Voynich manuscript

The Voynich manuscript is an illustrated codex hand-written in an unknown writing system. The vellum on which it is written has been carbon-dated to the early 15th century (1404–1438), and it may have been composed in Northern Italy during the Italian Renaissance. The manuscript is named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who purchased it in 1912.
Some of the pages are missing, with around 240 still remaining. The text is written from left to right, and most of the pages have illustrations or diagrams. Some pages are foldable sheets.
The Voynich manuscript has been studied by many professional and amateur cryptographers, including American and British codebreakers from both World War I and World War II. No one has yet succeeded in deciphering the text, and it has become a famous case in the history of cryptography. The mystery of the meaning and origin of the manuscript has excited the popular imagination, making the manuscript the subject of novels and speculation. None of the many hypotheses proposed over the last hundred years has yet been independently verified.
The Voynich manuscript was donated by Hans P. Kraus to Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in 1969, where it is catalogued under call number MS 408.
The codicology, or physical characteristics of the manuscript, are studied by various researchers. The manuscript measures , with hundreds of vellum pages collected into eighteen quires (units of 25 pages). The total number of pages is around 240, but the exact number depends on how the manuscript's unusual foldouts are counted. The quires have been numbered from 1 to 20 in various locations, using numerals consistent with the 1400s, and the top righthand corner of each recto (righthand) page has been numbered from 1 to 116, using numerals of a later date. From the various numbering gaps in the quires and pages, it seems likely that in the past the manuscript had at least 272 pages in 20 quires, some of which were already missing when Wilfrid Voynich acquired the manuscript in 1912. There is strong evidence that many of the book's bifolios were reordered at various points in its history, and that the original page order may well have been quite different from what it is today.
Protein testing revealed the parchment was made from calf skin, and multispectral analysis in 2014 showed the parchment was unwritten before the manuscript was created. While the parchment was created with care, deficiencies exist, and the quality is assessed as average at best.
Some folios are thicker than the usual parchment thickness, for example bifolios 42 and 47.
The goat skin binding and covers are not original to the book but date to during its possession by the Collegio Romano. Insect holes, present on the first and last folios of the manuscript in the current order, suggest a wooden cover was present earlier to the later covers and discolouring on the edges points to a tanned leather inside cover.
Many pages contain substantial drawings or charts which are colored with paint. Based on modern analysis using polarized light microscopy (PLM), it has been determined that a quill pen and iron gall ink were used for the text and figure outlines; the colored paint was applied (somewhat crudely) to the figures, possibly at a later date. The ink of the drawings, text and page and quire numbers had similar microscopic characteristics. Energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS) performed in 2009 revealed that the inks contained major amounts of iron, sulfur, potassium, calcium and carbon and trace amounts of copper and occasionally zinc. EDS did not show the presence of lead, while X-ray Diffraction (XRD) identified potassium lead oxide, potassium hydrogen sulphate and syngenite in one of the samples tested. The similarity between the drawing inks and text inks suggested a contemporaneous origin.
The blue, clear or white, red-brown and green paints of the manuscript have been analyzed using PLM, XRD, EDS and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The blue paint proved to be ground azurite with minor traces of the copper oxide cuprite. The clear paint is likely a mixture of eggwhite and calcium carbonate, while the green paint is tentatively characterized by copper and copper-chlorine resinate; the crystalline material might be atacamite or another copper-chlorine compound. Analysis of the red-brown paint indicated a red ochre with the crystal phases hematite and iron sulfide. Minor amounts of lead sulfide and palmierite were possibly present in the red-brown paint. The pigments were considered inexpensive.
It is highlighted by computer scientist Jorge Stolfi of the University of Campinas that parts of the text and drawings are modified, using darker ink over a fainter earlier script. Evidence for this is visible in various folios, for example "f1r", "f3v", "f26v", "f57v", "f67r2", "f71r", "f72v1", "f72v3" and "f73r".
Every page in the manuscript contains text, mostly in an unknown language, but some have extraneous writing in Latin script. The bulk of the text in the manuscript of 240 pages is written in an unknown script, running left to right. Most of the characters are composed of one or two simple pen strokes. While there is some dispute as to whether certain characters are distinct or not, a script of 20–25 characters would account for virtually all of the text; the exceptions are a few dozen rarer characters that occur only once or twice each. There is no obvious punctuation.
Much of the text is written in a single column in the body of a page, with a slightly ragged right margin and paragraph divisions, and sometimes with stars in the left margin. Other text occurs in charts or as labels associated with illustrations. There are no indications of any errors or corrections made at any place in the document. The ductus flows smoothly, giving the impression that the symbols were not enciphered, as there is no delay between characters as would normally be expected in written encoded text.
The text consists of over 170,000 characters, with spaces dividing the text into about 35,000 groups of varying length, usually referred to as "words" or "word tokens" (37,919). 8114 of those words are considered unique: "word types". The structure of these words seems to follow phonological or orthographic laws of some sort, e.g., certain characters must appear in each word (like English vowels), some characters never follow others, some may be doubled or tripled but others may not, etc. The distribution of letters within words is also rather peculiar: some characters occur only at the beginning of a word, some only at the end, and some always in the middle section. Professor Gonzalo Rubio, expert in ancient languages at Pennsylvania State University, stated that "The things we know as 'grammatical markers' – things that occur commonly at the beginning or end of words, such as 's' or 'd' in our language, and that are used to express grammar, never appear in the middle of 'words' in the Voynich manuscript. That's unheard of for any Indo-European, Hungarian or Finnish language."
Many researchers have commented upon the highly regular structure of the words.
Some words occur in only certain sections, or in only a few pages; others occur throughout the manuscript. There are very few repetitions among the thousand or so labels attached to the illustrations. There are practically no words with fewer than two letters or more than ten. There are instances where the same common word appears up to three times in a row. Words that differ by only one letter also repeat with unusual frequency, causing single-substitution alphabet decipherings to yield babble-like text. In 1962, cryptanalyst Elizebeth Friedman described such attempts as "doomed to utter frustration".
Various transcription alphabets have been created to equate the Voynich characters with Latin characters in order to help with cryptanalysis, such as the European Voynich Alphabet. The first major one was created by cryptographer William F. Friedman in the 1940s, where each line of the manuscript was transcribed to an IBM punch card to make it machine readable.
Only a few words in the manuscript are considered not to be written in the unknown script:
It is not known whether these bits of Latin script were part of the original text or were added later.
Because the text cannot be read, the illustrations are conventionally used to divide most of the manuscript into six different sections. Each section is typified by illustrations with different styles and supposed subject matter, except for the last section, in which the only drawings are small stars in the margin. Following are the sections and their conventional names:
Five folios contain only text and at least 28 folios are missing from the manuscript.
The overall impression given by the surviving leaves of the manuscript is that it was meant to serve as a pharmacopoeia or to address topics in medieval or early modern medicine. However, the puzzling details of illustrations have fueled many theories about the book's origins, the contents of its text, and the purpose for which it was intended.
The first section of the book is almost certainly herbal, but attempts to identify the plants, either with actual specimens or with the stylized drawings of contemporary herbals, have largely failed. Only a few of the plant drawings (such as a wild pansy and the maidenhair fern) can be identified with reasonable certainty. Those herbal pictures that match pharmacological sketches appear to be clean copies of these, except that missing parts were completed with improbable-looking details. In fact, many of the plant drawings in the herbal section seem to be composite: the roots of one species have been fastened to the leaves of another, with flowers from a third.
Botanist Hugh O'Neill believed that one illustration depicted a New World sunflower, which would help date the manuscript and open up intriguing possibilities for its origin; unfortunately the identification is only speculative.
The basins and tubes in the "biological" section are sometimes interpreted as implying a connection to alchemy, yet bear little obvious resemblance to the alchemical equipment of the period.
Astrological considerations frequently played a prominent role in herb gathering, bloodletting and other medical procedures common during the likeliest dates of the manuscript. However, apart from the obvious Zodiac symbols, and one diagram possibly showing the classical planets, interpretation remains speculative.
Below is the full manuscript in a table that can be sorted according to pages, folio numbers, topics or images. Missing pages are indicated.
Much of the early history of the book is unknown, though the text and illustrations are all characteristically European. In 2009, University of Arizona researchers performed radiocarbon dating on the manuscript's vellum. The result of that test put the date the manuscript was made between 1404 and 1438. In addition, the McCrone Research Institute in Chicago found that the paints in the manuscript were of materials to be expected from that period of European history. It has also been suggested that the McCrone Research Institute found that much of the ink was added not long after the creation of the parchment, but the official report contains no statement to this effect.
The first confirmed owner is Georg Baresch (1585–1662), an obscure alchemist from Prague. Baresch was apparently just as puzzled as modern scientists about this "Sphynx" that had been "taking up space uselessly in his library" for many years. On learning that Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680), a Jesuit scholar from the Collegio Romano, had published a Coptic (Egyptian) dictionary and "deciphered" the Egyptian hieroglyphs, Baresch twice sent a sample copy of the script to Kircher in Rome, asking for clues. Baresch's 1639 letter to Kircher is the earliest confirmed mention of the manuscript that has been found to date.
It is not known whether Kircher answered the request, but apparently, he was interested enough to try to acquire the book, which Baresch refused to yield. Upon Baresch's death, the manuscript passed to his friend Jan Marek Marci (1595–1667; also known as Johannes Marcus Marci), then rector of Charles University in Prague. A few years later Marci sent the book to Kircher, his longtime friend and correspondent.
A letter found inside the cover—written on August 19, 1665 or 1666 accompanied the manuscript when it was sent by Johannes Marcus to Kircher—which claims that the book once belonged to Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612), who paid 600 gold ducats (about 2.07 kg of gold) for it. The letter was written in Latin and has been translated to English. The book was then given or lent to Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz (died 1622), the head of Rudolf's botanical gardens in Prague, probably as part of the debt Rudolf II owed upon his death.
Marci's 1665/6 cover letter (written in Latin) was still with the manuscript when Voynich purchased it:
There are no records of the book for the next 200 years, but in all likelihood it was stored with the rest of Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Collegio Romano (now the Pontifical Gregorian University). It probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II of Italy captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal States. The new Italian government decided to confiscate many properties of the Church, including the library of the Collegio. According to investigations by Xavier Ceccaldi and others, just before this happened, many books of the University's library were hastily transferred to the personal libraries of its faculty, which were exempt from confiscation. Kircher's correspondence was among those books—and so apparently was the Voynich manuscript, as it still bears the "ex libris" of Petrus Beckx, head of the Jesuit order and the University's Rector at the time.
Beckx's "private" library was moved to the Villa Mondragone, Frascati, a large country palace near Rome that had been bought by the Society of Jesus in 1866 and housed the headquarters of the Jesuits' Ghislieri College.
Around 1912, the Collegio Romano was short of money and decided to sell some of its holdings discreetly. Wilfrid Voynich acquired 30 manuscripts, among them the manuscript that now bears his name. He spent the next seven years attempting to interest scholars in deciphering the script while he worked to determine the origins of the manuscript.
In 1930, after Wilfrid's death, the manuscript was inherited by his widow, Ethel Voynich (known as the author of the novel "The Gadfly" and daughter of mathematician George Boole). She died in 1960 and left the manuscript to her close friend, Anne Nill. In 1961, Nill sold the book to another antique book dealer, Hans P. Kraus. Unable to find a buyer, Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University in 1969, where it was catalogued as "MS 408". In discussions, it is sometimes also referred to as "Beinecke MS 408".
The timeline of ownership of the Voynich manuscript is given below. The commonly accepted owners of the 17th century are shown in orange, the long period of storage in the Collegio Romano in yellow, Frascati; the alleged location from where Wilfrid Voynich acquired the manuscript in green, Voynich in red and modern owners in blue. Periods of unknown ownership are indicated in white and the time it was possibly created, based on the carbon dating of the vellum in green.
Many people have been proposed as possible authors of the Voynich manuscript.
Marci's 1665/6 cover letter to Kircher says that, according to his friend, the late Raphael Mnishovsky, the book had once been bought by Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor and King of Bohemia (1552–1612), for 600 ducats (66.42 troy ounce actual gold weight, or 2.07 kg).(Mnishovsky had died more than 20 years earlier, in 1644, and the deal must have occurred before Rudolf's abdication in 1611—at least 55 years before Marci's letter.) According to the letter, Mnishovsky (but not necessarily Rudolf) speculated that the author was the Franciscan friar and polymath Roger Bacon (1214–94).