The Voynich Manuscript

History is littered with ancient languages that have been decoded, and ciphers that have been cracked, but if there is one bizarre occurrence that marks a thorn in historians' sides, it has to be the Voynich manuscript. Purchased by rare-book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1912, the text doesn't appear particularly remarkable at first glance. A series of paragraphs over the course of 240 pages accompanied by illustrations and diagrams, broken into what appear to be six distinct sections. The sections appear to describe different topics of herbal, astronomical, biological, cosmological, and pharmaceutical nature. What is so remarkable about the manuscript, then? Well, It’s written in a language unknown to man, and has evaded all attempts to decipher its contents to this day. The writing is composed of over 170,000 characters written in patterns that resemble natural language. Twenty or 30 glyphs can account for nearly the entire text, with the exception of a few stray characters that appear only once. It was written smoothly, with no evidence of errors or corrections anywhere, and no evidence of pauses during writing, which one would expect with encoded text. Almost as to suggest that the language was natural for whoever wrote it. Carbon dating revealed that the script was written between the years 1404 and 1438, and although theories have been offered, nobody actually knows the author of the work. Due to the numerous failed attempts to decipher the Voynich manuscript, many have suggested that the manuscript is an elaborate hoax, and cannot actually be deciphered. But until the truth becomes known, this strange text will remain one of history’s most fascinating unsolved mysteries.
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