The Voynich Manuscript is perhaps the world’s most famous and enduring cryptographic mystery. It is an ancient book of about 240 pages, written in a script unknown anywhere else, and illustrated with strange drawings of unfamiliar plants, cosmological scenes, astrological diagrams, and nude figures in various formations. It is named after a Polish-Lithuanian book dealer named Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it in 1912. Despite decades of frantic efforts and the use of advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, the Voynich Manuscript has not yet been fully, or even mostly, deciphered.

The fact that this enigma has remained unsolved for centuries does not diminish interest in it; rather, it amplifies its allure. The persistent failure to decipher it, instead of leading to abandonment or loss of interest, seems to increase the manuscript’s charm and attract continuous attention. This situation makes the manuscript the ultimate “cold case” in cryptology , a challenge that constantly pushes the boundaries of human creativity and computational capability. The impossibility of deciphering it becomes its central appeal, fueling speculation, fostering interdisciplinary research, and inviting new generations to engage with the puzzle. This ongoing mystery is key to the manuscript’s potential appeal, transforming it from a static historical object into a living, evolving enigma that actively invites collaborative participation and problem-solving.

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What is the Voynich Manuscrip?

The Mysterious Codex: Physical Characteristics, Dating, and Acquisition

The Voynich Codex is an ancient book, measuring approximately 22.5 × 16 cm (8.9 × 6.3 inches), and originally contained about 272 vellum leaves, of which about 240 (or 234) pages have been found. The manuscript is made of calfskin (vellum), a durable and expensive material. The text is written from left to right. The pigments used for the illustrations were considered relatively inexpensive but were typical for the period. Another notable feature is the presence of fold-out sections, a rare and beautiful characteristic for a medieval book.

Carbon-14 dating performed in 2009 unequivocally determined the vellum’s creation between 1404 and 1438, placing it in the early 15th century, during the early Renaissance period. This crucial scientific finding disproved popular and long-standing theories, such as the one attributing the manuscript’s authorship to the 13th-century English scientist Roger Bacon. This scientific determination, based on carbon-14 dating, serves as a critical filter in historical and cryptological research, providing tangible boundaries that guide and refine investigative approaches. It directs efforts toward more plausible directions, focusing on the manuscript’s internal characteristics and linguistic analysis, rather than romantic historical conjectures.

The manuscript’s place of creation is not known with certainty, but extensive research points to Central Europe , with stylistic analysis suggesting Northern Italy during the Renaissance. Clues supporting an Italian origin include architectural features (such as swallowtail merlons, common near Verona), a drawing of an archer wearing a Florentine hat, and similarities to alchemical herbals produced in Northern Italy in the 15th century.

The earliest probable owner of the manuscript was Carl Widemann, a physician and alchemist, who likely sold it to Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II in 1599 for 600 gold coins. Subsequently, it passed into the hands of scholars like Johannes Marcus Marci, who sent it to Athanasius Kircher in 1666 hoping he would decipher it. The manuscript then disappeared from records for about 200 years  before being rediscovered by Wilfrid Voynich in 1912 in a Jesuit college library in Italy. Today, it is housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.

A World of Unfamiliar Imagery: An Overview of the Manuscript’s Sections

The manuscript is conventionally divided into six sections based on its unique illustrations, as the text itself remains undeciphered.

The Botanical section is the largest, featuring 113 large, detailed, and colorful drawings of plants and herbs, with text carefully written around the illustrations. A major challenge is that many of these plants are “otherworldly” and cannot be unambiguously identified with known species, or they appear to be composites of different plants.

The Astronomical and Astrological section includes 12 pages of drawings depicting celestial bodies such as stars, the Sun, the Moon, and Zodiac symbols (e.g., Pisces, Taurus, Sagittarius). Some pages feature nude women intertwined with these celestial motifs.

The Biological/Balneological section contains numerous drawings of miniature nude women, often with swollen abdomens, immersed or wading in fluids and interacting unusually with interconnecting tubes and capsules. Some theories suggest this section relates to women’s health or gynecology, with the encryption possibly used to circumvent censorship on such sensitive topics during the medieval period.

The Cosmological section presents drawings of nine medallions filled with stars and other shapes, many spanning multiple folded folios, possibly representing geographical forms or cosmic diagrams.

The Pharmaceutical section returns to plants and herbs, often depicting medicinal plants alongside elaborate jars or bottles, with multiple types of herbs on a single page. This section differs from the Botanical section in its focus on preparation and application.

The Recipes/Continuous Text section contains no illustrations at all, but its text appears divided into many short paragraphs, suggesting the possibility that these are recipes, perhaps prepared with the aforementioned herbs.

The illustrations are the only visual context for the text, yet they are mostly unidentifiable or fantastical. This raises a fundamental question: were they intended to reveal the content (as in a typical herbal, where images aid identification) or to obscure it? If the manuscript is indeed a women’s health manual , then the encryption or ambiguity was deliberate, perhaps due to censorship on such sensitive topics in the Middle Ages. In this case, the “fantastical” plants and bathing women might be intentional camouflage, making the illustrations an integral part of the cipher itself, rather than a direct key to its interpretation. The illustrations, then, are not merely a visual component but active participants in the manuscript’s cryptographic challenge. They may encode information through their strangeness or serve as a highly effective distraction, making the “botanical-cyber” approach particularly relevant for examining their hidden meaning.

Why is the Voynich Manuscript So Difficult to Decipher?

The Stubborn Script: Peculiarities of “Voynichese” and Linguistic Anomalies

The script, known as “Voynichese,” is unique and does not correspond to any known language. It consists of 20-25 distinct characters (glyphs), with a few dozen rarer characters, and lacks clear punctuation.

Although the script appears to follow certain phonological or orthographic rules, these are highly unusual compared to known languages :

 * Character Distribution: Certain characters appear only at the beginning of a word, others only at the end (like Greek final sigma), and some exclusively in the middle of “words”.

 * Grammatical Markers: Professor Gonzalo Rubio notes that grammatical markers (like ‘s’ or ‘d’ in English) that typically appear at the beginning or end of words in Indo-European, Hungarian, or Finnish languages, never appear in the middle of words in the Voynich Manuscript. This phenomenon is “unheard of” in these language families.

 * Word Length: Most words consistently range between two and ten letters, with an average length of 5.5 glyphs, and an underrepresentation of unusually short or long words. This binomial distribution is atypical for natural languages, which tend to frequently use short words, creating an asymmetric distribution.

 * Repetitions: There are instances where the same common word appears up to five times in a row. Words differing by only one letter also repeat with unusual frequency. This unique repetition pattern causes decipherments based on simple substitution ciphers to yield “babble-like text”.

 * Smooth Flow of Writing: The smooth and consistent flow of the writing (ductus) gives the impression that the symbols were not enciphered during writing, as there is no delay between characters typically expected in encoded written text. A 2020 study identified the manuscript as the work of five scribes, all of whom were likely quite familiar with the unusual script, as they made few mistakes.

Statistical analyses  present a fundamental contradiction: the text obeys Zipf’s Law , a strong indicator of genuine linguistic structure, yet other characteristics (unusual word length distribution, high repetition patterns, strict character placement rules, strange word co-occurrence patterns) are highly unnatural for known languages. This leads to a deeper question: Is it a real language, albeit unknown; a highly complex cipher; or a sophisticated “hoax language” carefully designed to mimic a real language for the purpose of a prank?  The argument that a 15th-century forger could intentionally create a text conforming to Zipf’s Law (discovered centuries later) is considered highly improbable. This points to a deliberate and complex system, whether linguistic or cryptographic, that challenges our definitions of language and code.

The Missing Key: Absence of a Rosetta Stone and Historical Context Gaps

A fundamental challenge in deciphering the Voynich Manuscript is the complete absence of an external source or “Rosetta Stone” that could provide a key or context for decipherment.

 * History Gaps: The manuscript’s origin, author, and purpose remain debated, and there is a significant 200-year gap in its historical documentation after it was in the possession of Athanasius Kircher in the 17th century. This lack of information about its origin and historical context further complicates efforts to understand its intended meaning or the circumstances of its creation.

 * Extraneous Writing: Only a handful of words in the manuscript are believed to be written in known scripts (Latin, High German, possibly Arabic/Greek). These include a sequence of Latin letters on folio 1r, a line of Latin script on folio 17r, the High German phrase “der Mussteil” on folio 66r, names of ten months (from March to December) in Latin script (with medieval spellings) in the astronomical section (folios 70v–73v), and four lines of distorted Latin script (“Michitonese”) on folio 116v. However, these isolated instances do not provide enough context or a consistent pattern to decipher the entire text.

The absence of a known key, coupled with the manuscript’s unique script and enigmatic illustrations, clearly indicates a deliberate intention for secrecy or ambiguity. If the manuscript is indeed a “knowledge book” containing secret information , then its encryption has been exceptionally successful in protecting its “secret knowledge” for centuries. If, on the other hand, it is a sophisticated hoax , then the lack of a key ensures its baffling nature and perpetuates the illusion of hidden meaning. The recent discovery of hidden notes and decipherment attempts by Johannes Marcus Marci  shows that even early owners struggled, indicating that the ambiguity was effective from very early stages. This suggests that the manuscript was designed to be unreadable without a specific key, whether for protection or deception.

The Enigmatic Flora: Unidentifiable Botanical Illustrations and Their Role in the Mystery

The largest section of the manuscript is dedicated to botanical drawings, but a significant challenge is that most of the 113 depicted plants are “otherworldly” and cannot be unambiguously identified with known species.

 * Composite Nature: Many of the plant drawings appear to be composite, with roots from one species, leaves from another, and flowers from a third. This prevents the use of the illustrations as a reliable guide to the text’s content, as they do not correspond to real-world botanical knowledge. This is a critical deviation from typical medieval herbals.

 * Speculation on Purpose: While the overall impression suggests a pharmacopoeia or a work on medieval/early modern medicine , the puzzling details of the illustrations have fueled many theories without leading to a definitive understanding. Some researchers believe the plants were entirely invented, perhaps as a way for the author to hide secrets in plain sight.

The unidentifiable and composite nature of the plants  poses a major obstacle to traditional decipherment (e.g., using images as direct clues or translation aids). However, from a “cyber” or cryptographic perspective, this “noise” or “unreality” could be a deliberate feature of the manuscript’s design. If the manuscript is a hoax, the imaginary plants serve to confuse and thwart decipherment attempts. If it is an encrypted knowledge book , those same fantastical elements might be a form of steganography or a visual cipher layer, intended to distract, mislead, or even encode information through their strangeness or combination. This makes the botanical section fertile ground for AI analysis, searching for patterns within the “noise” rather than relying on external identification.

AI and “Cyber”: New Frontiers in Deciphering the Ancient Code

Computational Cryptanalysis: Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Approaches

The Voynich Manuscript is a prime target for modern computational methods due to its persistent resistance to human efforts. Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) algorithms are being applied to analyze the text and illustrations from entirely new perspectives.

 * Botanical Pattern Analysis: Do the Plants “Speak” Code?

   Teams worldwide are attempting to analyze botanical patterns in the illustrations and find statistical correlations between them and the appearance of specific words or “glyphs” in the text [User Query]. This involves treating the images themselves as complex data points for pattern recognition, and examining whether AI can identify specific botanical “signatures” linked to particular sections [User Query].

 * Glyph Frequency and Pattern Recognition: AI’s Search for Structure

   AI algorithms are particularly powerful at identifying subtle patterns undetectable by humans [User Query]. They analyze various text characteristics such as glyph frequency, word lengths, word distribution, and repetition patterns – all standard tools in modern cryptanalysis [User Query]. Statistical analyses have consistently shown that Voynich text obeys Zipf’s Law, a fundamental property of natural languages where word frequency decreases in a predictable, orderly manner. This suggests a structured language, not random gibberish.

However, other statistical characteristics are highly unusual for natural languages: a binomial word length distribution (underrepresentation of very short and very long words), high frequency of consecutive word repetitions, and specific character placement rules. AI’s ability to identify complex statistical patterns in the Voynich Manuscript is indeed impressive, as evidenced by the recognition of Zipf’s Law. However, pattern recognition (like 80% of words appearing in a Hebrew dictionary) does not automatically equate to meaningful translation or semantic understanding. This highlights the fundamental challenge of decipherment: moving from statistical correlation and structural identification to consistent and verifiable comprehension. AI can identify how something is structured, but not what it means without a “ground truth,” a known key, or external contextual validation. This is the central limitation of AI in fully deciphering the Voynich Manuscript.

 * The Hebrew Hypothesis: The University of Alberta AI Research and Its Implications

   Professor Greg Kondrak’s team at the University of Alberta used AI and natural language processing to analyze the manuscript. Their algorithmic decipherment system, after being tested on 380 different translations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (and achieving 97% accuracy in language identification), initially suspected Arabic as the Voynich Manuscript’s source language.

   However, the AI analysis ultimately pointed to Hebrew as the most likely source language, outperforming other potential matches that were not commonly used in writing during the Middle Ages. The researchers hypothesized that the cipher applied to the Hebrew language could be an example of alphabetically ordered anagrams (alphagrams), involving the rearrangement of letter order in words while omitting vowels.

Wrapping Up with Key Insights

In an attempt to unscramble the first 10 pages of the manuscript using their AI, the results were mixed. Computational linguist Greg Kondrak noted that “over 80 percent of the words were in a Hebrew dictionary, but we didn’t know if they made sense together”. For example: the AI translated the first words of the manuscript as: “She made recommendations to the priest, man of the house and me and people,” a sentence Kondrak found “a kind of strange sentence to start a manuscript, but it definitely makes sense”. In the opening section of the “Herbal” chapter, which contains drawings of several types of plants, botany-related terms such as “farmer,” “light,” “air,” and “fire” appeared.

   Challenges: The team struggled to find Hebrew scholars to validate their findings and eventually had to use Google Translate for initial checks. They acknowledge that the results could be interpreted either as “tantalizing clues” for Hebrew as the source language or simply as “artifacts of the combinatorial power of anagramming and language models”. A full, independently verified decipherment has not yet been achieved.

   The AI-driven “Hebrew” hypothesis from the University of Alberta  represents a significant step forward in applying modern computational power to the Voynich Manuscript. However, it also highlights a critical limitation: the “black box” nature of AI. While AI can suggest a language and a cipher method, validating its output for meaningful translation requires deep human expertise (Hebrew scholars, historians). The team’s difficulty in finding Hebrew scholars and their reliance on Google Translate  underscore this gap. This points to the indispensable need for interdisciplinary collaboration between computational linguists and domain experts for true decipherment, as AI can identify patterns but cannot yet provide the contextual and semantic understanding necessary for validating meaning.

Historical Cryptography and Knowledge Encryption: The Voynich as a “Cold Case”

The Voynich Manuscript is presented as the ultimate example of “encrypted knowledge” and “historical cryptography”. It raises the profound question: Is it possible that a 15th-century individual created a cipher so complex that even today’s most brilliant codebreakers and most advanced tools cannot break it? 

 * Evolution of Cryptography: The constant battle between those who seek to encrypt data and those who seek to break these ciphers has made modern encryption methods extremely powerful, with equally sophisticated breaking tools. The Voynich Manuscript challenges this historical progression by resisting modern methods.

 * Early Attempts: Historical figures like Athanasius Kircher, a renowned 17th-century scholar and expert in ancient languages, failed to decipher it, highlighting the immense challenge it posed even to the most learned minds of his era. This demonstrates its cryptographic strength long before modern computing.

 * 20th-Century Efforts: Leading cryptographers, including William Friedman, the first chief cryptologist of the NSA and a key figure in World War II codebreaking, dedicated years to the Voynich but ultimately failed. Friedman’s observations of frequent word repetitions led him to hypothesize that it was not an encrypted text but an unknown human language, perhaps an artificial one like Esperanto.

 * Comparison to Other Encrypted Books: Research comparing the Voynich to over 100 other known encrypted books reveals its uniqueness. It is one of the oldest known encrypted books, and by far the oldest that remains undeciphered. With the exception of the Voynich, all other undeciphered cryptograms on the list were created in the last 100 years.

 * Hoax vs. Knowledge Book: Comparative studies suggest that the most convincing explanations for its purpose are either a “knowledge book” (e.g., related to medicine, magic, or alchemy) or a “hoax”. Its adherence to Zipf’s Law strongly refutes a simple hoax, as it is highly improbable that a 15th-century forger could intentionally create such a complex statistical pattern, especially since the law was discovered centuries later. However, it is worth noting that some hoaxes (like “Steganographia”) were only recently broken after baffling scholars for centuries.

The unprecedented resistance of the Voynich Manuscript to centuries of decipherment attempts by brilliant minds and advanced tools  makes it an exceptional case study in cryptographic resilience. It challenges the common assumption that older ciphers are inherently simpler. Its unique statistical properties, if indeed not a natural language, suggest a highly sophisticated, perhaps innovative, encryption method for its time. This makes it a historical “acid test” for how effectively knowledge can be encrypted and protected over long periods, even against unforeseen future technologies like AI. It highlights the persistent challenge of codebreaking without known plaintext or a key.

“Advances” and “Insights”: The Ongoing Journey for Meaning

Theories That “Almost” Deciphered the Code: A Review of Prominent Decipherment Attempts

Over the centuries, many theories have emerged regarding the manuscript’s nature and content, ranging from it being a natural language, a constructed language, an undeciphered code, or a complex hoax.

 * William Romaine Newbold (1921): One of the earliest prominent efforts. Newbold hypothesized that the visible text was meaningless, but that each apparent “letter” was constructed of a series of tiny markings discernible only under magnification. These markings were supposedly based on ancient Greek shorthand, forming a second, hidden level of script that contained the true content of the writing. He claimed this decipherment revealed Roger Bacon’s authorship and documented his use of a compound microscope four centuries before its invention. Criticism: Newbold’s theory was quickly disproved by later scholars who found that his “tiny markings” were simply natural cracks in the ink on the animal skin pages, and that his interpretations were inconsistent and subjective.

 * Stephen Bax’s Partial Decipherment (2014): Professor Stephen Bax proposed a “bottom-up” approach to decipherment, focusing on identifying individual words by correlating text with corresponding illustrations, similar to methods successfully used to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs and Cretan Linear B.

   * Claims: Bax tentatively identified 10 words, comprising fourteen Voynich symbols and clusters, based on illustrations of one constellation (Taurus) and seven plants. Examples include “juniper” (from “oror,” possibly borrowed from Hebrew/Arabic “arar”), “Taurus” (from “doary”), “coriander” (“keerodal”), “centaury” (“kydain”), “hellebore” (“kaur”), and “Nigella Sativa”. He suggested the script might be an abjad (omitting most vowels) or have syllabic elements. Bax concluded that the manuscript is not a hoax but an explanatory treatise on the natural world, and perhaps encodes a previously unwritten language from the Near East, Caucasus, or Asia.

   * Criticisms: Numerous criticisms were leveled against Bax’s theory by the Voynich community.

     * Statistical Inconsistency: His claim that certain glyphs (EVA ‘p’, ‘t’, ‘k’, ‘f’) simultaneously map to plaintext ‘C’ or ‘K’ contradicts statistical evidence regarding initial letters on herbal pages.

     * Unsystematic Alphabet: The idea of three distinct Voynich characters (EVA r, m, n) all enciphering the letter ‘R’ is seen as “unsystematic” and a “giant Red Flag of Non-Believability”.

     * Selective and Unconvincing Word Identifications: Critics accuse Bax of selectively interpreting words like “oror” for ‘juniper’, ignoring contradictory evidence or common patterns, and relying on unreliable plant identifications.

     * Lack of Response: Bax was criticized for his unwillingness to respond to challenges from researchers who had studied the manuscript in detail.

     * Internal Contradictions: Carmen points out contradictions, such as Bax claiming the writing is unknown but later stating it is borrowed from Arabic and Hebrew, or claiming vowels are omitted (as in an abjad) while vowels ‘a’ and ‘o’ appear in the manuscript.

   Bax’s theory , while methodologically sound in its “bottom-up” approach, demonstrates a common pitfall in decipherment efforts: the human tendency to find patterns and make connections, even when underlying evidence is weak or contradictory. The extensive criticisms  highlight the critical importance of statistical rigor, internal consistency, and meticulous peer validation in cryptanalysis. Without a known key or external reference, any “decipherment” risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy based on confirmation bias or selective interpretation. This underscores why the Voynich Manuscript remains undeciphered – it’s not just about finding a pattern, but finding the correct pattern that applies consistently to the entire text and can be independently verified.

Statistical Footprints of Language: Zipf’s Law and Other Linguistic Patterns

 * Zipf’s Law: One of the strongest clues suggesting that Voynich text is a real language, rather than random gibberish or a simple hoax, is its adherence to Zipf’s Law. This law states that the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table (e.g., the most frequent word appears approximately twice as often as the second most frequent, three times as often as the third, and so on). This pattern holds true for a surprisingly long time in almost all known natural languages.

   * Implication: The fact that Voynich text obeys Zipf’s Law with impressive precision, despite the law being discovered centuries after its creation, makes the possibility of it being a simple hoax highly improbable. This strongly suggests a deliberate and structured linguistic system underlying the text.

 * Morphological Patterns: Analysis of Voynich text has revealed that related words share similar morphological patterns, either in their prefixes or suffixes. This indicates a strong connection between word structure (morphology) and meaning (semantics) within any code or language in the manuscript. This characteristic is reminiscent of scripts like Chinese and ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, where the graphical form of words directly derives from their meaning.

 * Word Co-occurrence Patterns: Statistical analyses show that identical or similarly spelled words frequently appear in close proximity within the manuscript. This contextual dependency exists in natural languages but is described as “more comprehensive” in the Voynich Manuscript, differing significantly from typical linguistic systems.

 * Positional Features: The text exhibits unusual positional features within lines and paragraphs:

   * In 86% of cases, the first word in a paragraph is highlighted by an additional “gallow glyph” (h, k, g, f) as its first symbol.

   * Words in the first line of a paragraph are, on average, longer (6.3 glyphs) compared to the overall average (5.0 glyphs), suggesting that word position within a paragraph or line is encoded to some extent in the words themselves.

   * The second word in a line is often shorter than the first (48% vs. 32% longer), implying that word position within a paragraph or line is encoded to some extent in the words themselves.

The combination of adherence to Zipf’s Law (a strong indicator of natural language) with highly unnatural internal statistical properties (unusual word length distribution, high repetitions, specific word co-occurrence patterns, and strict positional features)  creates a compelling argument for the “algorithmic generation” hypothesis. This theory suggests that the text was generated not as a direct transcription of a natural language, but through a set of rules or an algorithm, perhaps involving permutations of glyph sequences. Such a method would explain both the apparent linguistic structure and the strange anomalies, and importantly, such methods were likely feasible in the early 15th century.

Uncovering Hidden Clues: Recent Discoveries from Multispectral Imaging

Modern technology continues to reveal new insights into the Voynich Manuscript, even if not full decipherments.

 * Hidden Letters: Multispectral imaging revealed previously hidden columns of letters on the first page of the manuscript. These include two columns bearing letters from the Roman alphabet and one column of unreadable “Voynichese” characters.

 * Early Decipherment Attempt: Lisa Fagin Davis, who studied these multispectral images, identified the handwriting of the hidden letters as belonging to Johannes Marcus Marci, the Prague physician who owned the manuscript between 1662 and 1665.

 * Marci’s Intent: While Marci’s specific reasons for writing these columns are unknown, Davis speculates that he might have been attempting to decrypt the text using two different substitution ciphers, or that he was developing his own cipher using Voynich characters. This discovery adds to our understanding of his intellectual involvement with the manuscript and his efforts to understand its secrets.

 * Future Potential: Some scans still show faded text, suggesting that there are more discoveries yet to be revealed through this advanced imaging technology. This highlights the ongoing potential of technology to uncover new physical clues.