Voynich Manuscript Secrets

Men have always tried to encode secrets. Military communication. Love letters. For bit in knowledge. And most secret text is eventually decoded. But among all of history's cryptic writings, one stands out. It's the world's most mysterious book written by an unknown author in an art alphabet. And brilliantly illustrated with puzzling images. For centuries, he defies all attempts to unveil its secrets. Now, for the first time, experts analyze the ink, pigments, and parchment of the Voynich manuscripts. What secrets are hidden between these lines? Who wrote them? And why? At the headquarters of the US Military Intelligence Service, these experts succeeded in decoding Japan's so-called purple code. William Frederick Friedland, the services director, is one of the world's best cryptographers. For practice between jobs, Friedman and his team decode ancient cryptic texts. One by one, the codes are cracked. But one book, the Voynich manuscript, stubbornly defies all attempts to decode it. Unnerved the cryptographers give up. It's the only code they're unable to crack. The roughly 200 page manuscript, with its strange symbols, has been a mystery for decades. At the beginning of the 20th century, an antique stealer from New York visits Villa Monteregoña, new Rome looking for precious books. His name is Wilfried Voynich. Villa Monteregoña is home to many historical texts from a Jesuit school. Wilfried Voynich is allowed to inspect a trunk that comes from the estate of Athenaseous Kircher, one of the most famous scholars of the 17th century. Among various manuscripts, the trunk contains an unusual book. Voynich buys the manuscript and for the rest of his life, tries to decipher it. He dies without even coming close to a solution. After Voynich's death, the manuscript ends up with the Bonicé Rare Book and Manuscript library at year. The library possesses a wealth of literary gems, but probably none of his famous as the Voynich manuscript. René Zanberg is one of the leading experts on the Voynich manuscript and has been working on it for years. I immediately have the feeling this is something that I can decipher as something I can read. But as the years went by, this turned out to be wrong, so I couldn't read it like so many other people before me. The manuscript is kept in a secure place at the Bonicé Library. For the first time, René Zanberg is able to inspect the original. And the really amazing thing is that somebody probably wrote something many hundreds of years ago and still with Mark's technology we still cannot decipher this. On more than 200 pages of parchment, a million graphic details and some 170,000 characters unfolded. In this angle of text and images, an experts eye can easily get lost. And then it was the drawings of the strange names. The other interesting thing about the manuscript is it allows for so many different interpretations. There are so many drawing, so many figures. You can think of any theory and you will find evidence in the manuscript that fits this. This is really amazing. On closer inspection, the manuscript appears to be less confusing. The drawings break down the book into separate sections. Conservative polozioids has spent hours studying the manuscript. Now we can't read the text, but we can guess probably what the book is about from illustrations. So it seems to consist of several sections. I've had a greater preponderance of text in this book has to do with botanicals, herbal. It's clearly a book about these plants, shows the root systems they leave their flowers. Some of the drawings even seem to be inspired by reality. I would assume that what it says probably talks about where you're going to find this plant, how it grows, and then what can you use it for? Medicine was based on herbs. So another big part of medicine at that time is also encoded in the book. It's zodiac charts, star charts, you know the sky. But even here, there are astonishing parallels to natural shapes. Some of the books pages also contain optical phenomena. If said into a spinning motion, these illustrations come to life. What does this combination of plants and astronomical symbols mean? In the middle ages, if you were to be treated herbaly, you had to know what your zodiac sign was. And then there's the ladies. They start a little later on. Ladies tumbling through pools of green water. These bathing scenes are particularly puzzling. Does it hint at a collection of recipes for a bathing cure, or even of the secret of the fountain of youth? Other illustrations seem to support this view. And then it's followed by this section towards the end. I guess it looks like recipes. Where things look as though this is how you need to cut up your herbs that you've just seen on the preceding pages. And this is what you need to cook them in perhaps or pound them with. So I don't know. I mean, just to someone who knows nothing at all, it sure looks like an herbal, a medical book. Was the author a medical genius hiding his discoveries from competitors? Or from the Holy Inquisition which often roots out new knowledge? Will feed one inch himself, discovers the first clue leading to the anonymous author? Well, making reprograms of the original Voynich manuscript, an item once invisible accidentally appears. Someone has written something in the first page. The words were scratched from the parchment, but under ultraviolet light traces of ink become visible. Teem starting for ten minutes. Something underneath. Yacobus are tapin' it. She's a traveling doctor and expert in medical plants in the 17th century. His preparations are famous far and wide. In 16awakies summoned to Prague by Emperor Rougal II. The Emperor suffers from depression and melancholy. Teem in which famous herbal extracts will hopefully relieve the monarch's distress. Teem in which experiments with herbs, he grows them, distales extracts, mixes them without the whole and makes a fortune. His alcoholic remedy seemed to inspire the Emperor's will be. To thank Teem in which the Emperor promotes him, appointing him imperial chief distiller. But why would a doctor encode his recipes? Rougs who were involved in the practice of healing could easily get themselves in trouble with the church and with the authority. Kevin Rep is the curator of the Bynicate Library's manuscript collection. Al-Kame was very closely related to the growth of science in the early modern period. And yet at the same time, Al-Kame was considered to be an extremely arcane topic. Meaning the information that was recorded in these texts was often considered to be extremely secret. Did Yacoba Satepinich create the world's most mysterious manuscript? Most of the plant illustrations are unlike any natural plant. Details are out of proportion or reminiscent of parts of the human anatomy or of abstract symbols. They are allegorical images rather than botanical illustrations. This type of plant representation dates back to the Middle Ages. The medieval tradition was not to represent them realistically or naturalistically. But rather to represent them in terms of the powers that these particular plants possess. However, in the early 17th century, illustrations of plants are depicted in a more realistic manner. And if we're talking about a book that was written in the 16th or 17th century, you would expect it to be much more similar to a book like this. The book is from 1562. And as you can see, there's a much greater emphasis made on precision that you can identify these plants. Such aspects of art history are not considered during Teppinich's time. He only works in a style he's familiar with. Even though his name is found on the first page, it's unlikely that he is the author. Other books from his estate bear almost identical signatures. Clearly, at some point, the Voynich manuscript was in his possession. But the manuscript is written at an earlier time. A clue to the Voynich manuscript's age is discovered with the book. This is a very important letter. It was written in 1665 by the Bohemian Doctor Johannes Markosmati. He is sending it to his good friend, Artenazius Kierchenrom, who was a universal scientist and believed to be able to understand all languages in the world. Markosmati sends him the book in order to have it translated. The interesting thing is that in this letter, we'll also learn a bit more about the past of the manuscript. Markosmati heard from a friend that it was once bought by the Bohemian Emperor Rul of the Second of Habsburg for the sum of 600 dk. Emperor Rul of the Second is known for sponsoring sciences. But back then, no distinction is made between natural science and magic. Rul of the Second is a huge collection of occult books and magical instruments. The original book is called The Greatest of the Old Testament. He spends huge amounts of money for his collection, which also includes the Voynich manuscript. When Rul of the Second is, he leaves behind a great deal of death. Yakuva Sateponich is probably one of his creditors. He must have been compensated with objects from the Emperor's library. This is how the Voynich manuscript probably came into his possession. The letter to the universal genius Athanasius Kircher also hints at the manuscript's origin. The letter even names the book's author, Roger Bacon. Roger Bacon is a famous English clergyman in the 13th century with a telling nickname, Dr. Mirabilis, the miracle doctor. Bacon's insights greatly exceed his contemporaries. His urge for new discoveries frequently causes conflict with the church. He is imprisoned at various times. He is one of the first Europeans interested in optical phenomena and worked with magnifying glasses. The letter to the Holy Spirit is called the Holy Spirit. Many drawings in the astrological section of the Voynich manuscript resemble shapes that are only seen through a microscope. The letter to the Holy Spirit is called the Holy Spirit. He is the very first glimpse into a previously hidden world. At the time of Roger Bacon, the microscope still does exist that could make the type of detailed observations that are seen in the Voynich manuscript. It wasn't until the early 17th century when Cornelius Drabble developed a complex sophisticated twin convex lens microscope, where we would be able to see the types of things which seem to be reflected in these images. In fact, most of the illustrations appear detached from conditions of reality. Do they reflect the longing for a place of fantasy? A place that 17th century minds imagined somewhere in the deep past. Well, at the time that Cornelius Drabble was in London, there was a tremendous interest in the idea of the ancient book of mysterious knowledge. If anyone were to create such a book as the Voynich, they would have ended up with a very valuable document that would have garnered them great prestige and possibly been able to sell for a great deal of money. So, perhaps the Voynich manuscript is a purely decorative object, a perfectly created illustration of a mysterious ancient book. Even today, looking through a microscope opens up new perspectives. The surface of the parchment has very smooth and understood, and we'll see any abrasion. I don't even see any corrections. In other words, 200 pages of text have been written without even a slight error, an almost superhuman feat. This raises suspicions. There's only one source of information about the discovery of the manuscript. We'll free Voynich himself. Perhaps this successful dealer in antique books could not resist the temptation of fabricating such an odd and extremely precious book. Several people suspect that Voynich is a fraud. Very white page. Meanwhile, modern material science has the tools to find out. My cross-copy expert Joseph Barabe will investigate the manuscript. He and his team have exposed numerous fortress. Well, the first thing we'll do is look at it and see if any of the working methods are inappropriate for the time period. But mostly we would be looking at the materials. So let's look for a page with some good pigments. Okay. Do you have many choices here? We're all looking pretty good. Through the microscope, the manuscript's hidden beauty is revealed. This fantastic micro world harbors information that can prove whether the book is genuine or a hoax. I'll be taking a group of small samples. The analytical methods that we use them range from light microscopy, which gives us a look at which is what it looks like. And we do elemental analysis on the particles. And that tells us what it consists of. We also look at the chemistry using spectrographic methods and crystallographic methods. And that gives us a picture of what it is. Basically what we're trying to determine during our examination is how the object was constructed because if it's a forgery, most foragers will make stupid mistakes. But we get it from these ridges at the top. Joseph Barabe samples paint and ink from various portions of the manuscript. So what we found was that the ink is in iron gall ink. And we found that it was made in several different batches because the constituents vary somewhat from batch to batch. The blue is azureite ground azureite. Very beautiful mineral pigment. The red is a red in the brown or iron earth pigments. Red okre with hematite. Wonderful stuff. So in summary what we found was that the materials that constitute the writing and the painting of the document are completely appropriate to the 15 and 16 centuries. And more importantly, we did not find any materials that would indicate that it was a 19th or 20th century forgery. The paints and ink are proof that the Voynich manuscript is authentic. To get the bright hue present in the Voynich manuscript, the colours are applied with great care by a skilled artist. In stark contrast however, many of the drawings appear sloppy, even naive. Many figures in the manuscript such as this little dragon or the red chieke woman seemed to be creations of an infant's hand. This is why I have a sore of the manuscript for this one. And I assumed or developed the hypothesis that it was written by a young Leonardo da Vinci. The first time I have been in the museum, I have been in the museum for years. The first time I have been in the museum, I have been in the museum for years. Leonardo was a gifted child growing up in a wealthy family. From his early youth, he must have learned how to use a brush and pen. Does the Voynich manuscript contain his first illustrations? If you look at the quality of the drawing and the quality of the drawing and the other pictures, you realize that they are not very sophisticated and it was probably one of his first books done when he was a child. One page in particular hints at Da Vinci. I saw this astrological picture which shares 15-level new ladies sitting in terms. Some of them are fairly obviously pregnant and are represented in the astrological symbol areas. The areas symbol could stand for the month of April. The areas are surrounded by 15 obviously pregnant women. If each woman represents one day, the illustration could signify April 15. Da Vinci's birthday. Was the Voynich manuscript an early example of the coded text he would later produce? Leonardo was a genius. One of the greatest artists in history. Even at an early age, he is an expert draftsman. The drawings in the Voynich manuscript, however, show no sign of early genius. And there's reason to believe that this was not the product of a child. This book might have been a very expensive book. The pigments, particularly the mineral pigments that are used throughout, are a very good quality, especially as evidence by the fact that we can still see them bright and clear. The parchment gets more expensive, the larger the sheet. And this book contains a number of foldouts, including a faux page foldout, which is pretty unusual. When you start moving into parchment that is this size and larger, it has to be taken from the center of a piece of skin. That alone costs money. So you had to have someone with the means to obtain a fair quantity of good quality parchment, good quality pigments. And the amount of time that it would take to do this, it really could be a couple of years worth of work. Apparently, the unknown author invested years of his life in a book which must have cost a fortune to produce. The information within must have been of great value. So great, in fact, that it had to be encoded. There had been several methods for encoding text throughout history. The Caesar code, originally used by Julius Caesar, was popular throughout the Middle Ages. In the year from Julius Caesar. A shift code, wherein the alphabet is simply shifted forward by four digits, says that A becomes D, B becomes E, et cetera. Easy to use and equally easy to crack. The Caesar code is the simplest method. A decoder must determine by how many letters the alphabet is shifted. To crack it, it takes a maximum of twenty-five attempts. It was by no means safe. So around 1330, the paper court tried to create a code book, wherein strategic keywords like Pope, Church or King were replaced by single characters. To decipher a message, the receiver needs to have a list of the code words. This method results in ever-growing code lists that are tedious to update. And it is difficult to securely transfer these lists from the sender to the receiver. The cipher disc is more efficient and easier to handle. Several revolving rings with characters enable the user to create more complex codes. The cipher square is developed in the late 16th century. From a modern perspective, all of these methods are simplistic. We have employed it with infinite and frequent analogues. Today, within hard-free conciernalysis and computer assisted decoding methods, we can easily crack coded texts up to the 17th, even the 18th century. For this, we need a critical mass. 30 characters are not sufficient. Given that, and given that the plane text made sense, any coded text from that period can be deciphered. So, does this profusion of characters represent a text that makes sense? To find out, all 170,000 characters of the manuscript are electronically evaluated. The distribution pattern of each character is then compared to known patterns of natural languages. The result. Some characters occur more often than others. Like, for instance, particular vowels in European languages. However, most elements of the Voynich text do not correspond to the phonetic patterns of any natural language. In spite of all the modern technical tools that have been applied, the mysterious manuscript is still a mystery. The code remains uncracked. The code is still not being crafted by modern cryptographic techniques. It makes it highly unlikely that there is any real cipher in there. So, the Voynich manuscript may not even be an encoded message. The distribution patterns point to a different theory. Some of the features of the manuscript were very unusual in terms of human languages, but were exactly the things you'd expect if somebody was producing something artificially and trying to make it look like a language. Gordon Rugg thinks the unknown author merely wanted to create an impression that the book contained something mysterious. For this purpose, he may have used historical codes. One simple method is to use a thing called a card and grill. The key concept is you have the grill, which is a piece of card with holes, cotten it, in a particular pattern. In the cryptographic version, you put it over a text and it reveals the hidden message through the holes. But you can also use it to generate meaningless text by putting it over the table, reading out the word which is revealed through the holes, writing it down, moving it across, generating another word, writing that down, moving it across, and so on at the end of the grill and then repeating the process. So using that method, you could generate text very swiftly and very efficiently as fast as you could write it down. This would explain why the world's best cryptographers have failed to find a message, but who would produce such a book? The most likely suspect is an Elizabethan adventurer called Edward Kelly. Edward Kelly originally comes from England. He is the town's crowd, but is fired for forging official documents. Allegedly, his ear is cut off for punishment. A fact he hides for the rest of his life with hair styles and hats. Kelly leaves England by the late 16th century and travels the cities of Europe, pretending to be a scholar. As for why he might have done it, there are several possible explanations. One possible explanation is simply money. The Vonage manuscript was bought by Emperor Rudolf II for a very large amount of money. So if you could produce a manuscript that size quickly and efficiently, you could make a large amount of profit by selling it to Rudolf. Rudolf II has numerous scientists on his payroll, including crackpots, dazzlers and impusters. Kelly may have seen his chance and offers his services to the Emperor. He was an alchemist who claimed to have been able to produce gold from ordinary materials. Kelly claims to be able to make gold with the help of his apparatus. To check his ability, Emperor Rudolf has Kelly's tools inspected in the alchemist's locked in a room. Edward Kelly knows that he is under observation. Of course, his mysterious alchemistic experiments never really produced gold. Nor was it necessary because Kelly smuggles a tiny nugget into the room. The Emperor is obviously impressed. Kelly is hired. But there are other possible motivations as well as money. But somebody believed that the angels were talking to them for example to spell out some mystical words. Kelly is experienced with such phenomena. On behalf of another Englishman, the mathematician John D. He contacts angels for some time. The Emperor is the only person on earth who knows the language of the angels. And is able to dictate their words to a thrilled John D. Kelly uses special characters which he reads from a magic table. The angelic language of course is pure fantasy. Allegedly, their collaboration abruptly ends when the angels tell Kelly that he and he are to swap wives. In Kelly's case, he had the means, the motive, the opportunity and the personality to hook sit. Many things point to Edward Kelly as the author of the Voynich manuscript. He previously invented fantasy language. And Emperor Rudolph II is a financially potent and gullible buyer of his mysterious writings and formulas. Today, for the first time, we can convict the 16th century dazler by using modern technology. Greg Hutchins of the University of Arizona will take several samples of the Voynich manuscript. The manuscript is written on animal scale, so its age can be precisely determined. Like any organic material, parchment can be dated by the radio-carbon method. The book has never been scrutinized in this way. Since relatively large samples are needed, the radio-carbon test had previously been rejected. But now, for the first time ever, it is possible to determine exactly how old this mysterious manuscript really is. To ensure accuracy, Greg Hutchins takes four samples from four different pages. A few weeks later, the lab results arrive with a big surprise. So there are the four measurements from the four samples that we took from the Voynich manuscript. And as it can see, the dates are very tightly clustered together. It gives a picture of it being created in a relatively short period of time. Moreover, because they are so tightly clustered together, means we can treat it as one object that's been dated four times. And that increases the precision of the measurement. So at 95% confidence, we can say the age of the Voynich manuscript is 140480 to 143880. This result is extraordinary. And overthrows all the previous assumptions about the manuscript's origin. Neither Japanese nor Roger Bacon could have been the authors. They notodovinci also was born half a century later. Even Edward Kelly now has a sound, Alibi. He lived one and a half centuries later. None of the existing theories assumed the early 15th century to be the period of the manuscript's creation. All relevant methods of examination available today have been applied to the Voynich manuscript. It was written around 1420, with this new information, one detail in the manuscript gets a new meaning. One more than 200 pages filled with fantastic sceneries. There is only one realistic representation of the city. One with towers, walls and turrets. The ramparts are drawn with so-called swallowtail battlements. In combination with the manuscript's date of origin, these turrets take on a special significance. Later in history, swallowtail turrets are common across Iran. But in the early 15th century, they only exist in northern Italy. During a Renaissance period, northern Italy is one of the wealthiest and most influential regions of the Western world. This is the historical background of the manuscript's creation. Up to now, the research about the Voynich manuscript lacked a historical anchoring point. No one knew in which period or region a search could be started. Now this has changed. We know where to look. The Voynich manuscript is now in the history of the Voynich manuscript. It will be exciting to see what further references to the mysterious manuscript will be found in the archives between Milan and Venice. The Voynich manuscript is now in the history of the Voynich manuscript. The Voynich manuscript is now in the history of the Voynich manuscript. For the time being, the Voynich manuscript remains what it has been for the last 600 years. It's the whole of Mirrors reflecting its researches only imagination, without ever allowing him a glimpse into its inner secrets. The Voynich manuscript is now in the history of the Voynich manuscript. The Voynich manuscript is now in the history of the Voynich manuscript.