• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

The Voynich Manuscript

I don't think I was being particularly original when I suggested a Mayan connection on page two of this thread. 8)
 
JamesWhitehead said:
I don't think I was being particularly original when I suggested a Mayan connection on page two of this thread. 8)
Click to expand...

Smart arse :D
 
Remember this?

Publisher wins rights to Voynich manuscript, a book no one can read
Tiny Spanish publisher can clone centuries-old manuscript written in language or code that no one has cracked
Agence France-Presse
Sunday 21 August 2016 06.31 BST

It’s one of the world’s most mysterious books, a centuries-old manuscript written in an unknown or coded language that no one has cracked.
Scholars have spent their lives puzzling over the Voynich manuscript, whose intriguing mix of elegant writing and drawings of strange plants and naked women has some believing it holds magical powers.

The weathered book is locked away in a vault at Yale university’s Beinecke library, emerging only occasionally.
But after a 10-year appeal for access, Siloe, a small publishing house in northern Spain has secured the right to clone the document – to the delight of its director.

“Touching the Voynich is an experience,” says Juan Jose Garcia, sitting on the top floor of a book museum in the quaint centre of Burgos where Siloe’s office is, a few streets from the city’s famed Gothic cathedral.
“It’s a book that has such an aura of mystery that when you see it for the first time ... it fills you with an emotion that is very hard to describe.”

Siloe, which specialises in making facsimiles of old manuscripts, has bought the rights to make 898 exact replicas of the Voynich – so faithful that every stain, hole, sewn-up tear in the parchment will be reproduced.

The company always publishes 898 replicas of each work it clones – a number which is a palindrome – after the success of its first facsimile of which they made 696 copies.
The publishing house plans to sell the facsimiles for €7,000 to €8,000 (£6,000 to £6,900) apiece. Nearly 300 people have already put in pre-orders.

Raymond Clemens, curator at the Beinecke library, said Yale decided to have facsimiles done because of the many people who want to consult the fragile manuscript.
“We thought that the facsimile would provide the look and feel of the original for those who were interested,” he said.
“It also enables libraries and museums to have a copy for instructional purposes and we will use the facsimile ourselves to show the manuscript outside of the library to students or others who might be interested.”

The manuscript is named after antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich who bought it in about 1912 from a collection of books belonging to the Jesuits in Italy, and eventually propelled it into the public eye.

Theories abound about who wrote it and what it means.
For a long time, it was believed to be the work of 13th century English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon whose interest in alchemy and magic landed him in jail.
But that theory was discarded when the manuscript was carbon dated and found to have originated between 1404 and 1438.

Others point to a young Leonardo da Vinci, someone who wrote in code to escape the Inquisition, an elaborate joke or even an alien who left the book behind when leaving Earth.

The plants drawn have never been identified, the astronomical charts don’t reveal much. The women also offer few clues.
Scores have tried to decode the Voynich, including top cryptologists such as William Friedman who helped break Japan’s “Purple” cipher during the second world war.

The only person to have made any headway is Indiana Jones. The fictitious archeologist manages to crack it in a novel.

Fiction aside, the Beinecke library gets thousands of emails every month from people claiming to have decoded it, says Rene Zandbergen, a space engineer who runs a recognised blog on the manuscript, which he has consulted several times.
“More than 90% of all the access to their digital library is only for the Voynich manuscript,” he said.

Only slightly bigger than a paperback, the book contains more than 200 pages including several large fold-outs.
It will take Siloe about 18 months to make the first facsimiles, in a painstaking process that started in April when a photographer took detailed snaps of the original in Yale.

Workers at Siloe are now making mock-ups before they finally set about printing out the pages in a way that makes the script and drawings look like the real thing.

The paper they use – made from a paste developed by the company – has been given a special treatment so it feels like the stiff parchment used to write the Voynich.

Once printed, the pages are put together and made to look older.
All the imperfections are re-created using special tools in a process kept firmly secret by Garcia, who in his spare time has also tried his hand at cryptology.
“We call it the Voynich challenge,” he said.
“My business partner ... says the author of the Voynich could also have been a sadist, as he has us all wrapped up in this mystery.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...ights-voynich-manuscript-book-no-one-can-read
 
rynner2 said:
Remember this?

Publisher wins rights to Voynich manuscript, a book no one can read
Tiny Spanish publisher can clone centuries-old manuscript written in language or code that no one has cracked
Agence France-Presse
Sunday 21 August 2016 06.31 BST

It’s one of the world’s most mysterious books, a centuries-old manuscript written in an unknown or coded language that no one has cracked.
Scholars have spent their lives puzzling over the Voynich manuscript, whose intriguing mix of elegant writing and drawings of strange plants and naked women has some believing it holds magical powers.

The weathered book is locked away in a vault at Yale university’s Beinecke library, emerging only occasionally.
But after a 10-year appeal for access, Siloe, a small publishing house in northern Spain has secured the right to clone the document – to the delight of its director.

“Touching the Voynich is an experience,” says Juan Jose Garcia, sitting on the top floor of a book museum in the quaint centre of Burgos where Siloe’s office is, a few streets from the city’s famed Gothic cathedral.
“It’s a book that has such an aura of mystery that when you see it for the first time ... it fills you with an emotion that is very hard to describe.”

Siloe, which specialises in making facsimiles of old manuscripts, has bought the rights to make 898 exact replicas of the Voynich – so faithful that every stain, hole, sewn-up tear in the parchment will be reproduced.

The company always publishes 898 replicas of each work it clones – a number which is a palindrome – after the success of its first facsimile of which they made 696 copies.
The publishing house plans to sell the facsimiles for €7,000 to €8,000 (£6,000 to £6,900) apiece. Nearly 300 people have already put in pre-orders.

Raymond Clemens, curator at the Beinecke library, said Yale decided to have facsimiles done because of the many people who want to consult the fragile manuscript.
“We thought that the facsimile would provide the look and feel of the original for those who were interested,” he said.
“It also enables libraries and museums to have a copy for instructional purposes and we will use the facsimile ourselves to show the manuscript outside of the library to students or others who might be interested.”

The manuscript is named after antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich who bought it in about 1912 from a collection of books belonging to the Jesuits in Italy, and eventually propelled it into the public eye.

Theories abound about who wrote it and what it means.
For a long time, it was believed to be the work of 13th century English Franciscan friar Roger Bacon whose interest in alchemy and magic landed him in jail.
But that theory was discarded when the manuscript was carbon dated and found to have originated between 1404 and 1438.

Others point to a young Leonardo da Vinci, someone who wrote in code to escape the Inquisition, an elaborate joke or even an alien who left the book behind when leaving Earth.

The plants drawn have never been identified, the astronomical charts don’t reveal much. The women also offer few clues.
Scores have tried to decode the Voynich, including top cryptologists such as William Friedman who helped break Japan’s “Purple” cipher during the second world war.

The only person to have made any headway is Indiana Jones. The fictitious archeologist manages to crack it in a novel.

Fiction aside, the Beinecke library gets thousands of emails every month from people claiming to have decoded it, says Rene Zandbergen, a space engineer who runs a recognised blog on the manuscript, which he has consulted several times.
“More than 90% of all the access to their digital library is only for the Voynich manuscript,” he said.

Only slightly bigger than a paperback, the book contains more than 200 pages including several large fold-outs.
It will take Siloe about 18 months to make the first facsimiles, in a painstaking process that started in April when a photographer took detailed snaps of the original in Yale.

Workers at Siloe are now making mock-ups before they finally set about printing out the pages in a way that makes the script and drawings look like the real thing.

The paper they use – made from a paste developed by the company – has been given a special treatment so it feels like the stiff parchment used to write the Voynich.

Once printed, the pages are put together and made to look older.
All the imperfections are re-created using special tools in a process kept firmly secret by Garcia, who in his spare time has also tried his hand at cryptology.
“We call it the Voynich challenge,” he said.
“My business partner ... says the author of the Voynich could also have been a sadist, as he has us all wrapped up in this mystery.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...ights-voynich-manuscript-book-no-one-can-read
Click to expand...
Talking of strange plants, I'm not sure where this should be posted but I've just nicked one of these from someone's front garden hedge ..

https://www.neatwholesale.co.uk/pas...dRfL2OQEYc_5Sc4C5zK90qiVuk_wXl_M08aAkMM8P8HAQ
 
A couple of years ago there were claims that the mystery had been solved and that the mysterious plants were representations of the native flora of Mexico and the language was a now extinct dialect of Nahuatl from central Mexico. Sadly, as all native speakers of that language are long dead and there is no "Rosetta stone" to aid translation, the exact meaning of the script may never be known. I do quite like the notion of it being an Aztec Herbalist's encyclopedia though.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/07/new-clue-voynich-manuscript-mystery
 
Scans of the complete Voynich Manuscript are available freely online. At least one cheeky so-and-so has downloaded them and sells them on disc at £5 a pop on Ebay.

The article avoids specifiying the printing-method, which is probably Giclée - an upmarket form of the dreaded ink-jet!

The resolution needs to be 300 dpi or above. - any modern scanner will do that easily with capacity to spare. Of course the online images are in compressed format but they should print out fairly well. The choice of paper is important, as the article makes clear.

Lastly a top-of-the-range printer is important. The Epson UltraChrome K3 seems to lead the field and will set you back £2,500 new or about £1,000 second-hand.

It may not be such a status-symbol as the published version but you will now have a press for half the price of a book! :glee:
 
Last edited:
JamesWhitehead said:
I remember that idea, which seemed promising, especially since the illustrations are very like those in transcriptions of other codices from South America.
Click to expand...

That's weird since the manuscript was apparently from Europe originally......so how did someone in the 15th century learn this ancient language from across the ocean then write a strange book with pics...?
And why ?
o_O
 
dr wu said:
That's weird since the manuscript was apparently from Europe originally......so how did someone in the 15th century learn this ancient language from across the ocean then write a strange book with pics...?
And why ?
o_O
Click to expand...

There has long been speculation that the Vikings, known for reaching North America, may well have ventured South along the coast, as far as Meso America. Aztec tales of pale skinned, bearded, warriors coming over the ocean on 'serpent-headed rafts' is gloriously evocative of Viking longships.
 
blessmycottonsocks said:
There has long been speculation that the Vikings, known for reaching North America, may well have ventured South along the coast, as far as Meso America. Aztec tales of pale skinned, bearded, warriors coming over the ocean on 'serpent-headed rafts' is gloriously evocative of Viking longships.
Click to expand...

Yes....I've heard that before, but I'm not sure how that translates to someone learning an obscure language from ancient American Indians and then creating an extremely esoteric manuscript based on that language.
My impression, from reading about it many years ago, has always been that it was a coded text created by someone just for that piece of work.
What I find hard to fathom is why with all the computer assistance it hasn't been decoded.
 
Dr wu,

...My impression, from reading about it many years ago, has always been that it was a coded text created by someone just for that piece of work...

What I find heard to understand is why should anyone go to all that trouble to create such a thing if no one else could read it. ?

Even something written in a code is usually part of a dialogue between at least two people.

INT21

Edited to correct typo 'herd'.
 
Last edited:
"with all the computer assistance it hasn't been decoded."

For exactly the same reason that the Vinca script, Linear A, Cretan hieroglyphs, the Easter Island script, several mesoamerican scripts and loads of others have never been decoded. They are all the written forms of long extinct languages with no key translation or parallel text available. Without the Rosetta Stone, we would not have today's understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
 
Surely this is a massively-significant discovery to have made about the Voynich? How on earth did I miss this back in 2014?

I do hope this hasn't been discredited, as it sounds quite persuasive...

http://www.livescience.com/43542-voynich-manuscript-10-words-cracked.html

A researcher claims he's decoded 10 possible words in the famously unreadable Voynich manuscript, which has eluded interpretation for a century...
Click to expand...

Now Stephen Bax, a professor of applied linguistics at the University of Bedfordshire in England, says he's deciphered 14 characters of the script and can read a handful of items in the Voynich text, such as the words for coriander, hellebore and juniper next to drawings of the plants. He says he's also picked out the word for Taurus written beside an illustration of the Pleiades, a star cluster in the constellation Taurus.
Click to expand...

"I hit on the idea of identifying proper names in the text, following historic approaches which successfully deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs and other mystery scripts, and I then used those names to work out part of the script," Bax said in a statement.

"The manuscript has a lot of illustrations of stars and plants," Bax added. "I was able to identify some of these, with their names, by looking at mediaeval herbal manuscripts in Arabic and other languages, and I then made a start on a decoding, with some exciting results."
Click to expand...

 
I've now skim-watched Dr Stephen Bax's utterly-superb video above, and I'm completely convinced that he has made fantastic scientific progress on decoding the Voynich script.

His primary method is the attempted matching of era-correct proper names for the depicted plants, but corroborating this with what appear to be certain appended alternative names foot-noted below the illustrations (so, by analogy he's adducing the 'latin' botanic names with putative 'folk' names) but doing this within a convincing projection as to the likely geographic and archeosociological/linguistic contexts.

The guy is an utter genius, with solid credentials, full scientific peer reviews and he's a clear & convincing speaker. This is very nearly a Rosetta Stone effect, a decode made from matching the script to peoples, plants and planets.

Wow. Just completely amazing...the Voynich is NOT a hoax, it's almost certainly a long-dead Arabic/Near Eastern/Caucasian unwritten language, a dialectum insula that's been shared only between a small number of users.

And did you know it was already a well-established fact that more than one 'hand' was involved in writing the Voynich original?

Amazing. His website (more than 200k unique visitors, increment that figure now)

https://stephenbax.net

And a link to a PDF of his main thesis...

http://stephenbax.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Voynich-a-provisional-partial-decoding-BAX.pdf
 
Last edited:
I don't have time to look at the website but that makes it sound like a substituion cipher.
 
I think its a substitution cipher but with added 'noise' characters giving the repetitious effect.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top