The collection of the Yale University Library (USA) contains a unique Voynich Manuscript, which is considered the most mysterious esoteric manuscript in the world.

The manuscript was named after its former owner, an American bookseller. Wilfried Voynich, husband of the famous writer Ethel Lilian Voynich, author of the novel The Gadfly. Bookseller wilfriedVoynich bought the manuscript in 1912 in one of the Italian Jesuit monasteries.

History of the mysterious manuscript.

It is known that the owner of the manuscript was Rudolph II (German Rudolf II; 1552, Vienna - 1612, Prague, Bohemia) - King of Germany (Roman King) from 1575 to 1576. A mysterious manuscript with numerous color illustrations was sold to Rudolf II for 600 ducats famous mathematician, geographer, astronomer, alchemistAnd astrolo G Welsh origin John Dee , who wanted to get permission to freely leave Prague for his homeland, in Wales. John Dee exaggerated the antiquity of the manuscript, having assured King Rudolf that the author of this mysterious book is a famous English philosopher and naturalist Roger Bacon (1214 - 1292).

It is known that later the owner of the book was the alchemist Georg Baresch, who lived in Prague at the beginning of the 17th century. Apparently Georg Baresh was also puzzled by the mystery of this enigmatic book.

Having learned that a famous German scientist, a Jesuit who studied linguistics, antiquities, theology, mathematics Athanasius Kircher (Athanasius Kircher -1602 - 1680 , Rome), from the Roman College (Collegio Romano) published Coptic dictionary and deciphered the Egyptian hieroglyphs, Georg Baresch sent Kircher to Rome several copied pages of the manuscript and a letter asking for help to decipher the cryptic writings. Letter 1639 GeorgeBaresh addressed to Kircher was discovered already in our time by Rene Zandbergen, and became the earliest mention of an undeciphered manuscript.

After death GeorgeBaresh the book was given to his friend, rector of Prague University Johann Markus (Jan Marek) martzi(Johannes Marcus Marci, 1595-1667). Johann Marzi presumably sent it away Athanasius Kircher , to his old friend. Transmittal letter 1666 Johanna Marzi still attached to the manuscript. The letter states that it was originally bought for 600 ducats king of germanyRudolph II, who considered the author of this book an English philosopher Roger Bacon (1214 - 1292).

The fate of the mysterious manuscript from 1666 to 1912 remains unknown. Probably the book was kept along with the rest of the correspondence Athanasius Kircher in the library of the Roman College, now Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, founded in 1551 by Ignatius Loyola and Francis Borgia.
The mysterious book probably remained there until 1870, when Troops of Victor Emmanuel II King of the Kingdom of Sardinia (Piedmont since 1849), from the Savoy dynasty entered Rome and annexed the Papal States to the Italian kingdom. The new Italian authorities decided to confiscate the property of the Papal State, including the library in Rome.

According to research Xaviera Ceccaldi (Xavier Ceccaldi), before the confiscation of papal property, many books from the library Pontifical Gregorian University were hastily transferred to the libraries of university employees, whose property was not confiscated. Kircher's correspondence was among these books, and also, apparently, there was a mysterious manuscript, since the book has an ex-libris of the rector of the Pontifical Gregorian University, Petrus Beks (Petrus Beckx), at that time the head of the Jesuit order.

Library Pontifical Gregorian University with ex-libris of PetrusBecks was moved to a large palace near Rome, Villa Mondragon in Frascati (villa Borghese di Mondragone a Frascati), which was acquired by the Jesuit society back in 1866.

In 1912 the College of Rome needed funds and decided in the strictest confidence to sell part of her property. Bookseller Wilfried Voynich bought 30 manuscripts , among other things, and the one that now bears his name. In 1961 , after Voynich's death, the book was sold by his widow Ethel Lilian Voynich (author of The Gadfly) to another bookseller Hans Kraus (Hanse P. Kraus). Not finding a buyer in 1969, Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University in the United States.

Secrets of the Voinich Manuscript.

Initially the manuscript, measuring 22.5x16 cm, consisted of 116 sheets parchment, fourteen sheets of the book are considered lost today. The handwritten text of the book is written with a quill pen, in a fluent calligraphic hand, using five colors of ink - blue, red, brown, yellow and green.

To determine the age of the book, a paper and ink analysis - they belong to XVI century. About the age of the book they tell her illustrations , where you can see the clothes and decorations of women, as well as medieval castles in the diagrams. All details in the illustrations are typical for Western Europe between 1450 and 1520. This is indirectly confirmed by other historical information.

Almost every page of the Voynich Manuscript contains drawings that allow divide the entire text of the book into five sections: botanical, astronomical, biological, astrological and medical.

Botanical section of the book the largest includes more than 400 illustrations of plants and herbs that have no direct analogues in botany, and unknown to science. The text accompanying the drawings of plants is carefully divided into equal paragraphs.

Astronomical section of the book contains about two dozen concentric diagrams with images of the Sun, Moon and astronomical constellations.

Biological section of the book contains a large number of human figures, mostly female, presented in various stages of childbearing. Perhaps, in the biological section of the book, descriptions of the processes of human life and the secrets of the interaction of the human soul and body are given.

Astrological section of the book replete with images of magical medallions, zodiacal symbols and stars.

In the medical section of the book , probably given alchemical recipes for the treatment of various diseases and magical occult advice.

The alphabet of the texts of the manuscript Voynich has no similarity with any known writing system, hieroglyphs unknown to science, hiding the meaning of the text, have not yet been deciphered.

All attempts to determine the language and decipher the text of the Voynich Manuscript have so far been in vain. Experienced cryptographers of the 20th century tried to decipher text by the method of frequency analysis of the use of various symbols. However, neither Latin nor many Western European and Oriental languages ​​helped to decipher the text of the manuscript, research has come to a standstill.

What do modern scholars think of this manuscript?

Candidate biological sciences, specialist in the field of computer psychodiagnostics Sergei Gennadievich Krivenkov and Leading Software Engineer at IGT of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation Claudia Nikolaevna Nagornaya, from Petersburg, they consider it as a working hypothesis that the compiler of the texts of the Voynich manuscript was one of John Dee's rivals in intelligence activities, who apparently encrypted recipes for the preparation of potions, poisons, medicines, in which, as you know, there are many special abbreviations, which and provides short words of text.

Why encrypt? If these are recipes for poisons, then the question disappears ... John Dee himself, for all his versatility, was not an expert on medicinal herbs, so he could hardly have compiled this text on his own.

What kind of mysterious "unearthly" plants are depicted in the illustrations of the book? It turned out that all the depicted plants are composite. For example, the well-known belladonna flower is drawn with a leaf of the equally poisonous plant hoof . And so in many other cases, illustrations of plants depict wild rose, nettle, and even ginseng. Perhaps the author of the illustrations and text traveled to China from Western Europe, since the vast majority of plants are still European.

Which of the influential European organizations sent its mission to China in the second half of the 16th century? The answer from history is known - order of the Jesuits. B The nearest major residency of the Jesuit order to Prague was in the 1580s. in Krakow and John Dee along with his partner, the alchemist Kelly at first he also worked in Krakow, and then moved to Prague. The paths of a connoisseur of poisonous recipes, who first went on a mission to China, and then worked in Krakow, could well have crossed paths with John Dee.

Once it became clear what many of the "herbarium" pictures mean, Sergei Krivenkov and Claudius Nagornaya began to study the text. The assumption that the text of the Voinich manuscript mainly consists of Latin and Greek abbreviations was confirmed.

However, the main goal of the study was to uncover an unusual cipher used by the compiler of the recipes. Here I had to recall many differences in both the mentality of the people of that time, and the features of the then encryption systems and the use of numerology techniques typical of that time. At the end of the Middle Ages they did not at all create purely digital keys to ciphers, but very often they inserted numerous meaningless symbols (“blanks”) into the text, which generally devalues ​​the use of frequency analysis when deciphering the manuscript. But researchers have not yet been able to figure out what is "dummy" and what is not.

Under plant illustration belladonna - " belladonna» and hoof(lat. Ásarum) researchers managed to read the Latin names of these particular plants. Illustrations of plants accompany tips for preparing deadly poison... Abbreviations characteristic of medical prescriptions were also useful here, mentioning the name of the god of death in ancient mythology - Thanatos (ancient Greek Θάνατος - “death”), the brother of the god of sleep Hypnos (ancient Greek Ὕπνος - “sleep”).

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

Astranomic illustrations of stellar spirals appear to indicate the best time to gather herbs, and the incompatibility of certain plants.

Is the Voynich Manuscript a sophisticated forgery?

English scientist Gordon Rugg from the University of Keely (Great Britain) came to the conclusion that the texts of an old book of the 16th century may well turn out to be abracadabra.

Mysterious 16th-century book may be elegant nonsense, says computer scientist. Gordon Rugg used the spy methods of the era of Elizabeth the First to recreate the new text of the Voynich manuscript, and he succeeded!

“I believe that a fake is a very likely explanation,” says Gordon Rugg . “Now it’s the turn of those who believe in the meaningfulness of the text to give their explanation.” The scientist suspects that the English adventurer Edward Kelly made the book for the King of Germany Rudolf II. Other scientists consider this version quite plausible, but not the only one.

« Critics of this hypothesis have pointed out that the language of the Voynich manuscript is too complex for nonsense. How could a medieval swindler produce 200 pages of handwritten text with such knowledge of many subtle patterns in the structure and distribution of words? But it is possible to reproduce many of these wonderful characteristics of text using a simple encoder that existed in the 16th century. The text produced by this method looks like the manuscript text of the Voynich Manuscript, but is nonsense nonsense. This discovery does not prove that the Voynich manuscript is a hoax, but it does support the long-held theory that the document is a medieval forgery."

Without going into a detailed linguistic analysis, it can be noted that the text and illustrations of the manuscript have a complex structure and organization, many letters and words are repeated in a certain sequence. These and others the features of a real-life language are indeed inherent in the Voynich manuscript. Scientifically speaking, the Voynich manuscript is different low entropy (from the Greek. entropia - turn, transformation) part of the internal energy of a closed system , and forging a low-entropy text by hand is almost impossible, especially in the 16th century.

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

However, as shown Gordon Rugg , such text is quite easy to create with using an encryption device invented around 1550 and called the Cardano lattice. The Cardano lattice is a tool for encryption and decryption, which is a special rectangular or square card table, some of the cells of which are cut out. A table-card of a special stencil with holes is moved, writing down the words of the text. At the same time, the closed cells of the table are filled with an arbitrary set of letters, which turns the text into a secret message.

Via gratingsCardano computer scientist Gordon Rugg compiled a language similar to the Voynich manuscript, for this it took him only three months.

Attempts to decipher the text of the Voynich Manuscript in the 20th century.

It seems that attempts to decipher the text are failing, because the author was aware of the peculiarities of encodings and compiled the book in such a way that the text looked plausible, but did not lend itself to analysis. The letters are written in such a variety of ways that scientists can never establish how large the alphabet is in which the text is written, and since all the people depicted in the book are naked, this makes it difficult to date the text by clothing.

In 1919 reproduction Voynich Manuscript was a professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania Roman Newbold. In the hieroglyphs of the text of the manuscript, Newbould saw the knowledge of shorthand writing and proceeded to decrypt it, translating them into letters of the Latin alphabet.

In April 1921 Roman Newbould published the preliminary results of his work before the academic council of the university. The report of Roman Newbould created a sensation. Many scientists, although they refused to express an opinion on the validity of the methods they used to transform the text of the manuscript, considering themselves incompetent in cryptanalysis, readily agreed with the results.

One famous physiologist even stated that some of the drawings in the manuscript probably represent epithelial cells magnified 75 times. The general public was fascinated. Entire Sunday supplements to reputable newspapers were devoted to this event.

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

We don't actually know exactly when and where the manuscript was written, what language the encryption is based on. When the correct hypotheses are worked out, the cipher will perhaps appear simple and easy...

It remains to state the fact that in our era of global information and computer technologies the medieval puzzle remains unsolved. And it is not known whether scientists will ever be able to fill this gap and read the texts of the Voynich manuscript, stored in the Yale University Rare and Rare Books Library and estimated at $ 160,000. The Voynich manuscript is not given to anyone, but anyone who wants to try their hand at deciphering can download high-quality photocopies from the site Yale University USA.

Fresh "fake news" from Canada.

Artificial intelligence helped scientists from University of Alberta (Canada) discover the mystery of the famous Voynich manuscript.
Algorithm was worked out on the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" , translated into 380 languages. Artificial intelligence succeeded recognize 97% of the text "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" , after which the algorithm was applied to the text of the Voynich manuscript.

The researchers now have confidence in the language of the document and even know how to translate the first sentence. It turned out that the Voynich manuscript was written in Hebrew - the order of letters in words is changed, vowels are completely omitted. The first sentence of the Voynich manuscript translates like this: “She made recommendations to the priest, the head of the house, me and the people.” Yes, yes!

Today we turn to the most famous and unsolved text of all time, a medieval book of sciences filled with beautiful illustrations and strange wisdom: the Voynich Manuscript. No one has yet been able to read a single word of this book...
Let's go straight to the main point. The Voynich Manuscript has not yet been solved. Today, there is absolutely no hint of the author of the Voynich Manuscript, the meaning of the text and its purpose. There are several theories, but not a single brilliant answer in its discovery. The path of scientific discovery always captures and captivates not only what is known, but also what remains a mystery.

Somewhere in Europe in the early 1400s, presumably in northern Italy, the skin of pets was turned into parchment. Shortly thereafter, allegedly two men, using pen and ink, wrote a book of 38,000 words using an alphabet and language that could not be identified. The Voynich Manuscript is not a huge book, measuring 16 by 23 centimeters and about 5 centimeters thick. The Voynich Manuscript has approximately 240 pages, depending on how you count them. Some of the pages unfold into large drawings and diagrams. The alphabet consists of 23 - 40 characters, depending on the classification. Some of the symbols may have a decorative version or a double combination.

The Voynich Manuscript contains six sections, according to the type of illustration:

• In the largest, first section of 130 pages, there are drawings of 113 plants and flowers that cannot be identified. The first section of the Voynich Manuscript was named Botanical.
• 26 pages of the second section are Astrological drawings. Lots of circular and concentric charts, as well as some signs of the zodiac.
• The third section, Biological, is filled with drawings of naked women frolicking in many pools with a complex water supply system.
• Cosmological, the fourth section, presents the most impressive page spreads with circular diagrams of space objects.
• The fifth section, Biological, has more than a hundred sketches of plants, roots, powders, tinctures and potions of indeterminate composition and purpose.
• The final and most mysterious section of the Voynich Manuscript, called the Stars, contains 23 pages of text without illustrations. Each short paragraph of a section is marked with a star.

Some of the book's illustrations show an oriental influence. Including a map of the city with a circular layout, supposedly Baghdad, the center of knowledge of the East.

A few centuries later, it was not possible to determine exactly, The Voynich Manuscript received a cover, unfortunately, without registration. Even later, the illustrations became colored, although this was not done very neatly. In the 16th century, the Voynich Manuscript belongs to the English astrologer John Dee, who numbered the top corner of each page. John Dee sold the book to Emperor Rudolph II of Germany in the belief that it was written by Roger Bacon, who lived in the 13th century and is widely recognized as the author scientific methods. The book was then owned by one or two signed owners, and in 1666 was presented to a student, Athanasius Kircher, in Rome. The gift was accompanied by a letter from Johannes Marcus Marci, with the hope of being able to decipher. Markus' letter has been preserved along with the book. Until 1912, the adventures of the book are unknown, until it was discovered by the antiques dealer Wilfred Voynich. The book was kept at the Jesuit College, Italy, at Villa Mondragone. Voynich brought the book to international attention. Again, after changing owners, the book was donated to the Yale University Library, where it is kept under the official name MS 408.

The discovery of the Voynich Manuscript has given rise to many hypotheses about the contents of the book. Many people believe that the record is a code. All attempts at decryption have so far been unsuccessful. Some argue that the book is written in an invented language, as opposed to languages ​​that have evolved. There are opinions that when writing the Voynich Manuscript, the Cardan Grille, a special stencil that allows you to read only the necessary characters, was used. But perhaps the most popular theory holds that the Voynich Manuscript is a hoax of any period when parchment was used and for any purpose: scientific, financial gain, or just a weekend prank.

There are many possible authors of the book. Roger Bacon remains a suspect, but this opinion is based on the opinion of most of the previous owners of the book and has no evidence. Roger Bacon did not write anything in the language of the Voynich manuscript, as far as we know. Moreover, he died in 1294, 100 years before the book was written. There can be no doubt about the dates, because the age of the parchment is known today, which Voynich and his predecessors could not know. A radiocarbon analysis of the 2011 parchment was performed at the University of Arzona by Dr. Greg Hodgins and put the date of its manufacture in the early 1400s. Determining the age of ink is much worse. Most inks are organic-free and do not lend themselves to radiocarbon dating. Even if the ink contains organic components, there is no reliable technology for separating the carbon of the ink from the carbon of the document. The pigments used are comparable to the pigments of that time, but even an experienced forger could know this.

We have the opportunity to make several scientific assumptions. Parchment, often laundered and used repeatedly, is an excellent opportunity for modern scammers to create a document of ancient origin both visually and by radiocarbon analysis. But the chemical trace on the parchment remains in any case. We know that the Voynich Manuscript is the first and only text on these sheets of parchment. In addition, parchment has always been in high demand, and it is extremely unlikely to find virgin sheets through the ages, not used before, for a perfect fake. Given Marcy's 1666 letter of dedication, the age of the book can be assumed to match the age of its parchment.

Let's look at other properties of the Voynich Manuscript.

One of them is of great importance: The handwritten book is completely uncorrected. There are also no places with smaller text that they tried to squeeze into the page and complete the thought. All this is extremely unlikely if the book were a manuscript in the first edition. Mistakes and corrections in this case are inevitable. How to explain all this? There are several versions, two of which are the most plausible.

The first suggests that the Voynich Manuscript is a copy of another book. Possibly written by Roger Bacon. The copyist could carefully plan the placement of text on the pages based on the original, and if he worked carefully, do without errors. The theory of copying does not contradict the fact that the book was written from beginning to end by one or two people. The mere fact of a copy does little, but leads to a desire to decipher the document, leaving us wondering: Why would someone carefully copy a book that says nothing?

The second version of the neat-looking Voynich Manuscript will tell you more: The text makes no sense and consists of signs that were filled in sheets of parchment. Corrections are not required. Compressing the text to complete the thought disappears in the absence of a semantic load.

The Voynich Manuscript's "complete nonsense" theory has just one objection: If a document doesn't make sense, then it's very high-quality nonsense, beyond the amateur level. The Voynich manuscript has been repeatedly analyzed by different computer methods, by different researchers and by different programs. Everything is unsuccessful. The text was metrically compared with different languages. The frequency of letters, the length of words is very close to real languages, but does not correspond to any. All this is reasoning, but the author imagines a monk or a professional clerk who worked day after day, perfectly understanding his task to give the text a semblance of reality. The task is not easy for an amateur, a person from the street or a professional in another field. If it is gibberish, then the Voynich Manuscript contains the highest quality gibberish.

Hints on the semantic component are not exhausted. The combination of words and their application in different sections looks like real text on various topics would look like. The pages of one section are more similar to each other than the pages of neighboring sections of the Voynich Manuscript.

The intrigue around the Voynich Manuscript is growing.

The analysis of the book by the US Navy cipher Prescott Currier, who discovered two specific "languages" of the book in 1970, is quite famous. Speaking of "languages", Carrier specifies that these can be two dialects, two ways of encryption and calls them Voynich-A, Voynich-B. Interestingly, Voynich-A and Voynich-B are written in different handwriting, although they represent the same alphabet or cipher. Each page of the book is written in either Voynich-A or Voynich-B from start to finish. The Biology and Star sections are written in Voynich-B, the other sections in Voynich-A. The exception is the first and largest section: Botanical, which contains both "languages". "Languages" are not mixed, the book consists of so-called "bifolios", in which sheets are grouped before stitching the entire book. So each "bifolio" carries only one of the two "languages".

Among the hypotheses about the origin of the Voynich Manuscript, the author chooses the following:

Somewhere at the beginning of the 15th century, a professional alchemist, astronomer or physicist decided to create something that confirms his rare and priceless knowledge from the East on the market. This man engaged a monk or clerk to make a book filled with amazing drawings from various fields of knowledge and texts that no one can read. All this made it possible to interpret the "Wisdom of the East" at the discretion of the owner of the book, depending on the circumstances.

The monk had a clerk as his assistant, they developed an alphabet and, keeping the text similar to existing languages, wrote convincing nonsense. The quality of the creation allowed the owner of the book to impress even his colleagues in the craft. Thus, the "specialist" received a market-leading confirmation that is conceptually identical to the robes of a naturopath, the energy diagrams of top-level yogis, and the online-purchased titles of "doctor" by alternative medicine specialists of various currents.

This remains the main hypothesis for the origin of the Voynich Manuscript. Not a falsification, but a carefully thought out and well-crafted book filled with nothing but complete nonsense. Perhaps one day the Voynich Manuscript will reveal a different purpose, but for now this hypothesis is as good as the others.

Translation Vladimir Maksimenko 2013

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

However, enough interesting version the deciphering of the manuscript was proposed by the famous writer, paleoethnographer Vladimir DEGTYAREV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what is this text all about?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 came up. The bust continued. We checked Chinese, Ukrainian, and Turkish ... In vain!

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

History of the manuscript.

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

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

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

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

Bex's library was moved to 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.

With the help of 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 the syllable-table grids from the Voynich manuscript, Rugg compiled a language with many, though not all, hallmarks manuscript. It took him only three months to create a book like a manuscript. However, in order to irrefutably prove the meaninglessness of the manuscript, the scientist needs to recreate a sufficiently large passage from it using this technique. Rugg hopes to achieve this through grid and table manipulation.

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

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

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

“If the Voynich manuscript really contains the secrets of new stars and quasars, it is better for it to remain undeciphered, because the secret of an energy source that surpasses the hydrogen bomb and is so easy to handle that a person of the thirteenth century could figure it out is exactly the secret in the solution of which our civilization does not need, - 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 about the validity of their methods of transforming the text of the manuscript, considering themselves incompetent in cryptanalysis, readily agreed with the results. One famous physiologist even stated that some of the drawings in the manuscript were probably depicting epithelial cells magnified 75 times. The general public was fascinated. Entire Sunday supplements to reputable newspapers were devoted to this event. One poor woman walked hundreds of miles to ask Newbould to use Bacon's formulas to drive out the evil tempting spirits that had taken possession of her.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 -

Artificial intelligence has attempted for the first time to decipher the most mysterious medieval book known as the Voynich Manuscript. Who and when compiled the world-famous manuscript is not exactly known. This question has been haunting the minds of linguists and cryptologists around the world for several hundred years. Scientists from the University of Alberta in Canada reported that they were closer to the solution and were able to decipher the first phrase of the book. However, many experts were skeptical about the news. The Associate Professor of the Department of Computational Linguistics of the Institute of Linguistics spoke in an interview with MIR 24 about why Canadian scientists did not make a breakthrough, and the manuscript still remains a mystery. Russian State University for the Humanities, Research Fellow of the HSE School of Philology Alexander Pipersky.

What is the Voynich manuscript

The illustrated manuscript dates back to the 15th century and is named after the Polish-Lithuanian bibliophile and antiquary Mikhail Leonardovich Voynich. He bought the unusual 240-page book at Villa Mondragone near Rome in 1912 during a secret sale of the archives of the Jesuit College Library. Voynich was a passionate hunter of rare books, so he could not get past the manuscript with puzzle pictures written in an unknown language. The antiquarian suggested that before him was not an outlandish alphabet, but some kind of encrypted message. He devoted all the remaining 18 years of his life to deciphering, but he never learned anything about the book.

After the death of Voynich, his wife Ethel, the author of the novel The Gadfly, popular in the USSR, sold the manuscript to the famous second-hand bookseller Hans Kraus, and he, in turn, handed it over to researchers. Since 1969, the manuscript has been kept in the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University. It is fully digitized, so anyone can try to decipher the mysterious graphics and letters.

What is the mystery of the manuscript

The best cryptanalysts in the world cannot understand what the medieval tome hides, because it is not known what language it was written in. Many experts in different time approached to decipher, but did not establish what language the author used. As Piperski said, this is the main and only obstacle on the way to scientific discovery. Among the many assumptions about the language in which the manuscript was written, none is accurate.

The abundance of illustrations also does not bring scientists closer to the solution. On the contrary, one can freely search in them for justification for absolutely any theory about the origin of the manuscript. Thus, the popular conjecture that the book may be a treatise on women's health is confirmed by pictures with scenes of women bathing. Drawings with flowers and root systems make it clear that another part of the book can be devoted to botany and folk medicine, and the signs of the zodiac and maps of the heavenly bodies indicate the astrological component. Scientists explained the connection between astrology and botany by the fact that medieval healers could not treat a person without knowing his zodiac sign. However, in the scientific community even today they do not deny that the pictures may turn out to be an invention of the author, because almost not a single illustration corresponds to a real-life plant.

Perhaps the researchers are sure only that the book has a clear structure and a strict linguistic construction. This feature was helped to detect repeated words. So, in the section on plants, some specific words are used, and in astronomical - completely different ones. This means that the manuscript cannot possibly be an elaborate forgery.

Versions

Along with the manuscript, Voynich discovered a letter from 1666 stating that the 13th-century English monk and philosopher Roger Bacon had written the book. But the letter confused the bibliophile, since an earlier mention of the manuscript was later found - in a message of 1639. Voynich never managed to get closer to the truth and, moreover, fell out of favor with his contemporaries.

Voynich was suspected of having falsified the manuscript, but this version was disproved by radiocarbon analysis of the ink and paper. He confirmed that the text was created in the 15th century, around 1404-1438,” Piperski said.

The popular hypothesis that the language of the manuscript is artificial was first put forward by the chief cryptologist of the US National Security Agency, William Friedman. He suggested that specifically for writing the manuscript, its author created absolutely new language. At the start of World War II, Friedman managed to break the complex code of the Purple cipher machine used by the Japanese Foreign Ministry. However, the experienced cryptologist failed to do the same with the mysterious medieval manuscript.

What is the language of the manuscript? In 1943, New York lawyer Joseph Martin Feely published The Roger Bacon Cipher: The Real Key Found. The study stated that Bacon used abbreviated words from medieval Latin in the text. In 1978, philologist John Stozhko suggested that the Ukrainian language was used in the manuscript, from which vowels were excluded. In 1987, physicist Leo Levitov claimed that the mysterious tome had been created by the Cathar heretics who inhabited medieval France. In the text of the manuscript, he saw a mix of different languages. All three hypotheses seemed unconvincing to contemporaries and were refuted.

It was only in 2013 that the Voynich manuscript was proved to be a coherent text in a forgotten language. Physicist Marcelo Montemurro of the University of Manchester published a report saying that the text of the Voynich manuscript is not a useless set of symbols, it actually contains some kind of message in a forgotten language. For a long time, Montemurro studied how information is encoded in the course of neuron operation. He concluded that the Voynich manuscript had no cipher because the text had natural statistical features. However, neither Montemurro nor his many predecessors ever put forward a valid theory about what is contained in the manuscript.

Why the riddle was again remembered

Canadian scientists from the University of Alberta, using artificial intelligence, tried to determine the language of the manuscript and translate its first sentence. The algorithm showed that the manuscript was written in encrypted Hebrew. The first phrase of the book of the neural network was translated as follows: “She gave recommendations to the priest, the head of the house, and to me and the people.” Previously, the algorithm was tested on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, translated into 380 languages. The language of the Voynich manuscript using this algorithm was determined to be Hebrew.

Although the algorithm made a mistake with the choice of language, the study was not in vain, according to Pipersky. Scientists now know they are dealing with a real language. At the same time, regardless of whether the text has a cipher, artificial intelligence is not yet able to understand the meaning of the message.

“Imagine that you have a text where the letters are replaced in a certain way and rearranged inside the words. Artificial intelligence can understand what language it is written in. He suggested that since some words are similar to Hebrew, then the manuscript is written in this language. In fact, the computer translated the first phrase incorrectly and it has nothing to do with Hebrew. It turns out that Canadian computational linguists just solved an interesting mathematical problem. They determined that the unknown text was indeed written in some real-life language. That is, if a breakthrough concerns linguistics, it is only computer science. Philologists have already said that their experiment is of no value and does not bring science closer to understanding the manuscript.

For linguists and philologists, the Voynich manuscript is of no interest simply because it is not clear in what language it was written. So far, only cryptologists see it as an interesting object that needs to be tried to unravel. However, if convincing arguments appear in the reading of the Voynich manuscript, then this will be a big event for both specialists.

“No suggestion of what the Voynich manuscript is brings us closer to understanding the text. In cryptography, there are cases when the original language is unknown, but the translation language is known. So, for example, Jean-Francois Champollion deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs, comparing them with Greek words. But the Voynich manuscript does not apply to such cases. We can only say for sure that it does not apply to languages ​​that are well studied by historians. For example, to Latin. It is unlikely that for a hundred years no one has understood the encrypted text in Latin.

According to the expert, the characters in the book have a logical sequence, which means that the author of the manuscript did not have the goal of creating a hoax and encrypting it so carefully that no one could understand the content. Therefore, one day cryptologists will still be able to unravel both the language and the meaning of the handwritten riddle.