Thread by @amir_faizal_

**VOYNICH MANUSCRIPT**

There is one mysterious historical book, one manuscript, one codex, that has never been fully figured out by historians, or cryptographers, or linguists.

It is one of the most mysterious works in human history.

It is the Voynich Manuscript.

--THREAD--

The Voynich manuscript is a hand-written book which contains an unknown writing system - unknown language.

Carbon-dating suggested the date of writing to be in the early 15th century.

It is named after the Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish-Samogitian book dealer who bought it in 1912.

It has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from World War 1 and 2.

No individual or group has been successful in decrypting the language in which it was written.

It was extensively studied, and yet a mystery.

Almost everything was studied - the material (written on vellum - animal skin); scientific analysis of its ink, paint, parchment; its text (mostly unknown, but a few Latin words), statistics and patterns of words; its illustrations; its purpose.

No solid explanation exists yet.

The book has a history of being stored in libraries and universities, being bought and sold, being the subject of scholarly decipherment and discussion, undergoing the changing of owners, amongst others.

Pictured below is Voynich himself.

But who authored it?

Good question.

There have been several proposed authors.

Roger Bacon - English philosopher/friar
John Dee - Anglo-Welsh mathematician/advisor to Queen Elizabeth I
Edward Kelley - Dee's spirit medium
Giovanni Fontana - Engineer
Voynich - he was a collector, and familiar with antique books.

However, it's still unknown.

Now.

The book itself is divided into six different sections according to its illustrations (text unreadable): Herbal, Astronomical, Balneological, Cosmological, Pharmaceutical, Recipes.

Below are two example illustrations.

Dragon, castle

Other sections like Herbal include illustrations of unidentified plants with a few sentences explaining them (common format of the time). Astronomy includes the Zodiac signs. Other include small nude women with dense texts, roots, leaves, plants. >95% unknown information.

It has been speculated to be a guidebook for making medicines or drugs, or about alchemy, or about astrology. It's not exactly clear

The first section is almost certainly about herbals, but no plants were identified except for two. Sometimes it's a mix of two plants.

To understand it, we need to understand the language itself - Voynichese.

There are several hypotheses regarding the language of this manuscript:

Cipher
Codes
Shorthand
Steganography
Natural language
Hoax
Glossolalia

So let's briefly look at each one.

First is simple cipher.

What is a cipher?

It's a method to encrypt information so that it cannot be read.

A simple one would be assigning A -> B, B -> C, C -> D (next letter). So the word B A D would be C B E.

However, no known ciphers can decrypt it yet, not even the NSA.

The second one is code. What this means is that each word is actually a code for a different word, and you need to refer to a dictionary to know its meaning.

This would be possible, except that code-based ciphers like these are extremely cumbersome to read and write.

Another is shorthand. Joseph Martin Feely claimed that the manuscript was a scientific diary written in shorthand.

Like how a journalist has his/her own system of shorthand writing with lines and scribbles.

This, however, is not strongly supported.

Another is steganography, which is a technique of hiding information in plain sight.

For example, changing the colour of pixels in images (digital steganography) to hide messages in those pixels, which can be difficult to decode/detect.

This attempt hasn't been successful too.

It's also been suggested to be a natural language due to its structure, rather than random words.

Suggestions include Central and East Asian languages like Chinese, unknown North Germanic dialect, and other contemporary languages.

Analytics also suggests a natural language.

Its language systematic structure also suggested that it's a constructed language.

Some repetitive aspects of the language suggested that it's not gibberish, but rather carefully constructed.

But so far, no one has been able to assign plausible meaning to the texts.

Some has suggested it to be just a hoax, in which no real meaning exists in it.

It is possible to generate similar texts by using encryption methods as shown by Gordon Rugg, a computer scientist.

This has been disputed as being not strong evidence and reasoning to address it.

There appears to be a network of words and syntactic structures too sophisticated to just be a hoax.

It's too academic and too structured for it to just be an artificially constructed language.

But others suggested that it might as well be gibberish due to some randomness.

The final explanation is glosolalia, which basically means when a person speaks/writes an unknown language to them, which could originate from a trance state, mentally disturbed/induced state, or a stream-of-consciousness, migraine revelation from elsewhere.