Remember how jazzed I was about Codex Seraphinianus? That was nothing. Dig this: The Voynich Manuscript.
Haven’t heard of it? Neither had I. It’s this handwritten, illustrated manuscript that turned up in 1912. Some Italian book dealer, Voynich, had acquired it. 240 pages of illustrated prose. It appears to have sections on botany, astronomy, cosmology and pharmacology, among other subjects.
And not a word of it is in any known language. Even the letters are alien. Nobody knows what they are. Even the botanical drawings are of unknown plant species.
Carbon dating seems to validate the book’s antiquity, placing its creation somewhere in the early 1400s. As for what it means–who wrote it and why–the best cryptographers and linguists have come up with no clear answers.
Utterly fascinating! I think I’m going to read a book on the subject. The original manuscript is at Yale, but they’ve just placed high res scans online, so dig in.
So, what’s your theory? Here’s a fun one.
I’m surprised I haven’t seen that on an episode of Ancient Aliens… those guys are nuts for stuff like this… I can hear them now… “It’s Aliens… It has to be!”
Some say just that! Or that it’s a surviving artifact from Atlantis.
It doesn’t seem to be a hoax. Not a modern one and not a 15th century one, either. Nor does it seem to be a simple cryptograph.
What the hell IS it?
I just downloaded the entire manuscript as a pdf doc. Mesmerizing.
http://xkcd.com/593/
Yep! That was the last link in my original post
This post from a couple of years back may be of interest: the manuscript is a hoax and the “code” has been broken.
Ooops. The link was not to the post i recall. But I do recall reading an article that detailed exactly how the hoax was done, with supporting historical evidence. The article I read was probably the basis for this from the Wikipedia article:
I have of course read that passage in Wikipedia and more besides. It still seems to me that the mystery is unsolved. Or at least that a consensus to that effect has not been reached.
It does seem likely that it isn’t a natural language–that it’s either a gibberish hoax or a it’s a cypher. If it is indeed a hoax, what purpose did it serve? If it was simply to pass it off as someone else’s more valuable work, why the extraordinary gibberish and plant illustrations that don’t match known species? Perhaps these questions are answerable. But if it’s a cypher… then that opens up a whole bucket of fascinating questions, most of all: what’s the message?