The Voynich Manuscript

[yogi]

Siloe, a small publishing house in Spain specializing in handcrafted replicas of ancient manuscripts, has been granted the exclusive rights to create 898 facsimiles of the Voynich Manuscript. The book is about 600 years old, but nobody has been able to read it yet. It's written in an unknown language. It's not like cryptographers and linguists haven't tried to decypher the language; it simply has proven un-doable. The text surrounds hand painted images of plants - plants that nobody has been able to identify as anything here on earth. There are star maps and people illustrated as well. There is a lot of information, and even copies of the original floating around the Internet, but Siloe is on a mission to sell their exact replicas for $8000-$9000. Hopefully more scholars will become interested and crack the code. Check out the video embedded in the article, or download a copy for yourself from Yale. It's an amazing book even if it's not intuitively understandable.

http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research- ... manuscript

[Icey]

It's one of the most fascinating books I've ever looked at Yogi. I downloaded the available pages ages ago, and I've spent hours pouring over the fantastic pictures and script.

I personally don't think it's a hoax, as's been suggested. The writing may not follow a pattern that we're familiar with, but that doesn't mean to say it isn't from a language that's been lost or forgotten.

The more you try and work out what's happening within the pictures, the more puzzling it becomes, and yet experts agree that some of the plants're known to us, although not all of them. There also appears to be a semblance of a pattern within the actual writing, but it doesn't repeat on a regular enough basis for anyone to find a decent starting point.

The star maps're interesting, and the drawings of female figures inside some of the plants reminds me of something similar. I can't remember whether this was from ancient Egyptian drawings or not, but they're certainly aligned to other things I've seen, where people appeared to sprout from the bodies of animals, trees, plants and roots. Whether the Voynich Manuscript was an early form of biological and medicinal information, or a way of depicting how someone thought humans'd arrived on the earth, I don't know. Maybe an alien wrote it - but whatever the truth, it's a fascinating thing to look at.

[yogi]

There seems to be a lot of discussion and little agreement about this manuscript. The foliage is similar to known plants in our world, but nothing has been positively identified as exactly the same. Linguists have demonstrated how the patterns of words match those of a formal language, thus giving credibility to the idea that the document is not a hoax. Certain constellation groupings are very similar to what we see in the siderial zodiac of modern skies. While all that is true, the mystery is that none of it really correlates with anything we know today. I have a .pdf version of the high res scans and must agree with one of the comments I've read. Viewing the book gives one a certain "feeling" that is hard do describe.

[pilvikki]

love it! my first reaction was that the artist was perhaps indulging in some of the depicted plants, but the writing sure looks normal. perhaps two people enterprice?

did you notice the perfectly normal looking cornflower? the flower that is, not its leaves.

[yogi]

There is evidence of collaboration. Some of the pictures where drawn and then filled in. This was possibly a two person operation. The text added to the pictures could have been a third person. The weird thing about this manuscript is that some of the pictures are very suggestive of plants we know were around back in the day, but nothing matches exactly. The text is uniform and has patterns of a formal language, but many scholars have tried to decipher it and failed. Some implications can be made, but there is no consensus on things like the number of characters in the alphabet: could be twenty, could be thirty-two. Remaining mysterious for so long leads people to saying it's all a hoax, but there are too many consistencies and the amount of work that went into it far exceeds what a hoaxer would perpetrate. Odd. It's all very odd.

[Kellemora]

If you look at our own taxonomic charts, you will find more than one language used in the text.

If the chart is written in English, you will find Latin names used as well, and although rare, in some cases French words are also used.

The translation from any language, especially ancient languages is hard, because of how they formed their grammar, and in many cases, where we have a single word for an item, many languages use phrases.

Ancient Egyptian was one of the hardest languages for scholars to figure out, and they still disagree on most of it, hi hi...

[Icey]

Well I could look at this manuscript for hours, and still be none the wiser at the end of it, but that's why I find it so intriguing.