THE MOST MYSTERIOUS SCRIPT ON EARTH

Aarohi Wankhede
3 min readFeb 26, 2023

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The Voynich Manuscript

For about 600 years this undeciphered manuscript has baffled scholars, cryptographers, physicists, historians and computer scientists all over the world. The Voynich Manuscript is a 234 page manuscript written in about the 15th century that has scripts and drawings that have not yet been deciphered. It consists of peculiar drawings of abstruse plants, astrological symbols, and nude women. This script is named after an antiquarian bookseller, Wilfrid M. Voynich.

This script is assumed to have 6 sections in the following order:

1) BOTANY- It features drawings of 113 anonymous plants.

2) ASTRONOMY and ASTROLOGY-Its contains celestial charts, sketches of suns, moons, planets, and stars, all the zodiac symbols, and nude females appearing from varying structures.

3) BIOLOGY- It contains drawings of nude females with swollen bellies bathing in fluids, using tubes (no one knows why?) and swallowing capsules.

4) COSMOLOGY- It consists of nine drawings of medallions, some drawn in folded parchments of the script to depict probable geographical forms of the early universe.

5) MEDICINAL-It has more than 100 drawings for medicinal herbs and plants kept in jars.

6) MISCELLANEOUS-It has continuing parchments of writing (possibly recipes), and star shaped flower drawings.

The above topics are just predictions made by historians based on the pictures and diagrams.

HISTORY OF VOYNICH SCRIPT

The script has been passed from people to people and it has also disappeared amid the history. Following is a flowchart representing the ownership of the manuscript.

John Dee, an English astrologer

↓ (in 1665)

Emperor Rudolf II of Germany

(It is believe that Rudolf bought that script for 600 gold ducats)

↓ (in1622)

Jacobus Horcicky de Tepenecz, personal doctor of Emperor Rudolf II

Then the script has no record to be passed on. However we are able to find that script again in the historical record.

Johannes Marcus Marci, a doctor, scientist, head of the University of Prague, and official physician to the Holy Roman Emperors.

↓ (in 1666)

Athanasius Kircher, a German Jesuit scholar and polymath

Once Again the script disappears and is found

Jesuit College at Frascati near Rome

↓ (in 1912)

Wilfrid M. Voynich

H. P. Kraus, an Austrian-born book dealer

↓ (in1969)

Beinecke Library at Yale University, New Haven in Connecticut

SCIENTISTS AND THEIR THEORIES ON THE VOYNICH SCRIPT

  1. William Newbold-In 1921, William Newbold who was a philosopher at the University of Pennsylvania believed that every character of the script meant something in proper magnification.
  2. Grek Kondrok and his student Bradley Haurer — Grek Kondrok, a computer scientist at the University of Alberta and his student Bradley Haurer stated that the content was jumbled Hebrew.
  3. The Turkish Engineer-A Turkish Engineer and his son believe that the script is a Turkish dialect.
  4. Anthropologist in California- He stated that the script is in a vulgar Latin dialect.
  5. And earlier in the year, Gerard Cheshire, an academic at the University of Bristol, published a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Romance Studies arguing the script is a mix of languages he called “proto-Romance.”

This manuscript till date remains undeciphered as there are no specific proofs for most of the theories thus continuing to remain inexplicable.

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