A SMALL Spanish publishing house has won the right to print a limited number of copies of the world’s most mysterious book.
Currently held in a vault at Yale University, the centuries-old manuscript is written in a coded or unknown language that has defied the minds of the best cryptographers on the planet.
Generations of scholars have spent much of their lives trying to decipher the Voynich manuscript with its perplexing mix of elegant script and illustrations of naked women and strange plants. It has even beaten William Friedman, leader of the team that decoded the Japanese “Purple” cipher during Second World War.
Some have concluded that the book’s secrets must be magical or written by aliens. Others think it could be the work of Leonardo Da Vinci or monks threatened by the Inquisition. Others say that the failure of top cryptographers to crack the code means it must just be a hoax.
Interest in the book is so great that Yale has now agreed that Spanish publishing house Siloe can make facsimiles of the book.
“We thought that the facsimile would provide the look and feel of the original for those who were interested,” said Raymond Clemens, curator at Yale’s Beinecke library where the book is kept.
“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.”
COULD THE CODE NOW BE CRACKED?
For Siloe, which has tried for 10 years to gain permission to make the facsimiles, the decision is a triumph.
It has been sold the rights for 898 replicas of the manuscript which will be priced at £6,000 to £6,900 each.
Pre-orders already number 300 for the replicas which will include every hole, patched tear and stain in the parchment.
“Touching the Voynich is an experience,” said Siloe’s director Juan Jose Garcia.
“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.”
It will take over a year to make the copies from photographs of the original. They will be printed on special paper developed by the company to look like the original parchment.
“We call it the Voynich challenge,” said Garcia.
“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.”
With so many copies available it raises the possibility that at last someone will crack the code and reveal what the pages have kept hidden for so long.
WHO WROTE THE BOOK?
The book is named after Wilfred Voynich, the Polish antiquarian who brought it into the public eye after he bought it in 1912 from a collection owned by Jesuits in Italy.
It was originally thought to have been written by Roger Bacon, the 13th-century English Franciscan friar whose fascination with magic and alchemy landed him in prison.
That theory was discounted after carbon dating revealed it had been written between 1404 and 1448. The many illustrations of plants and herbs have led some to believe it is a study of medieval medicine but the only person so far to crack the code is Indiana Jones and that was in a novel.
Like its contents, the history of ownership of the manuscript is contested. It is possible it once belonged to Emperor Rudolph II of Germany, the Holy Roman Emperor from1576-1612, who bought it for 600 gold ducats, believing it to be the work of Bacon.
After some years and a few other owners it fell into the hands of the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher around 1666. After that there is no record of the book until it was found by Voynich.
In 1969, it was given to the Beinecke Library by a benefactor who had bought it from the estate of Ethel Voynich, Wilfrid’s widow.
WHAT COULD IT BE HIDING?
Every one of the 240 pages contains text which runs left to right without any obvious punctuation.
“The things we know as ‘grammatical markers’ – things that occur commonly at the beginning or end of words, such as ‘s’ or ‘d’ in our language, and that are used to express grammar, never appear in the middle of ‘words’ in the Voynich manuscript,” said Professor Gonzalo Rubio, of the University of Pennsylvania. “That’s unheard of for any Indo-European, Hungarian or Finnish language.”
However in 2013 it was announced that scientists had found linguistic patterns which they said proved it was not a hoax.
After many years of analysis, theoretical physicist Marcelo Montemurro, of Manchester University, said he believed the words in the text were meaningful.
“It’s not easy to dismiss the manuscript as simple nonsensical gibberish, as it shows a significant [linguistic] structure,” he said.
An unsolved code could hide almost anything according to Dr Craig Bauer, author of Secret History: The Story of Cryptology.
“It could solve a major crime, reveal buried treasure worth millions or in the case of the Voynich manuscript, rewrite the history of science,” he said.
IS IT REALLY NOT A HOAX?
In 2014 it was announced that Stephen Bax, Professor of Applied Linguistics at the University of Bedfordshire, had cracked some of the code using his knowledge of medieval manuscripts and Semitic languages like Arabic.
“The manuscript has a lot of illustrations of stars and plants,” he said. “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.”
Among the words he identified is the term for Taurus, beside a picture of seven stars which appear to be the Pleiades, and also the word Kantairon alongside a picture of the mediaeval herb Centaury as well as a number of other plants.
It is just a beginning but he believes it shows the book is not a hoax. “It is probably a treatise on nature, perhaps in a Near Eastern or Asian language,” he said.
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