The world has a fascination for ancient manuscripts, such as those written by Nostradamus, in addition to codes such as those broken by the enigma machine. We are maybe more aware of these codes and mysteries thanks to Dan Brown's book The Da Vinci Code. One such manuscript has the modern code breakers, language experts and historians baffled. The Voynich Manuscript. The Voynich Manuscript is considered to be 'The Most Mysterious Manuscript in the World'. To this day this medieval artifact resists all efforts at translation. It is either an ingenious hoax or an unbreakable cipher. The manuscript is named after its discoverer, the American antique book dealer and collector, Wilfrid M. Voynich, who discovered it in 1912, amongst a collection of ancient manuscripts kept in villa Mondragone in Frascati, near Rome. The manuscript is small, seven by ten inches, but thick, nearly 235 pages. It is written in an unknown script of which there is no known other instance in the world. There is no other example of the language in which the manual is written. It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from nineteen to twenty-eight letters, none of which bear any relationship to any English or European letter system. The text has no apparent corrections. There is evidence for two different "languages" (investigated by Currier and D'Imperio) and more than one scribe, probably indicating an ambiguous coding scheme. Due to the lack of success in the decipherment, a number of people have proposed that the manuscript is a "hoax". The manuscript could either be a 16th century forgery, to be sold for a hefty sum to emperor Rudolf II, who was interested in rare and unusual items (Brumbaugh, 1977, deriving from earlier unpublished theories), or a more recent one by W. Voynich himself (Barlow, 1986). The latter is effectively excluded both by expert dating of the manuscript, and by the evidence of its existence prior to 1887. One problem with the earlier hoax theory is that, as will be shown, certain word statistics (Zipf's laws) found in the manuscript are characteristic of natural languages. In other words, it is unlikely that any forgery from 16th century would "by chance" produce a text that follows Zipf's laws (first postulated in 1935). Since 1990, a multidisciplinary group of varying size, generally between 100 and 200 individuals, dispersed all around the globe and connected through the Internet, has maintained an electronic mail forum on the decipherment of the Voynich manuscript. This has led to a lively exchange of ideas and the definition of two main goals: a machine readable transcription of the manuscript text and the study of the text through numerical experiments. In parallel, two new hypotheses about the Voynich MS were proposed. One Russian researcher suggested that the text of the Voynich MS is in Manchurian. Early 2004, the English psychologist Gordon Rugg suggested that the text has been generated mechanically using a Cardan grille, and that the text is meaningless. Despite his incomplete findings, this has received a lot of attention in the popular press, where his hypothesis is incorrectly presented as 'proven'. In 2005, two Germans proposed a mystical interpretation of the Voynich MS, where every letter in the manuscript is to be translated to a word or 'principle' (for lack of a better term). This translation is presented 'as is', without justification or explanation and is therefore completely unverifiable. http://www.voynich.nu/s_solvers.html http://www.world-mysteries.com/sar_13.htm Fascinating and amazing that centuries after it was written the modern scientific world cannot even decide if the manuscript is a hoax, a scripture of meaningless language and illustrations, or if in fact it is written in a language that can eventually be de-coded and understood.
Earliest graffiti I've seen was a massive wang sodomizing cleopatra so i'm going with xkcd's point about human nature
For some reason that quote reminded me of the Radiolab episode about the Turin Papyrus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turin_Erotic_Papyrus) and the attempts at rebuilding the earliest known bible.
Possibly the programme I saw it on. They were following the idea that the Turin Papyrus might of been the oldest known pornography (it was late at night what do you expect kids to watch?) and she visited a cave that had the doodles on. Theory was that it was a place the slaves building the pyramids used to skive off.
This was a free podcast, it didn't go into much depth so that was a pretty interestingly little tidbit.
Could well be, but the mystery is being taken very seriously by a lot of academics. I was made aware of it watching a programme on the Discovery Channel today.
Or maybe the reason it can't be deciphered is that the 'writer' was completely round the twist and kept changing his writing system? I did a similar thing while I was in a psychiatric ward- kept changing between cyrillic, greek and english with a lot of random rubbish thrown in.
Possibly. Leonardo Da Vinci wrote in his own shorthand. 235 pages would be a lot of work for a hoax. Even to make it look convincingly like a language would be very difficult - you would actually have to make up a few rules to guide you! Fascinating article though.
The fact that it has sixth or seventh order Shannon entropy suggests that the rules governing the language are at least as complex as those which govern Latin or English. To put it in context, Japanese is around ninth or tenth order Shannon entropy (being more complex in its grammatical structure) while dolphin communication is around third order. So if it's made up, it's an impressive effort. Incidentally Shannon entropy also applies to shorthand, music, and any other structured form of information.
Osu, The manuscript is the precise description of all the bunkai of all present and future katas! .............. Lost forever! Osu!