- The Voynich manuscript, once owned by Emperor Rudolph
II in 16th-century Bohemia, is filled with drawings of fantastic plants,
zodiacal symbols and naked ladies. Far more intriguing than its illustrations,
however, is the accompanying text: 234 pages of beautifully formed, yet
completely unintelligible script.
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- Modern scholars have pored over the book since 1912,
when Wilfrid Voynich, an American antiquarian, bought the manuscript and
started circulating copies in the hope of having it translated. Some 90
years later, the book still defies deciphering. It now resides at Yale
University.
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- The manuscript is written in "Voynichese",
which consists of strange characters, some of which look like normal Latin
letters and Roman numerals. Some analysts have suggested that Voynichese
is a modified form of Chinese. Others think it may be Ukrainian with the
vowels taken out. But Voynichese words do not resemble those of any known
language. Nor is the text a simple transliteration into fanciful symbols:
the internal structure of Voynichese words, and how they fit together in
sentences, is unlike patterns seen in other languages.
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- Another possibility is that the text is written in code.
But the best efforts of cryptographers over the past 30 years have failed
to crack it. This resilience is unusual, given that other ciphers from
the period have yielded their secrets.
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- On the other hand, the text could just be gibberish and
the book - which may have been passed off to Emperor Rudolph as the work
of Roger Bacon, a 13th-century natural philosopher, in exchange for the
princely sum of 600 gold ducats - a grand hoax. But Gabriel Landini, a
Voynichese enthusiast at the University of Birmingham, in England, argues
against this theory. Given the complex structure of Voynichese words, writing
hundreds of pages of internally consistent gibberish would be a tough task
for a fraudster to pull off.
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- But perhaps not an impossible one. Gordon Rugg, a computer
scientist at Keele University, in England, thinks he may be one step closer
to an explanation of how the text might have been created. In a paper published
in the January issue of Cryptologia, he uses low-tech 16th-century methods,
rather than 20th-century computing, to generate text resembling that in
the book.
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- If the Voynich manuscript is a fraud, then one plausible
suspect is Edward Kelley, an Elizabethan con-artist. So Dr Rugg borrowed
one of Kelley's techniques. He used a grid of 40 rows and 39 columns to
create a table which he filled in with Voynichese syllables. He then placed
a grille - a piece of cardboard with three squares cut out in a diagonal
pattern - on top of the table, and started forming words by reading off
the syllables as he moved the grille across columns and down rows. The
result was words with the same internal patterns as Voynichese. Dr Rugg
and his team are now writing software to create dozens of tables and grilles
in an attempt to reproduce other linguistic patterns in the manuscript.
If their findings hold up, it would mean that the regularity of Voynichese
is no longer an argument against the manuscript being an elaborate hoax.
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- Of course, this does not prove that the manuscript is
nonsense - an impossible thing to demonstrate, in any case, since failure
to find meaning in the text does not make it meaningless, but simply beyond
current methods of decoding. Indeed, Dr Landini believes that the Voynich
manuscript might yet yield to massive computing power. If it does, most
people expect to find a work of modest historical interest, rather than
the secret of life. As with most puzzles, the thrill of solution lies in
the process, rather than the product.
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- Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2004.
All rights reserved.
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- http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=2329803
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