Back in 1912 a Polish book dealer, Wilfrid Voynich, purchased an odd manuscript from Jesuits in Rome. The Jesuits of the Villa Mondragone were in need of cash and so were selling off some of their holdings, including this old 15th century book.
Voynich kept it until his death in 1930. It is now in the possession of the Yale Library.
Based on the illustrations, (see above), Voynich inferred that this was supposed to be a medical or pharmacological text from that period. but he didn't recognize the language. Neither has anyone else since. The "Voynich manuscript" has become a standing challenge to cryptoanalysis. indeed, it is so difficult to decipher that one hypothesis is that there was no purchase from the Jesuits at all, that the whole thing was Voynich's hoax, and that the text-like symbols are nonsense. But carbon dating supported his account and the 15th-century origin.
There is another theory, that it is an older hoax, perhaps some Renaissance-era prankster saw fit to mix up some nonsense text with various randomly chosen illustrations. In that case, Voynich (and his Jesuit counterparties) were among the victims of the hoax, not its perpetrators.
But that interpretation seemed a bit unlikely to a lot of people. The counter argument might be concisely phrased: didn't people in the 15th century have better things to do with their time?
So the text remained a mystery. That is, until February 20, 2014, when word went out to those who care about such matters that a British linguistics professor named Stephen Bax had achieved a breakthrough.
It is far from a translation, but Bax has identified a handful of proper names used in the text. He suspects that it is in neither fraud nor code, but a still-unidentified Near Eastern natural language.
The march of human knowledge is fascinating to observe.
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