There exists a large book, filled with lengthy paragraphs of carefully written text and intricately drawn pictures, that was written sometime in Europe in the 1400s. To this day, nobody has been able to decipher a single word of it. It’s called the Voynich manuscript, and it remains one of the most puzzling documents in the world.
The mysterious manuscript was passed around to various collectors until it eventually landed in the hands of Wilfrid Voynich in 1912. Voynich made a public attempt to decipher the enigmatic book with the help of scholars, but was ultimately unsuccessful. However, because of Voynich’s efforts and the frustrating fact that no one could read the manuscript’s title, the manuscript took on Voynich’s name, which it retains to this day. The manuscript has been housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University since 1969.
The written part of the manuscript gives the resemblance a real language, with 25 specific characters accounting for nearly all of the text (around 170,000 characters). However, punctuation is seemingly nonexistent, and here and there one finds an extraneous character that further challenges the deciphering of the manuscript. Another interesting characteristic of the book is the large number of lavishly drawn illustrations it contains. Many of these illustrations depict plants that do not resemble any plants that have ever grown on Earth; in any case, none of them have been verified as real plants. One may also find numerous drawings of pregnant nude women, dragons and castles, as well as astronomical entities like the sun and the moon.
Several theories have been debated by scholars for why the Voynich manuscript has managed to go nearly 600 years without ever being deciphered. One of these theories is the obvious possibility that the book is simply an elaborate hoax, intentionally designed to fool anyone attempting to draw any meaning from it.
This theory, however, has one major flaw. The amount of time it would have taken to write the lengthy book (240 pages still exist today, and many more are thought to have existed in the past), combined with the relative scarcity of material needed to create it, lend a large amount of credence to the idea that such a work would have been written with a serious purpose; why waste extremely valuable resources on creating a fake and illegible book? Certainly, it is plausible that the whole manuscript is nothing but empty gibberish; however, it is an unlikely theory at best, given the time it was written in.
Therefore, by rejecting the hoax theory, one must conclude that the Voynich manuscript is a real document, written in a real language; indeed, computers have analyzed the text and the results indicate that the text bears a strong resemblance to a natural language.
If this is true, however, then it is a very strange and unique language, found in no other document or record anywhere else on Earth. Indo-European languages, as well as Hungarian and Finnish, all have things that ancient languages expert professor Gonzalo Rubio describes as “grammatical markers,” or “things that occur commonly at the beginning or end of words, such as "S" or "D" in (English), like the words “dogs” or “mugged.” This grammatical structure does not exist anywhere in the Voynich manuscript. Paradoxically, it is also illogical to assume that the manuscript originated from some other part of the world, such as Asia or Africa, as its text structure, illustrations and numerals are all evidence of a European work, and are consistent with what was produced in Europe during the 1400s.
Other theories by experts speculating the meaning of the manuscript’s language seem to take on a sort of desperation; everything from the manuscript’s language being an intricately disguised rendition of Latin to the letters of the language revealing a hidden message available only with the aid of a microscope have been suggested and discarded. To this day, no one knows the reason why the Voynich manuscript was written, what its meaning is (if it even has one) and why these two questions have, so far,been so difficult to answer despite hundreds of years of analysis and efforts by mathematicians and scientists (including the NSA).
Except, perhaps, with the exception of one man who, two years ago, uploaded a video to YouTube claiming to have successfully deciphered 14 characters from the Voynich manuscript. A researcher and professor of linguistics at the University of Bedfordshire in England, Stephen Bax claims that the manuscript does possess a real language and is “probably a treatise on nature, perhaps in a Near Eastern or Asian language.” If his findings turn out to be true (which so far appears to be the case), than perhaps the Voynich manuscript may at last be yielding some of its long-held secrets.
