The Voynich manuscript is a book that no one can decipher. It’s named after Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish book dealer who paid for the book in 1912. There are pages that are missing, but 240 of the pages are intact. Almost all of the pages contain text – written from left to right, and many of the pages have images. Some of the pages are also foldable, where you can unfold them to see more information. Regardless, no one can decipher what language the book is written in.
Cryptographers, mathematicians, linguists and scholars have studied the book, including codebreakers from both World Wars and no one has been able to determine the language, but it is a language. Scientists do believe that the manuscript contains a genuine message given linguistic patterns they believe to be meaningful text.
The text has been carbon dated to the 15th century. To date no one can tell what the book says, with some believing it’s a hoax. So what message is the book trying to tell us? Who wrote it? What language is it in? And most importantly, is it a warning of sorts?
The book is currently kept in Yale University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
-Gravedigger
