The Voynich manuscript

szasbi (41)in #voynich • 3 years ago (edited)

The Voynich manuscript was discovered in 1912 and published by antique dealer Wilfried Voynich. Voynich purchased the codex from the Collegio Romano in Rome, which ended up in 1969 in the manuscript archive of Yale University.

The Voynich manuscript is one of the greatest mysteries in the history of writing, as the volume contains text written in a language unknown to us, with an unknown writing system. It is nearly 250 pages long and contains approximately 200,000 characters of text. Another interesting fact is that it is very richly illustrated: a significant part of it contains, for example, images of plants that have not been identified with any known species so far.

The calfskin (vellum) that makes up the manuscript is dated to the first three decades of the 15th century using the C14 dating. Of course, this does not make it clear that the text was also created at that time, but the expensive nature of the material suggests that it was filled with strange signs shortly after its preparation. Its later history is also obscure: supposedly II. Emperor Rudolf had something to do with it, as did other famous alchemists of the 17th century.