Anyone know about the Voynich Manuscript?

This manuscript has really thrown me for a loop. Does anyone have info on or about this manuscript or the person who wrote it? I have been reviewing pages to see if I could figure out the code. I have been unable to decipher this material. I think if I had some more info about who wrote it or where it came from I could possibly figure it out. I looked and did not see any other threads on this and was hoping someone could help me with this. I have included a link that gives some backround on the manuscript for those of you who are unfamilar with this book. I dont have the link but if you go to the harvard rare book site you can view a ton of pages from the manuscript as well.

Voynich Manuscript Link



Thanks for the help,

Al77zzz

I find this very intriguing myself. I studied on it for quite some time a few years back. It can get you hooked...lol.

But, nothing new to offer you.

[edit on 10-10-2004 by Valhall]

Valhall,
Please u2u me with some sites or other material if you have it. I would love to figure this thing out.

thanks,

al77zzz

This link is like a clearinghouse of links concerning the manuscript:

www.people.virginia.edu...

This one may be in the above link, but it has some good references and a decent repository:

www.dtc.umn.edu...

Other than that, I can't help you much because like I said, I researched this back in 1999-2000 period and I've gone through at least one computer since then...lol.

hey AL77ZZ

i found this on ATS, heres the link www.abovetopsecret.com... it has a few links involved in it

not sure if it will be of help but maybe they are worth some interest

rynaldo

My understanding is that it has pretty much been proven to be a fraud.

I guess I should qualify that statement, since it's it's difficult to "prove" a coded document is a fraud. It's always possible that the code remains unbroken.

But anyway, a guy has been successful in using a method that while essentially random, duplicates the internal syntax of the Voynich.

He figured it out by researching the historical methods that were available at the time of its writing and trying to determine what avenues of investigation had not been addressed by previous attempts to crack the code. A method of tables and screens used to randomly combine syllables was apparently used.

He went on to generalize his investigative technique into a method he hopes to use to examine other puzzling questions.

Sorry I can't put my finger on link at this moment. If I can find it, I will edit it in.



link
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[edit on 10-10-2004 by cimmerius]

Originally posted by cimmerius

I think I read the same thing on the Urban Legends or Unexplained Mysteries sites.

The guy in question didn't use that method on other cases "after" he did it to this one. It was said he worked as sort of a consultant that helps analysts and scientists take an out of the box perspective and method of research, when they get stuck. He applied his consultancy to this manuscript and looked at it from all the ways other people didn't.

Instead of trying to decrypt it, or search for its origin, he went to try and replicate it.

.

It was said he worked as sort of a consultant that helps analysts and scientists take an out of the box perspective and method of research, when they get stuck. He applied his consultancy to this manuscript and looked at it from all the ways other people didn't.

nstead of trying to decrypt it, or search for its origin, he went to try and replicate it.

Yes, that sums it up very nicely. So what do you think? Does that satisfy you that it is a fraud?
,

So when people say they have compared these texts to all know alphabets / languages, is it really ALL? Some of the characters remind me of less well know languages like Theban. Perhaps it is an individuals way of preserving information but in a form that could only be shared with those the individual chose to teach the language to. I would love to translate it. There could be some interesting info in it.

If this manuscript is a fraud then why do people give it such high reguards? I mean we don't even know who wrote it. the person who wrote it could have very well used some sort of gibrish to hide his secrets. I have read about the fraud thing and I believe that has to be on everyones mind. I also think that maybe people want it to be true because if it was a fake then people have spent years deciphering nothing. What a huge waste of time.

I was looking at some of the websites giving some background info on this and saw this image. Its interesting how each page has a picture of a flower or plant on it. Maybe herein lies the key to the text. Find out the name of this flower, where it grew, and then it could have some possible link into the text. Some of the pictures appear to be labelled, if you look at the back ground image here. If you scroll to the bottom of the page you will see what I mean. If you can find out the right word for the plant, in whatever language you will have a crib to get you into the text.

Just a few thoughts, a stating point if you will, it would be good to look into this anyone have the necessary expertise to get us started?

Originally posted by AL77ZZZ
If this manuscript is a fraud then why do people give it such high reguards?

As Lincoln said, "you can fool some of the people some of the time." When presented with new information from what seems to be a credible source, we tend to believe it. Unless you have information to the contrary, most don't go checking out facts. And remember, the original shows up in the 1700's when they didn't have a lot of literate and educated people and when there weren't any methods of detecting frauds.

I mean we don't even know who wrote it. the person who wrote it could have very well used some sort of gibrish to hide his secrets. I have read about the fraud thing and I believe that has to be on everyones mind. I also think that maybe people want it to be true because if it was a fake then people have spent years deciphering nothing. What a huge waste of time.

Eh, if you want to see time wasting over nothing, you should read about some of the extremist sects of Christianity. Many (such as the Jehovahs Witnesses) spent hundreds of years proving that "the Rapture" was going to happen "tomorrow!"

The structure of the manuscript looks like a fraud to me. At that time, people were hungry for novelties and sciences such as biology were still pretty much in a primitive state. You could convince someone that these were pictures of strange plants found in a foreign country... and that naked women were waiting there to satisfy your every (male) demand.

The originator may have intended to provide the "translation" themselves... for a fee.

Hope this helps there was an ATS research project on this topic

www.abovetopsecret.com...

Maybe the manuscript is from Atlantis. Who knows? Or maybe a kid made it to throw people off. I doubt it but hey, it happens.

I thought the common idea was that it was a work created by a mathematician/alchemist, in order to make some money off a certain king who indulged in such tomes and scrolls... I'd have to read up on it again (check the research project, as they likely hit upon the same...)

EDIT: My personal view is that it is a personal spell/alchemy book by Bacon and a partner, and for recording their own research, later sold only out of need, not as the initial goal.

[edit on 11-10-2004 by Gazrok]

Hi Gazrok:

The so-called VOYNICH MS (VMS) in Yale's Beinicke Collection has sure stumped alot of people---- including some of the world's most talented cryptographers.....it would be nice if Yale would allow a carbon dating test on this MS so establish a Terminus AD quem (the so-called "date when the calf died" i.e. determined from the vellum itself).

Wilfred Voynich (a rare book collector) bought the MS from Jesuits at the Villa Frascati near Rome in 1912 along with a parcel of other rare MSS.

Was this a survivor of the Inquisition? I have never seen another book using the same SIGIL language symbols, have you?

From all the curiously painted "plants" (some seem copied from dried pressed examples, and are NOT accurate in the modern forensic sense at times) in the largest (first) section, it appears on the surface to be a mediaeval "Herbal" or some kind of private medical dictionary-pharamceutical "recipe" book of some kind which tried to relate the medicinal potency of plants and roots and herbs to certain key elements/chemicals and perhaps with a tie into a person's astrological birth sign.

Interestingly, perhaps, I do not see a lot of "classical" mediaeval Alchemical symbols expressed in the VMS book much, which is strange. Some almost look alchemical, but they appear in non-alchemical combinations.

I do NOT think it is a surviving heretical Albigensian Endura textbook [Cathar Death Rite of Isis (which was poor misguided prof. Levitov's worm-eaten theory of 1987)

Dr Dee of England in the 1580s sold the book for 600 dukaten to the Emperor Rudlolf II of Bavaria (Praha) which was the equivalent of about $250,000.00 US dollars today--quite a lot for one single book.

Dee told Rudolph it was the private notebook of Dr Francis Bacon of England (who died around 1390), but the present form of the book (with its 15th century women's hairdos and the overall style of the drawings including the CROSS BOW) seems to point to a date around 1450.-1460.

Also the "style" of the amateurish drawings (notice the castles) is what is known as "humanist" (AD 1440 to AD 1500) and resembles Brescian Herbals (i.e. from northern Italy, around Milan) of the period which were in vogue in those days (especially between 1400 to 1500). Also the hairdos are Brescian in style from around 1440-1450.

Several attempts have been made to make the text readable: I like Landini's EVA (european voynich alphabet) which uses typewritten letters to denote the letter-sigils of the VMS (e.g. daiin, sheoky, arar, cheoldy etc.)

The question of course is what BASE LANGUAGE is this book written in (the language which is supposed to be understood to be residing underneath all those cipher-sigils)?

Is it a totally new made up language? Is it Greek or Latin or Italian or some combination of languages?

Is it phonetically broken up differently than language is commonly written

(e.g. in English we might write: "Mary had a little lamb whose fleece was white as snow"

whereas the VMS (voynich MS might have written it phonetically,

e.g. : may reehadd alitt ellamm whozfleez wazwhyt aznoe).

Also there might be NULL VALUES (letters or combinations which mean nothing:

e.g. may redaiin hada leetdaiin ellamb whooz daiin fleez wazwhyte dain aznoe).

Why all the secret coding? Possibly it contained scientific information that the Spanish Inquisition might not have particularly liked....

There is a curiously repetitive phrase (annoying to keep having to look at all the time) which resembles the typewritten 8aiiv (EVA: daiin), which might be a PUNCTUATION MARK like a COLON or a COMMA or a FULL STOP (period).

Sometimes we see the "word" : [8aiiv 8aiiv] twice in succession which might be a "colon" (EVA: daiin daiin) or phrase/paragraph separator

Some "words" are fairly common throughout the book (i.e. they recur with some frequency like [EVA: shol] or [EVA: sheky etc) but there are many words that appear only once like [EVA: fachys] often set apart on the page or underneath a drawing, almost LIKE A LABEL of some kind.

This is why I think the book is a kind of medical herbal, or teaching manual giving names to different plants (in the Herbal sections) and planets (in the astrological section).

I've noticed that the separator (8aiiv) often occurs often right AFTER a rare word or series of rare words --as if to set these words apart....

The book is small: the VMS measures about 6" x 9" only (kind of smallish) with 235 sides of sigil-writing and herbal like pictures (about 24 pages have been deliberately torn out and handed out to various people around 1660 including pages that Johannes Marci gave to the cryptologist friend Athanasius Kircher to decipher). These pages are still missing to this day.

The book is today organised into 5 discrete "sections" separated according to topic: two pages from each section have been neatly torn out (possibly as "samples" from each for Kircher to work on)...

The sections are:

The large Herbal A/B section,
The Astrological Section,
The Balneological Section (featuring large numbers of naked women in sitz baths),
The Pharmaceutical Section
and the socalled Recipe Shorthand section)

with at least 10 different copyists' hands at work, and possibly in 2 dialects (Voynich A and Voynich B): the pages were apparently numbered in 1665-1666 by Kircher.

On the last page, Kircher seems to have written a coded cipher in Latin Letters of his own including the phrase in Germano-Latin

MICHITONOLADABASMULTOSCCCPORTAS

(removing the NULLS of ITONOLA and CCC possibly reduces to: mihi dabas multas portas: "to me Thou hast bestowed many gates")

Is this a CLUE to its decipherment...? One wonders if Kircher ever did get this book deciphered: apparenly he did not, but gave up after a few years.

There seems to be some evidence that the "VOYNICH MS" is not one book but at least FIVE smaller booklets that someone sewed together at a later date.

The curious undeciphered "letters" seem to be a combination of mediaeval Latin shorthand and Norse Runes and Guild symbols (e.g. the 4 gallows figures) and are sometimes grouped into 'words" either as single letters, double letters, triple letters, quadruple letters, quintuple letters and sometimes even sextuple groups of letters--and these words are separated by small spaces between them.

Some have suggested that these letters are not real "letters" in the modern sense but numbers, wheras others have postulated that they are "phonemes" or entire words or even short phrases.

The VMS is a FUN book to have around the house (I copied out the Herbal A and B sections by hand from the original, just to get a feel for the lettering----whoever these copyists were back in the 15th century, they must have had very tiny fingers, because the character sigils are very tiny and cause lots of cramping if you use a quill pen for long stretches at a time !!)

Considering the earliest crossbow is around 200BC (228 I think, but may be off there), it's not enough to discount Bacon. Though the hairdos comment is one I'm not so familiar with....so who knows.

Perhaps its a sort of Bible/Spellbook for an alchemical cult...of which Bacon (if he is one of the authors) was in? Just a thought.... I believe this cult or group developed their own language. Many of us (myself included) came up with our own languages as code to talk to friends... This group was perhaps no different. Likewise, they probably came up with their own symbols for known alchemical symbols as well.

It is truly a puzzle... Wasn't there a scientist who worked on it for about 4 years or so, and we never learned how that went?

I also at one point spent about 2 years poring through a copy of that thing; for the record, here's what I did and what I found:

a) if you have a full copy, there's about a 20 page section that's like an "index" to the plants, broken down by root types, leaf types, and stem types. there's also about 40-50 page section of plant drawings, and the plants all look like they're just glued together from components listed in the "component index" section.

I tried to find words or word stems that were repeated on both the page describing a particular plant, and on the parts in the index that looked like they were the same as the parts making up that plant; the hope was that I could start to at least find words for this or that kind of plant, and then see if those words ever showed up again in the pages of regular text.

This didn't go very far: I don't recall finding even one unambiguously matching word or word root, and the few "resemblances" I found were so ambiguous as to go nowhere productive; maybe with a good computer transcription and some powerful searching I could do better now, but at the time this seemed to be a dead end.

b) I went through the "astrological" pages and tried to figure out star names; this went almost nowhere, although I did get the word for the pleiades, I'm pretty sure: there's one page that pretty much has what looks to be the pleiades up there.

c) In general, I took a down-to-brass-tacks approach to the plain text -- the parts without pictures, etc -- and tried to find morphology, etc., but this also went nowhere very quickly. If it's a human language, the more familiar kinds of morphology -- ie, for verbs, indo-european style root + conjugation, altaic/ugric style root + suffixes -- are ruled out, possibly in favor of some sort of arabic-style vowel insertion, which I don't know how i'd recognize, or the even worse (for me) possibility of infixing, in which you'd say, say, "xay" for say in the present, but "xmuay" for say in the past, if you see what I'm saying.

After that, I basically gave up: the ways I thought I could make easy headway didn't pan out, and the brute-force approach didn't get anywhere, either.

-----

For the record, though, if it's not just a hoax, I suspect the origin is something like this:

person (A), a traveller in the far east in the 1500s or so, has an opportunity to make a copy of some far-eastern herbary, maybe also some kind of astrological stuff, or whatnot; I'd even guess the original copy is either in tibetan, mogolian, or manchu, but that's pushing my luck a bit. it's possible (A) would have had the intention of translating this book or books, but (A) probably didn't get around to it before dying or losing the book.

the belongings of person (A) eventually pass into the hands of some other person (B), including the book. at this point it may have been copied and compiled into a different volume -- as might be the case if the source text was a packet of scrolls (A) picked up in the east -- and probably copied by someone not familiar with the language and/or the script in which the books were written.

at this point, some years pass, and maybe one of (B)'s kids, hungry for money or whatnot, sell the book to John Dee, who in turn sells it to the prince, which is where the manuscript enters recorded history.

Basically, from working with it a bit it looks like someone took a script they didn't understand and/or a language they didn't understand, and miscopied it; the scripts used in various places out very far east are good candidates for the "source script", because if you miscopied them they'd wind up looking not that different from the voynich letters, and who knows how many copies-removed from the original source the voynich manuscript would be if this were the case.

------

That's why I quit working on the manuscript: i figure if it's a hoax, it's not really provable that it's a hoax and it'd be impossible to translate; if my hypothesis is right it might be possible to translate, but would be very near impossible because you'd be trying to translate a thoroughly miscopied book and script; if my hypothesis is wrong, I'll be happy to hear it, but I don't think I'll be the one who cracks it in that scenario.

If anyone's thinking of making a serious attempt at cracking it, there's a mailing list you should join, and I'll be happy to throw you links either to that or to stuff I've found if you ask; otherwise, the manuscript sure is a neat book -- find a full copy online if you can -- but I'd put good money on its not being translatable, even if it isn't a hoax.

There's been a lot of people claiming a lot of stuff about this manuscript...there are many that believe it is the writing of "fairies" , note small size of the book..below is interesting....


www.diac.com...

sisonek,
You wouldn't happen to have a full copy of the m/s that you could forward to me. I have only been able to get brief pages. I would love to study the whole thing. please let me know if you have anything.

thanks,

AL77zzz