I’m not sure how I’ve missed it, but this article is the first place I have ever read about the Voynich manuscript. (Well, it’s at least the first that I recall.
I gather that nobody has been able to figure out what Voynich is or what it says, although scholars have been delving into it for centuries. Wikipedia covers the manuscript, and efforts to decipher it, in an article that stretches nearly to book length.
The New Yorker summarized:
Stored away in the rare-book library at Yale University is a late-medieval manuscript written in a cramped but punctilious script and illustrated with lively line drawings that have been painted over, at times crudely, with washes of color. These illustrations range from the fanciful (legions of heavy-headed flowers that bear no relation to any earthly variety) to the bizarre (naked and possibly pregnant women, frolicking in what look like amusement-park waterslides from the fifteenth century). With their distended bellies, stick-like arms and legs, and earnest expressions, the naked figures have a whimsical quality, though their anatomy is frankly rendered—something unusual for the period. The manuscript’s botanical drawings are no less strange: the plants appear to be chimerical, combining incompatible parts from different species, even different kingdoms. Tentacled balls of roots take the forms of animals, or of human organs—in one case, sprouting two disembodied heads with vexed expressions. But perhaps the oddest thing about this book is that no one has ever read it.
That’s because the book—called the Voynich manuscript after the rare-book dealer who stumbled upon it a century ago—is written in an unknown script, with an alphabet that appears nowhere other than in its pages. The writing system is oddly beautiful, full of looping and fluid curves. A series of distinctive letters, called “gallows” for their resemblance to a hangman’s scaffold, are sometimes conjoined with other letters, or have been embellished with elaborate curlicues by a scribe. What these glyphs signify—whether they represent phonetic information or numeric values or something else—is anyone’s guess.
I’m getting to that point in my lifespan that I look at articles like this with the realization that I probably won’t live to see their solutions, which bums me out. If I had to pick one out, it would be Voynich. And, as I stated some time back, I insist that scientists clone the dodo back to life before I become extinct myself.
Well, I thought that we’d never really see close-ups of Pluto. Especially after it got demoted.
So you never know. Maybe they’ll figure out that you have to read it upside down with a mirror and then split the characters in half, and it turns out to be a cookbook.
Wait, you really never heard of this until now?
No. Unless I’ve forgotten. It seems totally new to me. I have seen the Indiana Jones movies, but the reference obviously didn’t sink in.
I guess every once in a while something creeps up on us and we think, “How have I never come across that before, when I’m interested in that kind of thing? Or, if I have come across it, how could I forget it?”
Well, I guess recently there have been some nude or topless pics of some celebrities posted here that I had never saw before. Like Cheryl Tiegs. Or Carol Alt. I guess that’s a similar thing.
And you too can try to decipher it…
It’s carbon dated to the early 15th century.
I didn’t recall the mention of a Voynich Manuscript in any of the Indiana Jones movies, but I never watched the most recent one, Dial of Destiny. However, out of curiosity, I checked to see if that was the one that mentioned it. The Wikipedia article says that the manuscript inspired works of fiction, including Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone. That wasn’t an Indy film; it was the ninth of 12 Indiana Jones novels published by Bantam Books in the 1990s. Interesting fact: Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone was published in 1995, two years before Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone was first published. I wonder if JK Simmons read that book?
Good info. No wonder I don’t remember it, despite having watched all the Indiana Jones movies!.
AI thinks it was a movie… “The Voynich Manuscript is featured in the movie Indiana Jones and the Philosopher’s Stone. In the movie, Indiana Jones is called upon to recover the manuscript from a Renaissance scholar who has stolen it.”
I suppose AI still has room for improvement.
So it has naked women in it too. Funhouse fodder? And AI tried 7 years ago.
In addition to J.K. Simmons, I wonder if J.K. Rowling read it. Whoops.
I bet the Voynich Manuscript is a secret Templar code that points to the Oak Island treasure. Or at least that’s what I’m going to mention around the Lagina brothers.
PR
Do y’all not have a TV? Get off the internet and back on good ol’ TV like the old days. Josh Gates figured out the Voynich. It’s basically a medical/shaman book from the Jewish tradition, as I recall. The language is some ancient variation of hebrew. I think they might have processed it with AI to get that part. I”m kind of making this part up potentially…but I think that the drawings are sort of combinations of actual plants from the region with their ‘spiritual attributes’ if you will, embedded into the drawings. Think Chinese medicine book for old jews. There was mention of the nekkid ladies in the margins. I can’t recall what that was but it was addressed. This was a recent show where he showed the answers to several ages-long mysteries in addition to the Voynich.