What the Voynich transcript revealed, and what other recently transcribed famous manuscripts told about

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The past has left mankind many mysteries, and some of them are connected in one way or another with inscriptions, records and whole manuscripts. For centuries, mankind deciphers the letters of lost civilizations and people obsessed with a mania for secrecy, from time to time making real breakthroughs. Perhaps the next one has just happened: there were reports that it was possible to decipher the most mysterious manuscript in Europe.

Voynich manuscript

In 1912, the Polish rebel Mikhail Voynich, who made a living by buying and selling antiques, bought something strange with a collection of manuscripts from a Jesuit monastery. The usual code for the Middle Ages, only written in an unknown language.

The manuscript went after the death of Mikhail's wife, the writer Ethel Voynich, and she sold it on occasion to Hans Kraus. Eight years later, Kraus donated the strange code to the Yale University Rare Book Library. Radiocarbon analysis showed that the manuscript was created in the fifteenth century, and this is the only thing that scientists could say about the code for a long time.

In May 2019, Briton Gerard Cheshire made a statement that he was able to decipher the manuscript. According to him, it is written in the Pro-Romance language, the ancestor of Latin, which was spread throughout the northern Mediterranean coast. He also claims that the decoding of the predecessors was greatly complicated not only by the lack of punctuation marks, but also by the fact that one sound was sometimes described not only by two or three letters, as is the case in many European languages, but sometimes by four or five.

However, do not rush to rejoice: the Cheshire version has already been criticized by professional linguists. He uses very loose parallels with modern Romance languages when translating phrases, and completely ignores the question of some unified grammatical structure that should be in any coherent text.

In addition, before Cheshire, it had already been announced nine times that the Voynich Code had been deciphered. One of the last to "read" it with the help of a complex computer algorithm was the Canadian Greg Kondrak. He stated that the book was written in Hebrew.

Now the main version of the researchers of the manuscript is the hypothesis that it is a treatise on women's health and is written in some rare unrecorded European dialect. Most likely, its authors are nuns. However, this data is still very little help in decryption.

Armenian letters by Leonardo da Vinci

Sensational, but it is not known how reliable transcripts happen all the time. For example, recently the artist Armine Khachatryan from Lipetsk stated that in every painting Da Vinci clearly sees the letters written in the ancient Armenian alphabet and that is why they were ignored as text by European researchers.

One of the moments of truth for Armine happened when she saw the news on TV about the sale of Da Vinci's drawing "A child in the womb". The news anchor expressed regret that the inscription near the picture was still undeciphered. Moreover, Khachatryan clearly saw that it was written in Armenian “I am writing in fear so that my mother would not see”. On the forehead of La Gioconda, Armine sees the inscription "Shy". Very often, Khachatryan claims, the inscriptions are very small and, moreover, are produced in a mirror, which, however, is typical for Da Vinci. She is sure that some of the genius's unscrambled notes are written in Old Armenian.

So far, the sensational discovery has not gone further than the Russian and Armenian media and the scientific world has not commented on it in any way.

Rohontsi Code

In 1838, the Hungarian prince Gustav Battyani donated his book collection to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. While analyzing it, the staff of the academy stumbled upon a very strange book - a typical illustrated code, written in unknown letters. Not even traditional Hungarian runes and, as it was later reliably established, not one of the Asian writing systems.

Throughout the nineteenth century, the best minds of Eastern Europe struggled to decipher it, but did not achieve great success. In the end, it became generally accepted that the code was a hoax.

However, in 2018, Levente programmer Zoltan Kiraj published an article in which he reported that he had managed to decipher the code. Among all the options for decrypting it, it is recognized as the most interesting to date. According to Kirai and another researcher, Gabor Tokay, the codex is written in an artificial language and contains a retelling of the Bible and some apocryphal stories. Work on a complete decryption is still underway.

Encryption Kopiale

Usually, along with the Rohontsi code or the Voynich code, the so-called Kopiale cipher is also remembered. It is a one hundred and five-page manuscript bound in a gilded cover and filled with a mixture of Greek and Latin letters, often also accented with diacritics.

However, the cipher of this manuscript is very simple. It was solved in 2011, also using computer technology. In the manuscript of the late eighteenth century, the rite of passage into a certain secret society and its political views turned out to be encrypted. The language of the manuscript was German.

Meanwhile, France is looking for its ingenious decryptor. Twenty years ago, a stone slab with mysterious signs was discovered on the shore. Linguists could not read the text, although it was written in rough Latin. Now the authorities are offering 2,000 euros to anyone who can be proven to decipher the mysterious stone.

Perhaps this is all a big attention-grabbing campaign, though. History already knows 10 "ancient" artifacts, the value of which scientists clearly overestimated.