2023 Author: Bryan Walter | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-21 22:24
An article was published in the weekly Times Literary Supplement last week claiming to have deciphered the famous Voynich manuscript. Allegedly, the text of the book consists of Latin abbreviations. As proof, the author - the historian Nicolas Gibbs - cited two lines of the manuscript he transcribed. However, other researchers were not convinced by his results. According to them, Gibbs' solution is a mixture of known facts and statements that he was unable to prove.
Voynich's illustrated manuscript (or manuscript) was written by an unknown author in an unknown language. The parchment on which the book is written dates from 1404-1438, although this does not mean that the text could not have been applied to it much later. The manuscript is named after the Polish bibliophile and antiquarian Wilfrid Voynich, who acquired it in 1912 from the Jesuits in a town near Rome. The manuscript is now kept in the Yale University Library.
The book contains 240 pages (at least 32 pages have been lost), and almost all of them have illustrations. Although the pictures did not help decipher the text, they allowed the book to be divided into several sections. For example, on each page of the "botanical" section there is a drawing of one or more plants. In the "astronomical" section there are diagrams depicting the Moon, the Sun and the signs of the zodiac. In the "biological" section, the text "wraps around" images of people, mostly naked women bathing. The “pharmaceutical” section consists of signed drawings of plant parts and pharmaceutical vessels.
Page from the "botanical" section of the manuscript
Since the First World War, many cryptographers and professional cryptographers have tried to decipher the text of the manuscript, but so far no one has succeeded. One of the first to propose his theory was the American cryptographer William Newbold in 1921. He believed that the visible text of the manuscript did not make sense, but each letter is made up of tiny signs that are only distinguishable when magnified. Later, another researcher, John Stojko, claimed that the manuscript was written in Ukrainian, which did not contain vowels. Already in the 21st century, James Finn suggested that the manuscript is a visually encoded Hebrew text.
A new attempt to decipher the text was made by the historian (as he calls himself) Nicholas Gibbs. He argued that the manuscript was a guide to the treatment of women's diseases, and the text in it was an acronym in Latin. In support of his hypothesis, he presented a "transcript" of two lines of text. However, experts who knew medieval Latin were not convinced by his arguments. According to the director of the American Academy of the Middle Ages Lisa Fagin Davis (Lisa Fagin Davis), the "transcribed" text was grammatically incorrect and consisted of meaningless phrases.
Page from the "biological" section of the manuscript
Gibbs suggested that somewhere in the text of the manuscript there must have been a pointer that could serve as a key to decipher the abbreviations. At the same time, the historian believes that the index was on the lost pages of the manuscript. He did not provide any other evidence for the existence of such a pointer.
The Voynich manuscript may indeed be a treatise on women's health, as Gibbs suggested, but even then it cannot be called a discoverer. Other researchers and cryptographers, having linked images of plants, bathing women and astrological charts, have previously put forward this hypothesis. The fact that before the publication of his article he was unknown neither to professional researchers of the Voynich manuscript, nor in the community of amateur cryptologists who are engaged in deciphering the manuscript, does not add credibility to the Gibbs hypothesis.
Anyway, Gibbs is known to the general public not as a scientist, but as the author of guidelines for writing television scripts or staging shows. In the author's description on Amazon, his profession is indicated - a script editor, who has conducted master classes in screenwriting, and is now working on two television dramas under the guidance of independent producers. Perhaps the study of the Voynich manuscript will form the basis of another scenario?
