Description of plants in an unknown language. Deciphering the Voynich manuscript

The collection of the Yale University Library (USA) contains a unique rarity, the so-called Voynich manuscript ( Voynich Manuscript). On the Internet, many sites are devoted to this document, it is often called the most mysterious esoteric manuscript in the world.

The manuscript is named after its former owner, the American bookseller W. Voynich, husband of the famous writer Ethel Lilian Voynich (author of the novel The Gadfly). The manuscript was bought in 1912 in one of the Italian monasteries. It is known that in the 1580s. The then German Emperor Rudolf II became the owner of the manuscript. The encrypted manuscript with numerous color illustrations was sold to Rudolf II by the famous English astrologer, geographer and explorer John Dee, who was very interested in getting the opportunity to freely leave Prague for his homeland, England. Therefore, Dee is said to have exaggerated the antiquity of the manuscript. According to the features of paper and ink, it is attributed to the 16th century. However, all attempts to decipher the text over the past 80 years have been in vain.

This book, measuring 22.5 x 16 cm, contains coded text, in a language that has not yet been identified. It originally consisted of 116 sheets of parchment, fourteen of which are currently considered lost. Written in a fluent calligraphic handwriting with a quill pen and ink in five colors: green, brown, yellow, blue and red. Some letters are similar to Greek or Latin, but are mostly hieroglyphs that have not yet been found in any other book.

Almost every page contains drawings, based on which the text of the manuscript can be divided into five sections: botanical, astronomical, biological, astrological and medical. The first, by the way the largest section, includes more than a hundred illustrations of various plants and herbs, most of which are unidentifiable or even phantasmagoric. And the accompanying text is carefully divided into equal paragraphs. The second, astronomical section is similarly designed. It contains about two dozen concentric diagrams with images of the Sun, Moon and various constellations. A large number of human figures, mostly female, decorate the so-called biological section. It seems that it explains the processes of human life and the secrets of the interaction of the human soul and body. The astrological section is replete with images of magical medallions, zodiacal symbols and stars. And in the medical part, probably, recipes for the treatment of various diseases and magical advice are given.

Among the illustrations are more than 400 plants that have no direct analogues in botany, as well as numerous figures of women, spirals of stars. Experienced cryptographers, in trying to decipher a text written in unusual scripts, most often acted as was customary in the 20th century - they conducted a frequency analysis of the occurrence of various characters, choosing the appropriate language. However, neither Latin, nor many Western European languages, nor Arabic came up. The bust continued. We checked Chinese, Ukrainian, and Turkish ... In vain!

The short words of the manuscript are reminiscent of some of the languages ​​of Polynesia, but nothing came of it either. Hypotheses about the extraterrestrial origin of the text appeared, especially since the plants are not similar to those familiar to us (although they are very carefully traced), and the spirals of stars in the 20th century reminded many of the spiral arms of the Galaxy. It remained completely unclear what the text of the manuscript was talking about. John Dee himself was also suspected of a hoax - he allegedly composed not just an artificial alphabet (there really was one in Dee's works, but has nothing to do with that used in the manuscript), but also created a meaningless text on it. In general, the research has come to a standstill.

History of the manuscript.

Since the alphabet of the manuscript has no visual resemblance to any known writing system and the text has not yet been deciphered, the only "clue" to determine the age of the book and its origin is the illustrations. In particular, the clothes and decorations of women, as well as a couple of castles in the diagrams. All details are typical of Europe between 1450 and 1520, so the manuscript is most often dated to this period. This is indirectly confirmed by other signs.

The earliest known owner of the book was George Baresch, an alchemist who lived in Prague in the early 17th century. Baresh, apparently, was also puzzled by the mystery of this book from his library. Upon learning that Athanasius Kircher, the famous Jesuit scholar of the Collegio Romano, had published a Coptic dictionary and deciphered (as it was then believed) Egyptian hieroglyphs, he copied part of the manuscript and sent this sample to Kircher in Rome (twice), asking help decipher it. Baresch's 1639 letter to Kircher, discovered in modern times by Rene Zandbergen, is the earliest known reference to the Manuscript.

It remains unclear whether Kircher responded to Baresh's request, but it is known that he wanted to buy the book, but Baresh probably refused to sell it. After Baresh's death, the book passed to his friend, Johannes Marcus Marci, rector of the University of Prague. Marzi allegedly sent it to Kircher, an old friend of his. His cover letter from 1666 is still attached to the Manuscript. Among other things, the letter claims that it was originally purchased for 600 ducats by Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II, who considered the book to be the work of Roger Bacon.

The further 200 years of the fate of the Manuscript are unknown, but it is most likely that it was kept along with the rest of Kircher's correspondence in the library of the Roman College (now the Gregorian University). The book probably remained there until the troops of Victor Emmanuel II captured the city in 1870 and annexed the Papal States to the Kingdom of Italy. The new Italian authorities decided to confiscate a large amount of property from the Church, including the library. According to research by Xavier Ceccaldi and others, before this, many books from the university library were hastily transferred to the libraries of university staff, whose property was not confiscated. Kircher's correspondence was among these books, and also, apparently, there was a Voynich manuscript, since the book still bears the bookplate of Petrus Beckx, at that time the head of the Jesuit order and the rector of the university.

Bex's library was moved to Villa Mondragone in Frascati (villa Borghese di Mondragone a Frascati) - a large palace near Rome, acquired by the Jesuit society in 1866.

In 1912, the College of Rome needed funds and decided in the strictest confidence to sell some of its property. Wilfried Voynich acquired 30 manuscripts, including the one that now bears his name. In 1961, after Voynich's death, the book was sold by his widow Ethel Lilian Voynich (author of The Gadfly) to another bookseller, Hanse P. Kraus. Unable to find a buyer, in 1969 Kraus donated the manuscript to Yale University.

So, what do our contemporaries think about this manuscript?

For example, Sergei Gennadyevich Krivenkov, Ph.D. in Biology, a specialist in computer psychodiagnostics, and Klavdiya Nikolaevna Nagornaya, a leading software engineer at the IGT of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation (St. apparently, recipes, which, as you know, have a lot of special abbreviations, which ensures short "words" in the text. Why encrypt? If these are recipes for poisons, then the question disappears ... Dee himself, for all his versatility, was not an expert on medicinal herbs, so he hardly wrote the text. But then the fundamental question is: what kind of mysterious "unearthly" plants are depicted in the pictures? It turned out that they are ... composite. For example, the flower of the well-known belladonna is connected to a leaf of a lesser known, but equally poisonous plant called hoof. And so it is in many other cases. As you can see, aliens have nothing to do with it. Among the plants there were also rose hips and nettles. But also… ginseng.

From this it was concluded that the author of the text went to China. Since the vast majority of plants are still European, I traveled from Europe. Which of the influential European organizations sent its mission to China in the second half of the 16th century? The answer is known from history - the order of the Jesuits. By the way, their major residency closest to Prague was in the 1580s. in Krakow, and John Dee, together with his partner, the alchemist Kelly, first also worked in Krakow, and then moved to Prague (where, by the way, the emperor was pressured through the papal nuncio to expel Dee). So the paths of a connoisseur of poisonous recipes, who first went on a mission to China, then sent back by courier (the mission itself remained in China for many years), and then worked in Krakow, could well intersect with the paths of John Dee. Competitors, in a nutshell...

As soon as it became clear what many of the pictures of the “herbarium” meant, Sergey and Claudia began to read the text. The assumption that it mainly consists of Latin and occasionally Greek abbreviations was confirmed. However, the main thing was to reveal the unusual cipher used by the compiler of the recipes. Here I had to recall many differences in both the mentality of the people of that time, and the features of the then encryption systems.

In particular, at the end of the Middle Ages, they did not at all create purely digital keys to ciphers (there were no computers then), but very often numerous meaningless symbols (“blanks”) were inserted into the text, which generally devalues ​​the use of frequency analysis when deciphering a manuscript. But here we managed to find out what is a “dummy” and what is not. The compiler of the recipes of poisons was not alien to "black humor". So, he obviously did not want to be hanged as a poisoner, and the symbol with an element resembling a gallows, of course, is not readable. Numerology techniques typical of that time were also used.

Ultimately, under the picture with belladonna and hoof, for example, it was possible to read the Latin names of these particular plants. And advice on preparing a deadly poison ... Here, both the abbreviations characteristic of recipes and the name of the god of death in ancient mythology (Thanatos, brother of the god of sleep Hypnos) came in handy. Note that when deciphering, it was possible to take into account even the very malicious nature of the alleged compiler of the recipes. So the study was carried out at the intersection of historical psychology and cryptography, we also had to combine pictures from many reference books on medicinal plants. And the casket opened...

Of course, for a complete reading of the entire text of the manuscript, and not its individual pages, the efforts of a whole team of specialists would be required. But the “salt” here is not in the recipes, but in the disclosure of the historical mystery.

What about stellar spirals? It turned out that we are talking about the best time to collect herbs, and in one case - that mixing opiates with coffee, alas, is very unhealthy.

So, apparently, galactic travelers are worth looking for, but not here ...

And the scientist Gordon Rugg from the University of Keely (Great Britain) came to the conclusion that the texts of the strange book of the 16th century may well turn out to be abracadabra. Is the Voynich Manuscript a sophisticated forgery?

Mysterious 16th-century book may be elegant nonsense, says computer scientist. Rugg used Elizabethan espionage techniques to reconstruct the Voynich manuscript that had puzzled codebreakers and linguists for nearly a century.

Using espionage techniques from the time of Elizabeth I, he was able to create a semblance of the famous Voynich manuscript, which has intrigued cryptographers and linguists for more than a hundred years. “I think fakery is a very likely explanation,” says Rugg. “Now it’s the turn of those who believe in the meaningfulness of the text to give their explanation.” The scientist suspects that the English adventurer Edward Kelly made the book for the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II. Other scientists consider this version plausible, but not the only one.

“Critics of this hypothesis have noted that the “Voynich language” is too complicated for nonsense. How could a medieval fraudster produce 200 pages of written text with so many subtle patterns in the structure and distribution of words? But it is possible to replicate many of these wonderful Voynich characteristics using a simple 16th-century encoder. The text generated by this method looks like Voynich, but is pure nonsense, with no hidden meaning. This discovery does not prove that the Voynich manuscript is a hoax, but it does support the long-held theory that the document may have been concocted by the English adventurer Edward Kelly to fool Rudolf II.
In order to understand why it took so much time and effort of qualified specialists to expose the manuscript, it is necessary to tell a little more about it. If we take a manuscript in an unknown language, then it will differ from a deliberate forgery by a complex organization that is noticeable to the eye, and even more so during computer analysis. Without going into a detailed linguistic analysis, it can be noted that many letters in real languages ​​occur only in certain places and in combination with certain other letters, and the same can be said about words. These and other features of real language are indeed inherent in the Voynich manuscript. Scientifically speaking, it is characterized by low entropy, and it is practically impossible to forge a text with low entropy by hand - and we are talking about the 16th century.

No one has yet been able to show whether the language in which the text is written is cryptography, a modified version of some existing language, or nonsense. Some features of the text are not found in any of the existing languages ​​- for example, the repetition of the most common words two or three times - which confirms the nonsense hypothesis. On the other hand, the distribution of word lengths and the way letters and syllables are combined are very similar to those of real languages. Many people think that this text is too complicated to be a simple fake - it would take some crazy alchemist many years to achieve such correctness.

However, as Rugg showed, such a text is quite easy to create using a cipher device invented around 1550 and called the Cardan lattice. This lattice is a table of symbols, the words of which are formed by moving a special stencil with holes. Empty cells of the table provide the compilation of words of different lengths. Using grids with syllable tables from the Voynich manuscript, Rugg compiled a language with many, though not all, of the hallmarks of the manuscript. It took him only three months to create a book like a manuscript. However, in order to irrefutably prove the meaninglessness of the manuscript, the scientist needs to recreate a sufficiently large passage from it using this technique. Rugg hopes to achieve this through grid and table manipulation.

It seems that attempts to decipher the text fail, because the author was aware of the peculiarities of encodings and compiled the book in such a way that the text looked plausible, but did not lend itself to analysis. As noted by NTR.Ru, the text contains at least the appearance of cross-references, which is what cryptographers are usually looking for. The letters are written in such a variety of ways that scientists can never establish how large the alphabet is in which the text is written, and since all the people depicted in the book are naked, this makes it difficult to date the text by clothing.

In 1919, a reproduction of the Voynich manuscript came to the University of Pennsylvania philosophy professor Romain Newbould. Newbould, who recently turned 54, had broad interests, many of which had an element of mystery. In the hieroglyphs of the text of the manuscript, Newbould saw microscopic shorthand signs and proceeded to decipher them, translating them into letters of the Latin alphabet. The result is secondary text using 17 different letters. Then Newbould doubled all the letters in the words, except for the first and last, and subjected to a special replacement words containing one of the letters "a", "c", "m", "n", "o", "q", "t" , "u". In the resulting text, Newbould replaced pairs of letters with a single letter, in a rule he never made public.

In April 1921, Newbould announced the preliminary results of his work to a scientific audience. These results characterized Roger Bacon as the greatest scientist of all times and peoples. According to Newbould, Bacon actually created a microscope with a telescope and with their help made many discoveries that anticipated the discoveries of scientists in the 20th century. Other statements from Newbold's publications concern the "mystery of new stars".

“If the Voynich manuscript really contains the secrets of new stars and quasars, it is better for it to remain undeciphered, because the secret of an energy source that surpasses the hydrogen bomb and is so easy to handle that a thirteenth-century man could figure it out is precisely the secret in the solution of which our civilization does not need, - wrote the physicist Jacques Bergier on this occasion. “We somehow survived, and even then only because we managed to contain the tests of the hydrogen bomb. If there is an opportunity to release even more energy, it is better for us not to know, or not to know yet. Otherwise, our planet will very soon disappear in a blinding flash of a supernova.”

Newbold's report caused a sensation. Many scientists, although they refused to express an opinion on the validity of their methods of transforming the text of the manuscript, considering themselves incompetent in cryptanalysis, readily agreed with the results. One famous physiologist even stated that some of the drawings in the manuscript were probably depicting epithelial cells magnified 75 times. The general public was fascinated. Entire Sunday supplements to reputable newspapers were devoted to this event. One poor woman walked hundreds of miles to ask Newbould to use Bacon's formulas to drive out the evil tempting spirits that had taken possession of her.

There were also objections. Many did not understand the method used by Newbold: people could not use his method to compose new messages. After all, it is quite obvious that a cryptographic system must work in both directions. If you own a cipher, you can not only decrypt messages encrypted with it, but also encrypt a new text. Newbold becomes more and more obscure, less accessible. He died in 1926. His friend and colleague Roland Grubb Kent published his work in 1928 under the title The Roger Bacon Cipher. American and English historians who studied the Middle Ages treated it more than with restraint.

However, people have revealed much deeper secrets. Why hasn't anyone figured this one out?

According to one Manley, the reason is that “decryption attempts hitherto have been made on the basis of false assumptions. In fact, we do not know when and where the manuscript was written, what language the encryption is based on. When the correct hypotheses are worked out, the cipher will perhaps appear simple and easy ... ".

It is interesting, based on which version of the above, they built a research methodology in the US National Security Agency. After all, even their specialists became interested in the problem of the mysterious book and in the early 80s worked on deciphering it. Frankly speaking, I can't believe that such a serious organization was engaged in the book purely out of sporting interest. Perhaps they wanted to use the manuscript to develop one of the modern encryption algorithms for which this secret agency is so famous. However, their efforts were also unsuccessful.

It remains to state the fact that in our era of global information and computer technologies, the medieval puzzle remains unsolved. And it is not known whether scientists will ever be able to fill this gap and read the results of many years of work of one of the forerunners of modern science.

Now this one-of-a-kind creation is stored in the Yale University Rare and Rare Book Library and is valued at $160,000. The manuscript is not given to anyone: anyone who wants to try their hand at transcribing can download high-quality photocopies from the university website.

What else would you like to remind the mysterious, well, for example, or The original article is on the website InfoGlaz.rf Link to the article from which this copy is made -

Deciphering the Voynich manuscript

Many people around the world are trying to decipher the mysterious inscriptions written in the Voynich manuscript. But no one has yet been able to find an answer to the centuries-old riddle. Does she have this answer?

It seemed to us that this information was extremely interesting and we decided to publish on our website the results of the work of Nikolai, who did not spare his time and effort to decipher the indecipherable mysterious text.

Below are pictures with decoding, text and a progress report provided by Nikolai Anichkin. The author's spelling and punctuation have been preserved.

All a pleasant acquaintance, we hope you will be interested in the decryption method proposed by Nikolai Anichkin.

The Voynich Manuscript Can Be Deciphered

1. Background

Our ancestors left us a lot of unsolved mysteries. They exist in many areas of human activity and have various origins, including: natural, historical, geographical, man-made, etc. among the man-made secrets, a special place is occupied by the so-called. the Voynich manuscript (hereinafter referred to as the MV). From the available open sources about the history of MW, the following is known.

In 1912, the College of Rome suffered a financial crisis and it was decided to sell off some of the property, and this had to be done under the cloak of secrecy. The library went on sale first. One of the buyers was the famous dealer of ancient books Wilfried Voynich (husband of the famous writer E. Voynich). Reviewing the rarities from the Kircher collection put up for sale, he drew attention to a mysterious manuscript, which was written in unfamiliar characters, and decided to purchase it. From about that moment on, the book began to be called the Voynich Manuscript, because. its true name is unknown to this day. After the death of V. Voynich, MV became the property of his wife. After the death of E. Voynich, the rarity became the property of her heiress Ann Neill, who in 1961 sold it again to the bookseller Hans Kraus. Hans Kraus failed to find a buyer and in 1969 he donated it to Yale University, and specifically to the Beinecke Library, where it is kept to this day. When buying the book, V. Voynich found 2 letters enclosed in it, according to the first one, in 1586 it became the property of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire Rudolf-2. Until that time, the history of MW is practically unknown. The following is known about Emperor Rudolph II (1552 - 1612). In 1576 he took the imperial post in Prague. Prague at that time was considered the center of the occult. Alchemy and the manufacture of artificial gold were especially common here. Rudolph-2 was practically known as the patron of alchemists. Apparently, believing that MV is related to alchemy, Rudolf-2 acquired it. It should be noted that even today there is an opinion that MW belongs to alchemy. Apparently, unsuccessful attempts to decipher the book cooled Rudolph-2's interest in it, and in 1585 it became the property of the next alchemist Baresh.

At this time, the name of the Jesuit scholar from Rome, Athanasius Kircher, who was then believed to be able to read the hieroglyphs on Egyptian artifacts, gains fame. It is confirmed that Baresh approached Kircher with a request to transfer the MV. The reverse reaction is unknown. After Baresh, the book passed into the ownership of his friend Johann Markus Marzi, who at that time was the rector of the University of Prague. According to a second letter found by Voynich while purchasing the book, Marzi sent it to his friend Kircher.

This is what the confirmed history of MV looks like, or rather part of it. Several examinations conducted to determine the age of the MV almost reliably showed that it was written at the very beginning of the 15th century. Therefore, the period of unknown history of MW is more than 200 years.

After acquiring the book, Voynich made active attempts to decipher it, attracting well-known specialists for this. Famous cryptologists, linguists, programmers and specialists in other fields of knowledge, who could not resist the most closed ciphers, took on the decryption. Experts in breaking the strongest ciphers used by Germany and Japan during the Second World War also failed to achieve any results. It is known from open sources that in our time, the US CIA officers also undertook to open the MV cipher, but they did not succeed either. But it is impossible to consider all these titanic efforts useless. The result of all the failures to decipher the MV became the basis for giving it the name of the most mysterious book in the world, the holy grail of cryptography, etc.

From all the grandiose and painstaking work done, the main conclusion was drawn - there is no language in the world and in the foreseeable past there was no language with an alphabet similar to the alphabet used when writing MV, if these signs are considered letters of some alphabet.

All of these failures have given rise to various versions of the origin of CF, including:

- MV is of alien origin;

- MV is someone's joke that has no significance;

- MV is written in some specially invented language, etc.

The first version can be rejected without discussion, because. nothing similar to the alien has been found on Earth so far.

The second version can be rejected on the grounds that too much painstaking work had to be put into such a joke.

Third version. Why was it necessary to invent a language to encrypt a large amount of information that no one will decipher later? Maybe it's easier to destroy it? Thus, the conclusion suggests itself - the information was encrypted with the prospect of being decrypted.

Consequently, when writing the MV, the language that really existed at that time was used.

From this follows the main conclusion - it is necessary to look for a different way of deciphering. At the same time, it is necessary to take into account the error of previous researchers. All of them wanted to see the letters of European languages ​​in the signs used in writing MV. Nobody succeeded.

From all of the above, the conclusion follows - when writing the MV, a language that actually existed at that time and in that territory was used, the letters of the alphabet of which were replaced by signs. This formed the basis for further work on deciphering the MV.

2. Choice of approach method

In general terms, the MV is a collection of drawings of plants, circle diagrams, unknown women's rites and a significant text part. According to external signs, it can be attributed to some kind of encyclopedic reference book.

An analysis of the methods of approach to deciphering the MV showed that all of them had one error.

All of them tried to see the letters of the alphabet of any language, moreover, the European language, in the signs with which MV is written. This approach did not give any results. Therefore, it is necessary to change the method of approach to decoding. Namely, it is necessary to find a language, the structure of the alphabet of which would correspond to the structure of the system of signs used in writing the MW. Those. take as a basis not a single sign, but the whole system of signs as a whole.

Now it is necessary to find a system in a variety of signs with which MV is written. After analyzing the signs used in the MV, I managed to discover such a system. It should be noted that later it turned out that in the entire system there are signs that do not correspond to any letter. But this is due to the peculiarities of the language.

Now the question arose to find a language whose alphabet format would coincide with the format of MB characters. The searches have yielded results. An ancient language was found, the format (or structure) of the alphabet of which coincided with the format (or structure) of characters used in the MW text. But then everything did not go smoothly. In terms of structure, the complex of characters and the alphabet of the proposed language are identical, but the number of letters turned out to be somewhat larger. I had to return to the text. As a result, a numerical mark was found in the text itself. Using this mark as a hint and assigning two letters to a certain number of characters, everything fell into place. Later, when translating some short words, the indicated assignment of signs to letters was confirmed. This is the second level of MB encryption. Further, after analyzing the text with the already available data, it turned out that in words that begin with vowels, these vowels are omitted. This can be considered the third level of encryption. These two circumstances further exclude the possibility of using computer programs for translating the MW text. "Manual" translation is also difficult. For example, if a word in the text consists of 4 characters, then this supposed word will correspond to 8 letters, 4 of which must be excluded. Thus, it is practically impossible to do without a perfect knowledge of this language of the ancestors. When translating short words, I used information obtained on the Internet, and they are, as you know, limited there and in only generally accepted use. And in this case we have specific themes.

Now it should be noted, it is clearly seen that at least three topics are described in the MW, namely: botany, medicine and astronomy. For one person, detailed knowledge in such different areas is too much. This leads to the conclusion that this MW contains information from various sources. If it is known that MV was written in the origins of the 15th century, then the knowledge described in it was known much earlier. It can be assumed that this knowledge was used by our ancestors in the so undeservedly forgotten Vedic times. This time had its own characteristics. For example, the reckoning was different. Namely, the year (summer) had three periods: winter, spring, autumn; in each period there were three months, in each month there were 40 (41) days, in a week there were 9 days (and this has survived to this day with the commemoration of the dead: 9 and 40 days), there are 16 hours in a day. We will dwell on other features of the Vedic chronology and astronomical knowledge below when opening individual topics of the MV.

Now it is necessary to determine the reason for encrypting this vital knowledge.

Knowing quite accurately the time of writing the MV and by the language used, having determined the territory where it was written, it is easy to determine what historical events took place in this territory. It turned out that in this territory at that time there was a conquest of one people by another. And not just a conquest, but a change of religion. It is known that the change of religion, faith is more painful than just occupation. Based on this, we can conclude that all this secret knowledge by our ancestors was collected in one place and encrypted in order to save them from enemies. Further "journeys" of this document until the second half of the 16th century are unknown. Perhaps about his content to those from whom he was hiding and a hunt was organized for him. According to the logic, there should be a key to it, which could, or even can, be stored elsewhere, namely in the place where it was written. Moreover, it cannot be ruled out that the keepers of the key are looking for this document, but its common name is far from the true one, which makes it impossible to find it. But this is an assumption that, in principle, cannot be ruled out and should be verified.

Using the above in the so-called botanical section, the following short words (short in the text of the MW) succumbed to translation: Sweet drink, nectar. Food, food. Pleasure, enjoyment. Grain, bread. Six. Drink, absorb. Maturing, maturity. Saturated. Hemp, hemp, hemp clothes. Food, food. Maybe. Cleanse (intestines). Drink. Wish. Knowledge. Sweet drink, nectar and others. There is no doubt that the correlation coefficient between the meaning of these words and the depicted plants is very high.

So, on page 20 the words are translated: hemp, hemp clothes; food, food. Indeed, even in our recent past, hemp was grown in my small homeland, from which threads were obtained, then linen and clothes.

In addition, oil was obtained from it, which was used in cooking. Moreover, among the many types of cannabis, we can easily find a similar one. Next we have the word "six". Bearing in mind the Vedic week equal to 9 days, we have 6 weeks, or 54 days, or almost two months in the modern chronology. And this is the period of full maturation of most plants. These first obtained translation data give grounds to consider the chosen MT translation algorithm as correct.

By the way, among a fairly large number of plants, we do not see potatoes, which were imported from America. This is due to the fact that some experts believe that Mexico is the birthplace of CF. But at the time of its writing, the potato was used to the fullest.

At the same time, a specialist from Ukraine, Yevgeny Chorny, should also answer, who believes that the MV was written using the Ukrainian language. Moreover, he wrote and presented a book on this subject. He is wrong. This is something similar to the globe of Ukraine.

Now let's move on to the section of pie charts. The first of them is on page 57/1 (114) according to the numbering on the Internet). The diagram consists of 4 parts. In each part, the silhouette of a person, by which it is impossible to determine his gender (this remark will play its role later). Therefore, the information in this figure is applicable to everyone, regardless of gender. There are many short words in this diagram that have been translated. These are commonly used words, namely: sour milk. Milk product. Boiled food. Meal time. Sometimes. Some. Contribute. Eat, eat. There is no doubt that in this case we are talking about the organization of proper, healthy nutrition. Now why four parts. Turning to the Vedas, we find that the food of our ancestors was four times a day. Further. In each part we find the same groups of words, which are translated as follows: someone. Pronounce. Praise. located. Turning to the Vedas, we find that before each meal, one of those present at the table should say praise to the Gods and our Ancestors. Thus, the conclusion follows that in this figure we are talking not only about rational nutrition, but also about the ritual of eating.

Next, consider the diagrams posted on pages 70-74 (127-134). All charts are the same. A distinctive feature of the diagrams is that their center is the sign of the zodiac. But we find only 10 signs out of 12 existing. This is explained as follows. According to the CF custodian, it is known that some of the CF sheets were not found. In this section, we see that sheet number 73 is followed by sheet number 75, i.e. 1 sheet is missing, on which 2 more diagrams should be placed.

Consider the diagram on page 70 (127). In the middle of the diagram is most likely the sign of the zodiac Pisces. A total of 30 female figures with notes are placed around in concentric circles. In the next two diagrams, the author depicted the same signs of the zodiac, but in each drawing there are fifteen female figures. Nevertheless, thirty figures of women correspond to this sign of the zodiac. The situation is similar in the other figures.

As a result, we have the following:

- the figures on the diagrams are purely female;

- all signs of the zodiac correspond to a specific number of female figures, namely thirty;

- in most cases, the marks next to the female figures located in the same places are different.

It is logical to assume that there should be a probable connection between the signs of the zodiac, the silhouettes of women and the number "30". Consider the fact that according to the Vedas there were nine days in a week. Multiplying nine days by thirty gives two hundred and seventy days. Well, this period is familiar to all at least women. This is the full period of a woman's pregnancy. Now it is clear why the diagrams show only the figures of women and there are thirty of them.

Based on the foregoing, the conclusion follows by itself: the indicated diagrams show the features of pregnancy periods in women at conception during various zodiac signs. To prove this, in one of the diagrams I was able to translate two words: Perhaps. Born.

Further, on page 67 (121) there are 2 diagrams. Let's consider the first of them. The diagram is a circle divided into 12 sectors. A word is inscribed in each sector and a certain number of stars are placed, and their number is not constant. With a high degree of probability, we can assume that this diagram shows a year according to the lunar calendar. At that time, according to the lunar calendar, the year consisted of 12 months. The word in the sector means the name of the month, and the number of stars indicates the number of stars included in the zodiac sign corresponding to this month. On the outer circle of the diagram, apparently, the essence of these months is described.

We continue on the next page, which also contains two diagrams. The first of them, most likely, shows the main phases of the moon, namely: new moon, first quarter, full moon, last quarter. Around the circumference, apparently, a description of these phases is given.

On the next page, the first drawing also refers to the Moon. It shows the two main phases of the moon: new moon and full moon, as well as 29 stars. The number of stars corresponds to the number of days in the lunar month (28.5). According to the Vedas, each day of the lunar month had its own name.

There are a few more diagrams below. Again, according to the Vedas, the Vedic chronology had the so-called. Circles of time. The main ones are the Circle of Years and the Circle of Life. With a high degree of probability, it can be assumed that part of the MW diagrams are the circles of time. So, on page 86/1 (158) there are 9 circular drawings. According to the Vedas, the Sun, moving in its orbit, passes through 9 elements. Perhaps these elements are shown in this figure.

There are plausible explanations for some other sections as well. But they still need to be confirmed.

This is what we managed to get using the existing technique. Of course, with the help of professional translation, you can get more significant results. Nevertheless, the results obtained with a high degree of probability give reason to believe that:

1. The specified method of decrypting the MB is its key and can be used for further translation.

2. MV is a kind of encyclopedia of ancient knowledge, or the Book of Life of our ancestors. Perhaps this knowledge would be relevant today.

Nikolai Anichkin

For those who are interested in the decryption method or have a desire to help the author, here is his email address: [email protected]

We thank Nikolai for the information provided and wish him not to stop there, and success in his future work!

Author

barbarian

Creativity, work on the modern idea of ​​world knowledge and constant search for answers

There are mysteries in the world that have not been solved for centuries, despite the efforts of hundreds or even thousands of specialists. One of these secrets is probably the most amazing treatise in the world - the Voynich manuscript. Whoever undertook to decipher it, whatever versions the researchers offered - all in vain: the text of the mysterious manuscript has stubbornly kept its secret for more than five hundred years.

However, a rather interesting version of the decoding of the manuscript was proposed by the famous writer, paleoethnographer Vladimir DEGTYAREV.

- Vladimir Nikolaevich, so what does the Voynich manuscript tell about? What are the opinions on this?

Someone says that this is an encrypted alchemical text that figuratively describes ways to prolong life. Others call this document a medical treatment for a certain European ruler. Well, still others generally believe that this manuscript is just someone's mockery, which contains a set of meaningless graphic characters. By the way, it is not difficult to see the text of the manuscript itself, it has long been placed on the World Wide Web - the Internet.

- And yet it has not yet been deciphered ...

The manuscript was tried by high-level specialists - CIA and NSA cryptographers. For this purpose, even the most powerful computer in the world was connected. But in vain. Let me remind you: the book has four illustrated sections. The color drawings depict plants, naked women, the insides of the human body, some schemes and even a map of a section of the starry sky. In fact, half of the information is clear enough because it is illustrated.

- What do these drawings, diagrams mean? What is the book ultimately about?

REFERENCE: The Voynich Manuscript is a mysterious book written about 600 years ago by an author whose name history has not preserved. The text of the book is either encrypted or written in an unknown language using an unknown alphabet. As a result of radiocarbon analysis of the manuscript, it was precisely established that the book was written between 1404 and 1438. The Voynich manuscript has been repeatedly tried to decipher, but so far to no avail. The book got its name from the bibliophile from Kaunas, Wilfrid Voynich, who bought it in 1912. Today, the manuscript is in the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.

The illustrations tell about a person, more precisely, about how a person can live no less than 120 years measured by God. Of course, one cannot claim more, but it is possible to live 120 years in perfect health, in mind and memory. This is written in an ancient manuscript. More precisely, this is one of the “storylines” of this completely scientific work.

Moreover, the "plot" of the book suggests a possible extension of life up to three hundred years ... Why such a figure was chosen, I will not say, but the formula "To be the elder of the family in twenty generations" directly speaks of the number 300. The time when the manuscript was created was different from ours by the fact that one generation was considered a period of 15 years. Today we think differently: one generation - 25 years.

Do you mean to say that you have read the manuscript? Or just made such an approximate conclusion based on the universal desire of people for longevity?

I read only a few pages of the manuscript, selected at random from the Internet, because I needed to get some information about the plants of interest to me. More precisely, about the line of plants that is depicted at the beginning of the manuscript.

- In what language is the Voynich manuscript written, if you managed to read it?

It turns out that the manuscript was written not in any, but in a common language. This is the proto-language of our civilization, and it is already hundreds of thousands of years old. It is important to remember that 600 years ago the book was not born - it was copied onto paper from linen scrolls or from layers of dressed leather. And on the same skins or linen scrolls, it was also rewritten - probably from clay tables or from palm leaves, and this happened around the 1st century according to the current chronology.

I sensed that the rhythm of the writing did not fit the 1/6 folio sheets of paper on which the current text of the manuscript was transferred. After all, the style of writing, even of a strictly documentary nature, always depends on the size of the writing material. And the Voynich manuscript is not a strict document. This is, most likely, a scientific essay, a kind of diary of the development of the action according to the scenario of a certain scientific search. It seems that much earlier the text of this manuscript was executed on sheets of material stretched in length, and not in height.

So what is this text all about?

Today, a popular hypothesis is that someone in the 15th century sat over three hundred blank sheets of expensive parchment and diligently wrote various meaningless curls on them with no less expensive ink. Then he painted almost a thousand pictures and decorations with different, also extremely expensive paints. However, there were no futurists, imagists and abstractionists in that era - if they did appear, they quickly went to the fires of the Inquisition.

So hardly anyone would be able to create an abstraction of such a high class. From time immemorial, people have written a lot. One should not think that after the Flood there was a lot of illiteracy and it continued until the 19th century. For example, in the 17th century, a simple Belarusian merchant of an average hand wrote in Old Slavonic, but ... in Arabic letters. And nothing. His cash receipt for one hundred and fifty thalers was considered honest and accepted into business ...

I will not accurately describe the process of decoding the three pages of this manuscript - because of the complexity of the explanations. I can only talk about my general impression. Three languages ​​were used in the manuscript: Russian, Arabic and German. But they are written in a certain one alphabet, unknown in the world of scientists. Although in fact this alphabet is much more common than you might think.

Last year I specifically communicated with people who speak African dialects. In the conversation, I cited two words from the Voynich manuscript: "unkulun-kulu" and "gulu". I was translated that it is “he who came first” and “heaven”. This is a modern interpretation of very ancient East African concepts, the original meaning of which is “one who stands above all (slaves)” and “blue doom”. In general - "God" and "Death". The last term "gulu" (Si Gulu) denotes uranium, the same one that is stuffed with nuclear charges.

- But the book depicts plants. What does uranium have to do with the exotic flower or fungus ergot?

A solution or infusion of ergot, in very small quantities, apparently acted as an antidote. People in those days lived very far from London and Paris. And in the Sahara, the dust carried radioactive particles, a kind of "blue salt" that erases the skin from a person. So ergot could well be used as an ointment against ulcers that occur on the body ... Do you know what was the most precious knowledge in Egypt, China, Europe at all times? Not a Fibonacci number, not an electric battery, not a way to get kerosene from oil. The secret of longevity - that's what cost a lot of money. People paid big money even for the most fantastic recipe. Imagine what will happen if you give the world this elixir of youth. No, it's better to keep it a secret.

If someone else is not in the know, then the Voynich manuscript ( English Voynich Manuscript) was written about 600 years ago by an unknown author in an unknown language using an unknown alphabet.

In 1912, Wilfried Voynich stumbled upon a mysterious manuscript while sorting through books from the collection of the Roman College. In 1969 the book was donated to Yale University

Appearance

The book contains about 240 pages of thin parchment, some of which have been lost. The text is written with a bird's pen, and the illustrations are also made by it. The manuscript contains several sections.

"Botanical": with pictures and descriptions of plants.

"Astronomical": with circular charts and traditional symbols for the zodiac constellations.

"Biological": text and images of bodies bathing in ponds or channels connected by a kind of pipeline.

"Astrological": obscure pie charts. One attachment, six pages long, contains some sort of map or diagram with six "islands" connected by "dams", castles and possibly a volcano.

"Pharmaceutical": sketched parts of plants with images of apothecary vessels.

"Recipe": short paragraphs with notes.

Language

Many theories have been put forward regarding the language of the manuscript.

• Letter cipher: text in a European language rendered unreadable by coding, an algorithm that operated on individual letters.
  The codebreakers who adhered to this theory paid special attention to polyalphabetic ciphers, which can be strengthened by non-existent and / or similar characters, rearrangement of letters, false spaces, etc.
• Code book cipher: The words in the text of the manuscript are codes that are transcribed in a special dictionary or book.
• Micrography: The visible text is meaningless, but each individual character is a set of tiny dashes that are visible under magnification and form a second level of reading of the manuscript.
• Steganography: Most of the text is meaningless, but contains information hidden in subtle details, such as the second letter of each word, the number of letters in each line, etc.
• Natural language: The text is written in one of the exotic natural languages ​​using an invented alphabet. Manchu and even "proto-Ukrainian" languages ​​were named as assumptions.
• Artificial language: the text is written in a special "philosophical language" (one of the oldest concepts). In such languages, the general meaning of a word can be determined from the sequence of letters. In the modern synthetic language Ro (Ro), the prefix "bofo-" denotes a category of color, so every word that begins with bofo- will be the name of a color: red - bofoc, yellow - bofof.

New Hope

Until recently, it has been repeatedly suggested that this is just a cleverly executed joke with an incoherent set of characters. The arguments in favor of this theory were doubled and tripled words, as well as "fantastic" illustrations.

And a year ago, theoretical physicist Marcelo Montemurro from the University of Manchester, after analyzing the distribution of words in the manuscript, again confirmed that it contains a meaningful text in an encrypted or artificially created language. His method consisted in highlighting the words with the greatest semantic load, as well as the most commonly used groups of such words.

This was followed by several more high-profile statements. Arthur Tucker (botanist) and Rexford Tolber (IT specialist) published the results of their study in the official journal HerbalGram.

It turned out that the drawings in the manuscript are very similar in style to the Aztec Herbarium in Nahuatl. Thanks to this, 37 plants out of 303 presented, 6 animals and one mineral were identified. The habitat of the identified objects is Central America. Based on this, it was suggested that the book was written in one of the dialects of the Aztec language and describes the contents of a botanical garden in Mexico.

But that's not all. In February 2014, Stefan Bax, an applied linguist from the UK, claimed to have deciphered about half of the letters in the manuscript. The scientist "translated" the letters using familiar words.

So, in particular, he recognized the seven stars of the Pleiades cluster in the illustration with the caption. Identified juniper, coriander and hellebore on the signed drawings. There are 14 letters in total.

In fact, researchers have repeatedly claimed to decipher individual words and even entire pages of the manuscript. But none of the proposed options has yet received universal recognition.

I would like to hope that the enthusiasts of this project will more actively join forces in search of the truth. Let's wait for more news. Well, on the blog, on occasion, I will definitely put also - an illustrated encyclopedia of the fantasy world from Luigi Serafini, written in an artificial language.

UPD 2017 Another interesting study of the Voynich manuscript. By comparing medieval manuscripts, the author comes to the conclusion that we have before us a summary medical reference book with extracts from the most famous medical books of that time. Designed for women of high status. It is possible that it was created for one specific person. In all likelihood, the manuscript is incomplete, the pages are in the wrong order, the index with page numbers is missing.

Austrian documentary "The Voynich Code" (2010, translated into Russian).