The Voynich Manuscript

The Voynich Manuscript is a book which appears to date from the 15th century, lavishly illustrated with a mixture of mundane and fantastical images, with extensive text in a unique script. Its discovery was announced by Wilfrid Voynich (1865 – 1930) in 1912. Voynich was an antiquarian bookseller, and anti-Tsarist revolutionary. Controversy has surrounded the manuscript for decades, ranging from claims that Voynich’s account of how he discovered the manuscript could not be trusted, to widely differing claims about its origins, date, and content.

At first glance the manuscript appears to be written in a language whose identity is partially obscured by the unique script. The text is divided into paragraphs, and words of about the same length as most known languages, with a clear syllable structure. However, detailed analysis of the text by expert linguists and codebreakers found that it was not a known language, and that its structure contained features found in few or no existing languages. Repeated attempts by the world’s best codebreakers failed to find a decipherment. The argument that it might contain only meaningless gibberish, whether from glossolalia or a hoax, was generally discounted because the text contained numerous statistical regularities that appeared to be too complex to hoax.

Gordon examined the key assumptions made by previous researchers, and showed that the same statistical regularities found in the Voynich Manuscript could be easily produced using a low tech hoaxing method, involving tables of gibberish syllables combined with a card containing cut-out holes which produced quasi-random (but not truly random) combinations of syllables. This work featured in Scientific American and in various television documentaries.

The Hyde & Rugg blog contains numerous articles describing the manuscript, problems with previous claimed decipherments, and issues involved in hoaxing a document using this method.