Mysterious ancient book

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the wise men have not yet " translated " the " Voynich Code " that they consider to be from the Middle Ages. Even crypto experts have so far held hands.

Looking outside, the book is nothing special. There was no title nor the author's name, the cover was not decorated, wilted because of time, only made with leather straps. In 1912, at the library of the Mondragone mansion, a Jésuite school near Rome, the superintendent Wilfrid Voynich recognized the book between the manuscript of the manuscript that the monks sold to him to have the money restored.

One page in the book (Photo: Sulinet.hu)

From the first pages, a strange plant world reminds him of ancient pharmacopoeia about the medicinal properties of herbs. But when he looked closely, he didn't recognize any plants. The huge roots deformed the trees, the leaves arched against each other like a miserable gardener who experimented with grafting or mutating before the time.

Voynich also found a chapter on astronomy - astrology - cosmology with astronomical, sun and moon universes, a rather strange zodiacal face, fairies with big stomachs and lifeless faces. bathing in blue lakes connected by tubes like an organism's internal arrangement .

The text is also of no help: it is written in brown ink in a strange language . It looks like the text is written from left to right and from top to bottom. There are words like Latin letters, with letters that resemble Arabic numerals and strange symbols. There are gaps but there are no breaks. Wilfrid Voynich believed it to be a code and he bought it, hoping to turn it into gold.

He planned to rely on a letter written in Latin from 1666 attached to the text. The author is a man named Johannes Marcus Marci, who sent a text to Athanasius Kircher, a Jesuit monk, who deciphered the pictorial texts of Egypt. Maybe this is the ideal person to ' break ' the code used in the text that Marci thinks it belongs to the German Emperor Rodolphe II and possibly by Roger Bacon (Francisco monk). He is one of the great scientific figures of the Middle Ages.

There are so many ' possible ' things, but Voynich does not have the rigor of a historian. And it seems he believes that Bacon is the author of the text because this English monk has enough reasons and means for coding. He was a supporter of the scientific experimental approach and the sectarianism, having been imprisoned for 25 years for his thoughts, and Voynich believed that Bacon used the code for his final work. only he understood.

However, the Bacon hypothesis is very attractive but still a hypothesis. Voynich needs to have an objective confirmation. Which evidence is better than the decoding? In 1914 Voynich moved to New York and made a photo of that ancient text into several copies to send to wise men. It is strange that the subsequent decryption efforts only darken the mystery surrounding the ancient text.

In 1919, Philosopher Professor William Romaine Newbold at the University of Pennsylvania received a copy of the three pages of texts. The last page has only two and a half lines, but it is very special because the part is written in the ' Voynich alphabet', the same part as the Latin alphabet. Capital did not have much experience in decoding so Newbold thought that he got the key and plunged into an exhausting intellectual adventure. The professor also believes that the text of Bacon and the priest has included many coding methods. So he created an extremely complex decoding system and after a year of hard work, Newbold telephoned Voynich to announce the result: the right writer was Roger Bacon and the text made a way. network in the history of science. According to Newbold, Bacon built the first telescope - which was ahead of Galilée and Newton for centuries - and observed the Andromède galaxy. Moreover, Bacon has also built a microscope.

The text also shows genital studies, because many mysterious illustrations are nothing more than pictures of ovaries, sperm and internal structures of the testicles . Excited because of The extraordinary result, Voynich estimated the value of the ancient text about $ 160,000. But Newbold died in 1926 and Voynich in 1930, the two still believed in the theory that the author was Bacon.

Page written about sexual organs (Photo: Sulinet.hu)

In 1931, Professor John Manly at the University of Chicago demonstrated that Newbold's technique completely depends on subjective reasoning, so people can get the results that people want. More specifically, Newbold read in the text of Voynich what he wanted to see.

Over the years, many other amateur decoders also tried their luck. In 1945, Leonell Strong commented that the author was an XVI century Englishman, Anthony Ascham, and he described a birth, and offered a contraceptive method from plants . In 1978, John Stojko asserted that the text was a copy of many ancient Ukrainian letters about a civil war or conflict in Ukraine. By 1987, Leo Levitov argued that the text described a Cathare's ritual.

Since the past few decades, the Bacon hypothesis has been rejected because the form and illustration show that the text was written between 1450 and 1600, long after the British priest died. So who is the author? The mystery, the question still has no answer.

After Wilfrid Voynich died, his wife Ethel inherited the old text but still did not sell at the price her husband wanted. For 30 years, that text lay dormant in a bank safe. When Ethel died in 1960, Wilfrid's secretary sold the text to a New York dealer, Hans Kraus, for $ 24,500. He could not find a buyer, so in 1969 he gave the text to Yale University library.

Currently, it is still stored there with the symbol MS 408, the world's most mysterious Voynich manuscript.

Minh Luan