
• there are no punctuation marks;
• spaces separate syllables, not words formed from them;
• word wrap can be carried out after any syllable;
• the lengths of different syllables differ slightly from each other;
• there are only about four hundred phonetically distinct syllables;
• very similar words often have completely different meanings;
• the same word is part of different complex formations, with different meanings;
• the repetition of words is widespread;
• words do not change form;
• numbers look like ordinary words;
• syllables have a strict internal structure;
• syllables have three phonetic components;
• there are about 4, 25 and 30 different variations of these components, respectively.

But this is still only a hypothesis. However, the word structure of the manuscript discovered by Stolfi is considered one of the major advances in manuscript research in recent times. According to Rene Zandbergen, it is the one who explains this structure that will receive the key to unraveling the manuscript.

At the same time, the search for the author of the book continues. Surprisingly, so far no books have been found related to the Voynich manuscript with similar content, or documents that could be attributed to the same author. So far, it has not been possible to significantly narrow the search context - as researcher Luis Velez, a certified lawyer from Venezuela, now living in the United States, says, the author could be "any European who lived in the late 15th - early 16th centuries." Any reference or similarity to another book can lead to significant research progress.

High hopes are pinned on recently published high-resolution scanned copies of the pages of the manuscript by the Yale University Library on the Internet - after all, most researchers working in their spare time have never even seen the original. According to English-based manuscript researcher Nick Pelling, a computer game creator by profession, this has already resolved many long-standing questions. In particular, the hypothesis that the book was bound in the wrong order was confirmed. Nick, who focused his research on the iconology and iconography of the book (that is, on trying to understand the meaning of the book without deciphering the text), based on new, better images, came to the conclusion that most likely in the original version the book was mostly one-color and additional coloring was done later by those who numbered the pages of the manuscript.

Pelling believes that now, with good images, it is important to determine the correct sequence of pages and determine in what order the various elements of the book were created. There is already evidence that many of the drawings and letters were retouched decades after the book was written, with some of the original text distorted. According to Luis Velez, for further research it is important to create an unambiguous, with a minimum number of errors, computer version of the text. Currently, several versions are used, created by different researchers at different times and often noticeably different from each other.

The Voynich Manuscript is unique in every way. First of all, the fact that more than ninety years have passed since its discovery, and there is still no acceptable interpretation of the contents of the book, with all the achievements of modern cryptanalysis and the intellectual power of scientists who participated in deciphering the manuscript. There is no answer to any of the important questions about the origin of the book - who, where and when it was written. But despite the complexity and scale of the task, everyone can try to contribute to its solution - enough access to the Internet. The Voynich Manuscript is a chance to feel like Champollion without leaving home. And the fact that the key to the puzzle has not yet been found does not mean that the task is impossible. It only means that the most interesting is yet to come.

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About the Voynich manuscript

The Voynich Manuscript is a book measuring 6 by 9 inches and about one inch thick. The pages and cover of the book are made of parchment. There are no inscriptions or drawings on the cover itself. The text is written in an unknown alphabet. On almost every page there are drawings of unknown plants, naked women, constellations, interweaving of pipes and vessels through which liquid flows. Neither the drawings nor the alphabet of the text of the manuscript are found in any other book (of course, unless it is a modern copy or imitation of the Voynich manuscript). Most of the drawings are in color.

The text is still undecipherable. There are symbols in the book that were not created in the writing system of the main text, but their meaning is not clear either. The only legible inscriptions made in Latin are the designations of the signs of the Zodiac in the drawings and the signature of Jacob Horcicki (Jacobus Horcicky), one of the owners of the book.

The book consists of 204 pages, but the manuscript bought by Voynich was incomplete - part of it was lost. In addition, some of the pages disappeared later - probably around the time Voynich died. Presumably, at the moment the book is missing 28 pages. Some of the pages have a format that differs from the standard, such pages are folded along a horizontal or vertical fold line. Some pages are numbered, most likely not by the author, but by one of the later owners of the book. There are drawings on almost every page, many of them are signed. In accordance with the themes of these drawings, the book is usually divided into several parts: "botanical", with drawings of plants, for the most part not known to science (this part makes up almost half of the book); "astronomical", illustrated with images of the Sun, Moon, stars and signs of the Zodiac; "biological", which contains drawings of naked women inside strange systems of vessels filled with liquid; "cosmological", with circular drawings of unknown content; and the "pharmaceutical" part, with painted containers, next to which are drawings of various plants and a short text, presumably recipes.
The manuscript was found along with a cover letter written in 1665 or 1666. The letter was signed by the rector of the University of Prague, Johannes Marcus Marci, and addressed to his friend and teacher Athanasius (Athanasius) Kircher, a famous medieval scholar who was then living in Rome. Marzi wrote that a close friend of his gave him an unusual book written in an unknown language. He asked Kircher to decipher this book, because, in his opinion, Kircher is the only one who can do it. Marzi also wrote that the book belonged to the Habsburg king Rudolph II, who believed that it was written by Roger Bacon.

About Kohau rongorongo

It rarely happens that a discoverer does his best to keep his discovery from becoming public knowledge. However, the wooden tablets found on Easter Island were not so lucky. Missionary Eugene Eyraud was not only not happy when he discovered writing on the Easter Island entrusted to him in 1864, but destroyed all the tables known to him. And very diligently - when four years later the Bishop of Tahiti Tepano Jaussen became interested in the tablets from Easter Island, he managed to find only five of them.

However, it is possible that the efforts of Eugene Ayrault were in vain - by the time the tables were discovered, there were almost no people left on the island who could read them. Eiro himself believed that the islanders forgot writing and kept the tablets out of habit (most likely, only priests could read and write rongorongo, which had almost completely been destroyed or taken to Peru by that time). With great difficulty, Jossan managed to find a local resident who said that he could translate ancient texts. The bishop diligently wrote down everything that the native Metoro dictated to him, but was disappointed with the results - the same Metoro sign could be translated in different ways, and the translation as a whole could hardly be called meaningful. The value of Metoro as a translator is doubtful, but he, without a doubt, saved later researchers from having to guess what this or that sign depicts (without knowing its true meaning).

For lack of a better "Jossan list" is still used as a base for almost any attempt to decipher kohau rongorongo. At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, several more attempts were made to read the texts with the help of the islanders, but the results were even more discouraging.

In the 1940s a group of Soviet schoolchildren became interested in the tablets, who managed to make an unexpected discovery: it turns out that some of the tablets contained parallel texts. In the late 1950s, perhaps the main research work in the history of kohau rongorongo was published - an article by the German scientist Thomas Bartel, but he also limited himself, by and large, to compiling a "periodic table" of graphemes, accompanying each with a possible pronunciation and interpretation. He also suggested that one of the tables shows the lunar calendar.

Rongorongo has been studied for almost 150 years, but so far scientists have not even come to a consensus on the writing system. Some believe that this is a hieroglyphic system, others see a mnemonic system of signs in rongorongo, others tend to think that the ancient Rapanui script consists of pictograms.

About Voynich

The origin and authorship of the Voynich manuscript are unknown. The first mention of the manuscript refers to its appearance in Prague during the reign of King Rudolf II. An accompanying letter found with the book claims that Rudolf II was one of the owners of the manuscript, but there is no evidence for this. Wilfried Voynich believed that the manuscript was sold to Rudolph by the alchemists John Dee or Edward Kelly, although their possession of the book has not been confirmed.

The first known owner of the book was Jakob Horczycki. He served as a chemist, physician and alchemist at the court of Rudolph II, and we can see his signature on the very first page. How the book got to him is not yet clear. Another clearly identified owner of the book is the "close friend" mentioned in Marzi's letter. Initially, he was considered Dionysius Misseroni, a jeweler from the famous Milanese dynasty at that time, who was really friendly with Martzi. However, later, after studying Kircher's correspondence, Rene Zandbergen established that he was Georg Baresch, a Czech alchemist. After Baresh's death, the book fell into the hands of Marzi. Although it appears from Marzi's letter that he sent the book to Kircher for deciphering, there is no definite evidence that the book reached Kircher, although this is obviously to be assumed.

From the time of writing the letter to Marzi Kircher until the book was found in the Jesuit possession located in the Villa Mondragone, its exact location is unknown, although there is every reason to believe that the book did come to Kircher, who then handed it over to the Jesuits. In 1912, the Jesuits who owned the villa decided to restore it. It was decided to get funds for the restoration by selling part of the collection of about a thousand old manuscripts. Voynich competed for the right to acquire them with another person, whose name is unknown, and won. In total, he acquired about thirty books. At the same time, one of the conditions of the deal was non-disclosure of information about who the books were bought from. Voynich did keep this information secret from the public, but shared it with his wife.

Throughout the world, the name Voynich is famous primarily due to the mysterious manuscript. However, in the Soviet Union she was known as the surname of the author of "The Gadfly" - a literary work from school curriculum. Ethel Lilian Voynich Boole, the author of the book, was the wife of Wilfried Voynich, and in addition, the daughter of George Boole, the inventor of Boolean algebra named after him.

The origin and biography of Voynich himself are no less interesting. He was born in 1865 in Kaunas in the family of a petty official. Voynich graduated from Moscow University with a degree in chemistry and joined the Narodnaya Volya movement. After moving to Warsaw, he became one of the organizers of the escape from prison of two former members of Narodnaya Volya, who were sentenced to death. The escape failed, and Voynich and the other conspirators were arrested. Voynich was exiled to Irkutsk, from where he managed to escape three years later. He got to London, where after some time he married Ethel Lilian, who also participated in the leftist movement.

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Voynichs had moved away from the revolutionary struggle. Wilfried retrained as a bookseller, in which capacity he gained fame.

After Voynich's death, the book was inherited by his wife, and after her death went to Wilfried's secretary and friend Ethel Voynich Ann Neill. She sold the book to the merchant Hans Kraus. He was unable to resell the manuscript and donated it to Yale University, in whose library the book is now kept.

About the Rohonczi Codex

The manuscript owes its name to the Hungarian town in which it was kept until 1907 (presumably the codex was written in the middle of the 16th century, but the exact date of its creation is unknown). In 1907, the then owner of the codex donated his entire library to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and the strange 448-page book in an unknown language fell into the hands of scientists for the first time. Hungarian academics involved the German researcher Bernhard Jülg in decoding, who, having failed, declared that the code was filled with nonsense.

It is still unknown what language the manuscript is written in. In addition, the "alphabet" of the code consists of almost two hundred characters, which also does not facilitate the work of researchers.

In no way inferior to the Voynich manuscript in “mysteriousness”, the codex is much less known, since it was mainly Romanian scientists who were engaged in deciphering it. To date, there is only one translation of the code, made in 2001 by the philologist Viorica Enachiu (Viorica Enachiuc), according to which the text tells about the struggle of the Volohs with the Pechenegs and Polovtsy).

Expert opinions on the Voynich manuscript

Gordon Rugg: It is unlikely that this is a text in an unknown language, since it is linguistically very unusual. Previously it was thought that the text was too complicated to be a hoax. If it is a code, then it has turned out to be much more difficult to decipher than any other code from the "pre-computer" era, and its properties are too difficult to correlate with any known coding system.

Jacque Guy: I am convinced that the manuscript is written in a natural language (probably no longer in existence), and that Georges Stolfi's "Chinese hypothesis" is correct (it is not necessarily Chinese, but the linguistic characteristics of the language of the manuscript are close to Chinese). I find it least improbable (exactly, not most likely) that the manuscript was written by some Italian traveler who learned an obscure (possibly extinct) Chinese dialect and decided to write his secret diary in it, which ensured that no one else can read it. The Voynich manuscript is a reflection of our utter ignorance about what language is, and what makes it so, what distinguishes language from gibberish. We cannot explain it, we cannot understand it, simply because we do not have the necessary knowledge.

Nick Pelling: Although I am cautious in my opinion, I am somewhat certain that the manuscript is a "book of secrets" compiled in the Milan area in the middle of the 15th century, and that the coder Cicco Simonetta participated in its encryption between 1476 and 1480.

Louis Velez: I don't think the manuscript is a modern or medieval hoax. This, however, does not mean that the text necessarily carries a meaning. The manuscript could have been copied by an illiterate scribe from a lost original, the meaning of which he did not understand. Or it could turn out to be glossolalia (ordinary meaningless writing), despite the fact that entropy levels - a measure of the randomness of any piece of information - noted by some researchers indicate that this document has a certain linguistic structure. It may be a unique specimen of the unknown artificial language, or even an extinct natural language. It could be numbers. It can be prayers, the names of angels. Or perhaps a pharmaceutical guide. Or, as some suggest, information in a known language, but very skillfully encrypted. These are just some of the possible explanations for our inability to break the cipher. My own hunch is that it is a meaningfully encrypted document, possibly by a medical practitioner or scientist. I believe it has something to do with the 15th century alchemical herbalists.

Rene Zandbergen: I consider it highly probable that the manuscript is nonsense. Possibly a hoax, but the document was not created around 1600, as Dr. Rugg believes, but much earlier. It is very likely that it was written by a person with a strange mindset, with no intention of deceiving anyone. To me, this is the only reason why the manuscript has not yet been deciphered, and it is also the only reason why the document can be nonsense.

For more than 100 years, the so-called Voynich manuscript remained a mystery. This is a text by an unknown author, presumably dating from the first half of the 15th century and written in an unknown language. Many attempts were made to read (decrypt) it, including with the participation of professional cryptanalysts, but all attempts failed.

However, this secret did not resist the power modern technologies. Television historian and writer Nicholas Gibbs, also known as a specialist in medieval Latin and ancient medicine, reported that he was able to crack the code of the Voynich manuscript.

To do this, together with specialists from the Yale University Library, they had to completely digitize the text of the manuscript. After analyzing the code of the text, Gibbs found recurring medieval Latin abbreviations in it, often used in ancient treatises on herbs. Further study of the herbs and images in the manuscript reminded him of similar medical texts.

Once Gibbs realized that the Voynich manuscript was a medical textbook, the content of the illustrations also became clear to him. So the images of medicinal plants and bathing women are nothing more than recommendations for gynecology. As you know, even the ancient Romans often used healing herbal baths in the treatment of many diseases.

Found their explanation and zodiac maps in the text. During the Middle Ages, many doctors believed that certain medicines were more effective when combined with certain signs of the zodiac.

According to Gibbs, the Voynich manuscript is most likely a book written on an individual order and dedicated to women's medicine.

Anyone can independently familiarize themselves with the manuscript on the site.

The collection of the Yale University Library (USA) contains a unique rarity, the so-called Voynich manuscript ( Voynich Manuscript). On the Internet, many sites are devoted to this document, it is often called the most mysterious esoteric manuscript in the world.

The manuscript is named after its former owner, the American bookseller W. Voynich, husband of the famous writer Ethel Lilian Voynich (author of the novel The Gadfly). The manuscript was bought in 1912 in one of the Italian monasteries. It is known that in the 1580s. The then German Emperor Rudolf II became the owner of the manuscript. The encrypted manuscript with numerous color illustrations was sold to Rudolf II by the famous English astrologer, geographer and explorer John Dee, who was very interested in getting the opportunity to freely leave Prague for his homeland, England. Therefore, Dee is said to have exaggerated the antiquity of the manuscript. According to the features of paper and ink, it is attributed to the 16th century. However, all attempts to decipher the text over the past 80 years have been in vain.

This book, measuring 22.5 x 16 cm, contains coded text, in a language that has not yet been identified. It originally consisted of 116 sheets of parchment, fourteen of which are currently considered lost. Written in a fluent calligraphic handwriting with a quill pen and ink in five colors: green, brown, yellow, blue and red. Some letters are similar to Greek or Latin, but are mostly hieroglyphs that have not yet been found in any other book.

Almost every page contains drawings, based on which the text of the manuscript can be divided into five sections: botanical, astronomical, biological, astrological and medical. The first, by the way, the largest section, includes more than a hundred illustrations of various plants and herbs, most of which are unidentifiable or even phantasmagoric. And the accompanying text is carefully divided into equal paragraphs. The second, astronomical section is similarly designed. It contains about two dozen concentric diagrams with images of the Sun, Moon and various constellations. A large number of human figures, mostly female, decorate the so-called biological section. It seems that it explains the processes of human life and the secrets of the interaction of the human soul and body. The astrological section is replete with images of magical medallions, zodiacal symbols and stars. And in the medical part, probably, recipes for the treatment of various diseases and magical advice are given.

Among the illustrations are more than 400 plants that have no direct analogues in botany, as well as numerous figures of women, spirals of stars. Experienced cryptographers, in trying to decipher a text written in unusual scripts, most often acted as was customary in the 20th century - they conducted a frequency analysis of the occurrence of various characters, choosing the appropriate language. However, neither Latin, nor many Western European languages, nor Arabic didn't fit. The bust continued. We checked Chinese, Ukrainian, and Turkish ... In vain!

The short words of the manuscript are reminiscent of some of the languages ​​of Polynesia, but nothing came of it either. Hypotheses about the extraterrestrial origin of the text have appeared, especially since the plants are not similar to those familiar to us (although they are very carefully drawn), and the spirals of stars in the 20th century reminded many of the spiral arms of the Galaxy. It remained completely unclear what the text of the manuscript was talking about. John Dee himself was also suspected of a hoax - he allegedly composed not just an artificial alphabet (there really was one in Dee's works, but has nothing to do with that used in the manuscript), but also created a meaningless text on it. In general, the research has come to a standstill.

History of the manuscript.

Since the alphabet of the manuscript has no visual resemblance to any known writing system and the text has not yet been deciphered, the only "clue" to determine the age of the book and its origin is the illustrations. In particular, the clothes and decorations of women, as well as a couple of castles in the diagrams. All details are typical for Europe between 1450 and 1520, so the manuscript is most often dated to this period. This is indirectly confirmed by other signs.

The earliest known owner of the book was George Baresch, an alchemist who lived in Prague in the early 17th century. Baresh, apparently, was also puzzled by the mystery of this book from his library. Upon learning that Athanasius Kircher, a well-known Jesuit scholar of the Collegio Romano, had published a Coptic dictionary and deciphered (as it was then believed) Egyptian hieroglyphs, he copied part of the manuscript and sent this sample to Kircher in Rome (twice), asking help decipher it. Baresch's 1639 letter to Kircher, discovered in modern times by Rene Zandbergen, is the earliest known reference to the Manuscript.

It remains unclear whether Kircher responded to Baresh's request, but it is known that he wanted to buy the book, but Baresh probably refused to sell it. After Baresh's death, the book passed to his friend, Johannes Marcus Marci, rector of the University of Prague. Marzi allegedly sent it to Kircher, an old friend of his. His cover letter from 1666 is still attached to the Manuscript. Among other things, the letter claims that it was originally purchased for 600 ducats by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, who considered the book to be the work of Roger Bacon.

The further 200 years of the fate of the Manuscript are unknown, but it is most likely that it was kept along with the rest of Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Roman College (now the Gregorian University). The book probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal States to the Kingdom of Italy. The new Italian authorities decided to confiscate from the Church a large number of property, including the library. According to research by Xavier Ceccaldi and others, before this, many books from the university library were hastily transferred to the libraries of university staff, whose property was not confiscated. Kircher's correspondence was among these books, and also, apparently, there was a Voynich manuscript, since the book still bears the bookplate of Petrus Beckx, at that time the head of the Jesuit order and the rector of the university.

Bex's library was moved to the Villa Mondragone in Frascati (villa Borghese di Mondragone a Frascati) - a large palace near Rome, acquired by the Jesuit society in 1866.

In 1912, the College of Rome needed funds and decided in the strictest confidence to sell some of its property. Wilfried Voynich acquired 30 manuscripts, including the one that now bears his name. In 1961, after Voynich's death, the book was sold by his widow Ethel Lilian Voynich (author of The Gadfly) to another bookseller, Hanse P. Kraus. Unable to find a buyer, in 1969 Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University.

So, what do our contemporaries think about this manuscript?

For example, Sergey Gennadyevich Krivenkov, Ph.D. in Biology, a specialist in computer psychodiagnostics, and Klavdiya Nikolaevna Nagornaya, a leading software engineer at the IGT of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation (St. apparently, recipes, which, as you know, have a lot of special abbreviations, which ensures short "words" in the text. Why encrypt? If these are recipes for poisons, then the question disappears ... Dee himself, for all his versatility, was not an expert on medicinal herbs, so he hardly wrote the text. But then the fundamental question is: what kind of mysterious "unearthly" plants are depicted in the pictures? It turned out that they are ... composite. For example, the flower of the well-known belladonna is connected to a leaf of a lesser known, but equally poisonous plant called hoof. And so it is in many other cases. As you can see, aliens have nothing to do with it. Among the plants there were also rose hips and nettles. But also… ginseng.

From this it was concluded that the author of the text went to China. Since the vast majority of plants are still European, I traveled from Europe. Which of the influential European organizations sent its mission to China in the second half of the 16th century? The answer is known from history - the order of the Jesuits. By the way, their major residency closest to Prague was in the 1580s. in Krakow, and John Dee, together with his partner, the alchemist Kelly, first also worked in Krakow, and then moved to Prague (where, by the way, the emperor was pressured through the papal nuncio to expel Dee). So the paths of a connoisseur of poisonous recipes, who first went on a mission to China, then sent back by courier (the mission itself remained in China for many years), and then worked in Krakow, could well intersect with the paths of John Dee. Competitors, in a nutshell...

As soon as it became clear what many of the pictures of the “herbarium” meant, Sergey and Claudia began to read the text. The assumption that it mainly consists of Latin and occasionally Greek abbreviations was confirmed. However, the main thing was to reveal the unusual cipher used by the compiler of the recipes. Here I had to recall many differences in both the mentality of the people of that time, and the features of the then encryption systems.

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

Ultimately, under the picture with belladonna and hoof, for example, it was possible to read the Latin names of these particular plants. And advice on preparing a deadly poison ... Here, both the abbreviations characteristic of recipes and the name of the god of death in ancient mythology (Thanatos, brother of the god of sleep Hypnos) came in handy. Note that when deciphering, it was possible to take into account even the very malicious nature of the alleged compiler of the recipes. So the study was carried out at the intersection of historical psychology and cryptography, we also had to combine pictures from many reference books on medicinal plants. And the casket opened...

Of course, for a complete reading of the entire text of the manuscript, and not its individual pages, the efforts of a whole team of specialists would be required. But the “salt” here is not in the recipes, but in the disclosure of the historical mystery.

What about stellar spirals? It turned out that we are talking about the best time to collect herbs, and in one case - that mixing opiates with coffee, alas, is very unhealthy.

So, apparently, galactic travelers are worth looking for, but not here ...

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

Mysterious 16th-century book may be elegant nonsense, says computer scientist. Rugg used Elizabethan espionage techniques to reconstruct the Voynich manuscript that had puzzled codebreakers and linguists for nearly a century.

Using espionage techniques from the time of Elizabeth I, he was able to create a semblance of the famous Voynich manuscript, which has intrigued cryptographers and linguists for more than a hundred years. “I think fakery is a very likely explanation,” says Rugg. “Now it’s the turn of those who believe in the meaningfulness of the text to give their explanation.” The scientist suspects that the English adventurer Edward Kelly made the book for the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Other scientists consider this version plausible, but not the only one.

“Critics of this hypothesis have noted that the “Voynich language” is too complicated for nonsense. How could a medieval fraudster produce 200 pages of written text with so many subtle patterns in the structure and distribution of words? But it is possible to replicate many of these wonderful Voynich characteristics using a simple 16th-century encoder. The text generated by this method looks like Voynich, but is pure nonsense, with no hidden meaning. This discovery does not prove that the Voynich manuscript is a hoax, but it does support the long-held theory that the document may have been concocted by the English adventurer Edward Kelly to fool Rudolf II.
In order to understand why it took so much time and effort of qualified specialists to expose the manuscript, it is necessary to tell a little more about it. If we take a manuscript in an unknown language, then it will differ from a deliberate forgery by a complex organization that is noticeable to the eye, and even more so during computer analysis. Without going into a detailed linguistic analysis, it can be noted that many letters in real languages ​​occur only in certain places and in combination with certain other letters, and the same can be said about words. These and other features of real language are indeed inherent in the Voynich manuscript. Scientifically speaking, it is characterized by low entropy, and it is practically impossible to forge a text with low entropy by hand - and we are talking about the 16th century.

No one has yet been able to show whether the language in which the text is written is cryptography, a modified version of some existing language, or nonsense. Some features of the text are not found in any of the existing languages ​​- for example, the repetition of the most common words two or three times - which confirms the nonsense hypothesis. On the other hand, the distribution of word lengths and the way letters and syllables are combined are very similar to those of real languages. Many people think that this text is too complicated to be a simple fake - it would take some crazy alchemist many years to achieve such correctness.

However, as Rugg showed, such a text is quite easy to create using a cipher device invented around 1550 and called the Cardan lattice. This lattice is a table of symbols, the words of which are formed by moving a special stencil with holes. Empty cells of the table provide the compilation of words of different lengths. Using grids with syllable tables from the Voynich manuscript, Rugg compiled a language with many, though not all, of the hallmarks of the manuscript. It took him only three months to create a book like a manuscript. However, in order to irrefutably prove the meaninglessness of the manuscript, the scientist needs to recreate a sufficiently large passage from it using this technique. Rugg hopes to achieve this through grid and table manipulation.

It seems that attempts to decipher the text fail, because the author was aware of the peculiarities of encodings and compiled the book in such a way that the text looked plausible, but did not lend itself to analysis. As noted by NTR.Ru, the text contains at least the appearance of cross-references, which is what cryptographers are usually looking for. The letters are written in such a variety of ways that scientists can never establish how large the alphabet is in which the text is written, and since all the people depicted in the book are naked, this makes it difficult to date the text by clothing.

In 1919, a reproduction of the Voynich manuscript came to the University of Pennsylvania philosophy professor Romain Newbould. Newbould, who recently turned 54, had broad interests, many of which had an element of mystery. In the hieroglyphs of the text of the manuscript, Newbould saw microscopic shorthand signs and proceeded to decipher them, translating them into letters of the Latin alphabet. The result is secondary text using 17 different letters. Then Newbould doubled all the letters in the words, except for the first and last, and subjected to a special replacement words containing one of the letters "a", "c", "m", "n", "o", "q", "t" , "u". In the resulting text, Newbould replaced pairs of letters with a single letter, in a rule he never made public.

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

“If the Voynich manuscript really contains the secrets of new stars and quasars, it is better for it to remain undeciphered, because the secret of an energy source that surpasses the hydrogen bomb and is so easy to handle that a person of the thirteenth century could figure it out is exactly the secret in the solution of which our civilization does not need, - wrote the physicist Jacques Bergier on this occasion. “We somehow survived, and even then only because we managed to contain the tests of the hydrogen bomb. If there is an opportunity to release even more energy, it is better for us not to know, or not to know yet. Otherwise, our planet will very soon disappear in a blinding flash of a supernova.”

Newbold's report caused a sensation. Many scientists, although they refused to express an opinion on the validity of their methods of transforming the text of the manuscript, considering themselves incompetent in cryptanalysis, readily agreed with the results. One famous physiologist even stated that some of the drawings in the manuscript were probably depicting epithelial cells magnified 75 times. The general public was fascinated. Entire Sunday supplements to reputable newspapers were devoted to this event. One poor woman walked hundreds of miles to ask Newbould to use Bacon's formulas to drive out the evil tempting spirits that had taken possession of her.

There were also objections. Many did not understand the method used by Newbold: people could not use his method to compose new messages. After all, it is quite obvious that a cryptographic system must work in both directions. If you own a cipher, you can not only decrypt messages encrypted with it, but also encrypt a new text. Newbold becomes more and more obscure, less accessible. He died in 1926. His friend and colleague Roland Grubb Kent published his work in 1928 under the title The Roger Bacon Cipher. American and English historians who studied the Middle Ages treated it more than with restraint.

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

According to one Manley, the reason is that “decryption attempts hitherto have been made on the basis of false assumptions. In fact, we do not know when and where the manuscript was written, what language the encryption is based on. When the correct hypotheses are worked out, the cipher will perhaps appear simple and easy ... ".

It is interesting, based on which version of the above, they built a research methodology in the US National Security Agency. After all, even their specialists became interested in the problem of the mysterious book and in the early 80s worked on deciphering it. Frankly speaking, I can't believe that such a serious organization was engaged in the book purely out of sporting interest. Perhaps they wanted to use the manuscript to develop one of the modern encryption algorithms for which this secret agency is so famous. However, their efforts were also unsuccessful.

It remains to state the fact that in our era of global information and computer technologies, the medieval puzzle remains unsolved. And it is not known whether scientists will ever be able to fill this gap and read the results of many years of work of one of the forerunners of modern science.

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

What else would you like to remind the mysterious, well, for example, or The original article is on the website InfoGlaz.rf Link to the article from which this copy is made -

The Voynich Manuscript is a medieval work written in the 15th century by unknown authors. Researchers have been trying to solve its riddle for several hundred years: the language of the manuscript is not known to anyone. Some even suggest that it was created by aliens. Recently, the Spanish publishing house Siloe decided to release exact physical copies of the book to help scientists and enthusiasts who cannot access the original. Lenta.ru tells the story of the manuscript and attempts to decipher it.

In 1912, the antiquary Wilfried Voynich discovered a strange manuscript in the ancient South European castle of Villa Mondragone: the text was written in an incomprehensible language using a script unknown to him.

The graceful letters on the pages of the manuscript writhed, interlocking and diverging from each other. Some of them were later called "gallows" for their visual resemblance to the scaffold. The book was decorated with numerous illustrations depicting plants, people, natural phenomena and movements of celestial bodies.

It is now believed that between two and eight scribes worked on this manuscript over the course of several years, but Voynich came to a different conclusion. He discovered in the book a letter from the Czech scholar Johannes Markus Marzi, on the basis of which he concluded that it was the work of the famous philosopher and naturalist Roger Bacon, who lived in the 13th century. Voynich decided that a lot of money would be given for such an antique, but he was somewhat mistaken with the date. Subsequent radiocarbon dating showed that the manuscript was produced between 1404 and 1438, which means that Bacon could not have had anything to do with it. However, the history of this manuscript is much more interesting than Voynich thought.

Whose book?

Not only the manuscript itself, but also the identity of its owner is still partially hidden by a veil of secrecy. About 10 years ago, researcher René Sandbergen discovered in the archives a letter dating back to the 17th century, which was sent by the Prague alchemist Georg Baresh. It turned out that he had been unsuccessfully trying to decipher the language of this work for more than 20 years.

Desperate, Baresh sent several pages of the manuscript to the Jesuit erudite Athanasius Kircher, who lived in Rome. The old book interested Kircher, and he tried to convince the alchemist to send him the whole work, but he refused.

After the death of Baresh, the manuscript went to his friend, the same Martzi, whose letter was discovered by Voynich. Marzi was a famous scientist of his time and served as a physician at the court of the Holy Roman Emperor. In the letter, he talked about his friend's obsession with deciphering the manuscript, to which he devoted his whole life.

It is not known whether Baresh achieved any success in this field, but after his death the book lay in the Jesuit vaults for three centuries. During the persecution of the church on the order, the manuscript migrated to the personal library of its head Peter Beks - otherwise it could have been confiscated. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Villa Mondragone was the headquarters of the Jesuits, so it is not surprising that Voynich found the manuscript there.

Encryption to nowhere

But initially Voynich did not know about this. Being sure that the manuscript was written by Roger Bacon, he gave this work to a cryptographer, professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, William Newbold. His fate is similar to the fate of Baresh: he devoted the last years of his life to finding a clue to the language of the book. Newbold's method consisted in the fact that he studied the text under a magnifying glass, and then tried to reproduce on paper individual strokes of the pen, behind which, as it seemed to him, anagrams were hidden. Of course, he didn't do anything.

Newbold's theories were smashed to smithereens by William Friedman, the first cryptologist of the US National Security Agency. In the last days of World War II, he and his wife, Elizabeth Friedman, assembled a team of experts and devoted an enormous amount of time to trying to decipher the Voynich manuscript. As a result, they concluded that the book does not contain anagrams, and its language is artificial - that is, it was invented specifically for the manuscript.

Subsequently, many theories arose that the manuscript is a fake, which was written on ancient sheets of parchment. Of course, such a possibility cannot be ruled out, but it would be very strange if the alleged hoaxer found 120 sheets of parchment of the 15th century somewhere, and even did it at a time when no one had heard of radiocarbon analysis yet. The assumption that the text of the work is meaningless does not stand up to criticism: it has a clear structure. Let's say, in the section devoted to plants, some specific words are used, and in the astronomical - others, and they are not repeated.

There have been many theories as to what constitutes the language of the manuscript. Joseph Martin Fili claimed that the text was written in Latin and encrypted with the simplest permutation of letters. Researcher John Stozhko wrote in his book that the manuscript was written in Ukrainian, devoid of vowels, and Dr. Leo Levitov believed that this was one of the Creole languages. However, none of the experts came close enough to understanding the text of the manuscript.

Mysterious message

In 2013, theoretical physicist Marcelo Montemurro from the University of Manchester published a paper that supported the theory that the text of the Voynich manuscript is not a useless set of characters, it really contains some kind of message in a forgotten language. To do this, he applied one of the techniques designed to study the encoding of information in the process of neuron operation - this method made it possible to identify important data in the signal even though it was not known how to interpret them.

In an interview with Lente.ru, Montemurro said that the more he studied the statistical features of the text, the more levels of structure of an unknown language he found in it. The researcher also rejected the hypothesis that the information in the manuscript is encrypted - after all, strong ciphers have an important property: they destroy the statistical features of the language in order to exclude the possibility of recognizing it.

Montemurro drew attention to the fact that the Voynich manuscript obeys Zipf's law, which describes the statistics of the frequency of occurrence of words in natural languages. If you arrange the words in descending order of frequency of use, then the frequency of repetition of each word will be inversely proportional to its serial number in the list. In principle, it is possible to develop an encryption algorithm that allows you to comply with this rule, but it will be extremely complicated, and it is not clear who, how and why would do this in the 15th century, when no one knew about the law.

In addition, Montemurro pointed out that, as a result of text analysis, he revealed a pattern: the repetition of certain specific words coincides with sections of the book. That is, if the illustrations located on specific pages depict plants, then they will be accompanied by the vocabulary associated with them.

Intellectuals of a Lost Culture

Stephen Bucks, professor of applied linguistics at the University of Bedford, presented in 2014 his strong evidence that the Voynich manuscript could not be fake. He claimed that, according to the results of his research, the text of this work completely coincides with the illustrations. For example, in the botanical section, it is told about the plants drawn in it, and also, perhaps, their medicinal properties are explained. Bax claimed that they were all described in earlier works. “In short, the manuscript is most likely not an encrypted message at all, in which information of a different kind is hidden,” he concluded.

Based on the illustrations, the researcher was able to identify some of the words found in this work by isolating frequently repeated sequences of letters. So, he found the constellation Taurus, juniper, coriander, hellebore, cornflower and black cumin. Of course, these discoveries did not bring Bax much closer to deciphering the language of the manuscript, since he could only understand the meaning of some words in modern English.

In addition, the professor put forward an interesting theory about where the mysterious language came from. He believes that it was spoken by some small community that did not develop its own script. A group of intellectuals belonging to this culture created an alphabet for it, consisting of elements of European, Middle Eastern and Caucasian scripts, in order to preserve their people's knowledge of nature for posterity. Bucks points out that the 15th century was a troubled time, and it is possible that the culture that used this language disappeared around the same time that these people were trying to develop its script.

Very big data

In 2014, Diego Amancio, a professor at the Brazilian University of São Paulo, also obtained confirmation that the Voynich manuscript was not a fake using “big data” (a set of technologies and approaches for automatically analyzing extremely large amounts of information). The scientist's research showed that the structure of an unknown language coincides with the structures of modern ones.

Amancio did not try to translate the text - he simply collected the words into groups and analyzed the connections between them, modeling a complex network. As a result, he found that in 90 percent of cases the structure of the text of the manuscript repeats that found in the Bible and other famous books.

In addition, the professor discovered the terms that are most often repeated in the document, and connected the letters of an unknown language with Latin (for example, he received words such as cthy, gokeedy and shedy). He failed to establish their meaning, but he did not particularly try to do this, believing that his work would serve as the foundation for the research of cryptographers.

In assessing the contents of the manuscript, he agrees with many other specialists. In his opinion, the document is an encyclopedia of medieval practices, which include medical prescriptions, astrological and metaphysical information, and descriptions of fertility rites.

The results of recent research allow us to speak with a considerable degree of confidence that the manuscript is really written in a real-life language, is not a fake, and the message contained in it is not encrypted. Nevertheless, the Voynich manuscript remains a mystery to this day, lending itself to analysis, but not betraying the meaning of what was written.