The Voynich Manuscript is it truly a mysterious language or just a Gibbish???
What we KNOW for Sure about it.So far, the volume called the Voynich Manuscript is one of a kind. No other examples of the language are known to exist. It is known to be about four hundred years old through a fairly well documented chain of possession. It is thought to be somewhat older than that but the exact age is unknown. Everybody from Vatican researchers to ATT/Bell Labs as well as investigators at MIT and Yale University worked on translating the text. It was even gone over by a top team of British and American code breakers from World War 2. And all of them, so far, have failed. Botanists and biologists have tried to identify the plants in it and have been disappointed. The book is currently in the Rare Books Collections in the library at Yale. Its catalog number is MS408.
A description of the object.
The manuscript itself is some two hundred and thirty pages long, but it was a little longer as some pages have been lost. The overall size as presented is approximately six inches by nine inches, but many pages are larger and have been folded to fit the rest of the sheets. A vellum cover and leather bindings were added some time after its production. It was written and drawn by hand on parchment in several different colors of ink with the curving script of the text printed in black. The majority of the illustrations of plants and people and astrological signs have been hand colored with these basic colors. There are several different 'dialects' of basically the same 'language' in its pages which appear to have been written by five or six different scribes. More on the words and letters of the text later. The drawings of plants are carefully made as if they were done by a botanist, many showing root structure and veins in the leaves. The representations of people are almost crude by comparison, all appear to be female and the majority of which are nude. The astrological section includes what appear to be star maps and zodiacs with figures surrounding a central point. Another section shows containers with labels and ingredients and has been labeled the 'recipe section'.
Who did it, when and why?
The theories about its authorship abound. It is a straight up hoax, a fraud, a practical joke perpetrated on a sixteenth century collector. Somebody tried to translate Mongolian or Vietnamese into Latin, or vice versa. Aliens did it. It's from the Ancient Past or Distant Future. It's from The Central Library of Atlantis, and you can't imagine how much the overdue charge is going to be when it's returned.
And there are even more theories about its contents. Some claim it is an Alchemists manual and contains the secret to the Elixir of Life. The Jesuits were interested in it because they thought it might be religious in nature. There are several theories involving early, perhaps even prehistoric voyages to the Far East during which the authors tried to convey the local's culture and flora and fauna into Arabic. A letter that was found in the 'book' some time later that indicated the Emperor who had bought it from the dealer in the 1660's thought it had been written by Roger Bacon, an English monk and mystic who died around 1300 AD. There is no known evidence either in the manuscript or elsewhere as to the actual author or year of production.So do we consider it to be a mystry written by someone who was out of our world?
